Focus on ... Chantilly Sprouts
When I see this jar with this huge choux pastry and this whipped cream that makes you want to dive into it ... I can't resist ... after devouring it, first with my eyes and then with all my senses ... I give you the history to taste it with ... culture!
Although complex, the choux pastry is not recent and comes from the XNUMXth century, in particular from Popelini, the cook of Queen Catherine de Medici. We are around 1540: Catherine de Médicis (born in Florence in 1519, mother of Queen Margot, known as a great patron of the arts and letters) wants to impress her subjects to show the power of the kingdom. In addition to painters, musicians, poets and other artists, she invites the greatest cooks of the moment to court so that they can demonstrate all their talent during the sumptuous parties organized.
This is how an Italian cook named Popelini arrived. The latter, very smart, recovers the recipes of his predecessor (Pantanelli) which worked well with the queen, and seeks to improve them. It includes in particular a cake dough dried on the fire called "hot dough", rework it, dress it in small "puffs" and bake it in the oven. These little cabbages - not very regular because they are prepared with a spoon - are all the rage at the court and called "puppets". Building on this success, Popelini also tried to fry his dough and seeing it seriously swell, he called the result “fart de none”.
The years go by, the "hot paste" is still used but does not evolve. It was not until the XNUMXth century and the imagination of pastry chef Jean Avice and his apprentice Antonin Carême to see it evolve and lead to our current recipe. The hot dough then becomes choux pastry.
And what about the Chantilly ??
Since its popularization, whipped cream has been the subject of debate. Indeed, two camps are fighting over the invention of whipped cream ... On the one hand, it would be in Italy that whipped cream would find its origins. Very popular in the XNUMXth century and made without sugar, it would (still) be Queen Catherine de Medici who imported it to France during her marriage to Henry II.
Far from being unanimous, this story is not at all to the taste of those who consider the pastry-caterer François Vatel as the sole inventor of cream. According to his defenders, it is the young butler who created the whipped cream. And this, inadvertently... In 1671, at the request of Louis II of Bourbon-Condé, François Vatel was tasked with organizing a reception given in honor of the visit of King Louis XIV. Faced with a shortage of cream in the kitchens of the Château de Chantilly, the pastry-caterer would then have decided to whip the cream which remained to him to give it volume and thus serve all the guests.
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