It’s the second week of May, but what better time for a quick recap of the second half of 2018? Here, for your reading pleasure (and my organizing pleasure), is a small summary of projects I worked on after hitting “publish” on my Cream of Tartar article. I haven’t dropped off the map! I’ve just been sailing quietly.
Definitely planning on posting the written versions of my egg tart and Italian bakery talks (as described below).
Also, right at the top–
What Am I Working On Now?
I haven’t had a ton of time for research so far this year, but these are the topics I’m thinking about/poking around when I have a minute:
French marriage proposal cakes??
I have found ONE source on this, and one other French source that’s very brief, but according to “A History of Food” by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, young men in Brittany would propose marriage by sending a young woman a cake…and if she rejected the proposal, she would send back an identical cake, but not the original cake. This is fascinating to me. If anyone has leads, let me know.
Why are croissants so ubiquitous in the United States?
You can get them in any coffee shop and even at gas stations. There are pre-packaged versions. How did this happen? It’s a complicated French pastry. When, exactly, did they become so common?
Pastry that looks like genitalia
‘Nuff said, probably. There’s a surprising amount of it. Send examples if you find ’em!
Onward to recap!
What Came First? A Brief History of the Chinese Egg Tart (July 2018)
At the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in Greenpoint, I gave a talk about the complicated history of the Hong Kong-style egg tart; how the “seed” of the dessert was likely planted by Portuguese pirates, and then spread, like so many foods do, via colonialism and immigration.
How To Navigate An Italian Bakery (September 2018)
Gina Leggett, the powerhouse lady behind Renaissance Person, put together a dessert-themed September event featuring Megan Giller, author of Bean to Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution and one of the creators of the feminist food history YouTube series What Women Ate–and me! I talked about traditional Italian bakeries and where most of the desserts originated. (Spoiler: most of the distinctive Sicilian desserts can be traced back to their once-upon-a-time period of Arab rule.)
And of course there were tastings from local NYC Italian bakeries, including Veniero’s, which has been open since 1894.
Edible History: Feminism, Trade Winds, and Elizabethan London (July-September 2018)
Edible History, a Brooklyn-based historical supper club “focused on bringing the past to life through food, drink, and stories” is the truly engaging collaboration between Victoria Flexner, a vibrant and elegant speaker, and Jay Reifel, a passionate chef with vision, guts, and the technical skill to match.
I was lucky enough to work with Jay on a handful of edible centerpieces for three dinners–“Feminist Food, Feminist History,” featuring a dough-and-pastillage St. Agatha, “Secrets of the Trade Winds,” where a fake “fish pie” shaped like a 15th-century map took center stage, and “A Tudor Feast,” with a dough replica of the Globe theater acting as home for a cockenthrice and some marzipan delicacies.
Still available in their fourth issue, Sweet & Sour, “Death in the Pie” tells the story of George Wheeler, a man in New York at the turn of the century who died after eating a poisoned lemon meringue pie. Why was it poisoned? (Brief answer: So MANY things were poisoned then!) Why did people care so much? (Brief answer: Lemon pie was a quintessentially American dessert and it was an easy metaphor for the huge changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution!)
This piece was a lot of fun to write and fascinating to dig into. Also Emelyn Rude is a brilliant editor and a dream to work with.
Historical Dessert Based On The Silk Road (November 2018)
In collaboration with Chef John Hutt of MOFAD, I developed this dessert as a small part of a 9-course Silk Road-themed dinner he created for a private event. Drawing on Venice’s place as part of the Silk Road in the 13th century, the dessert featured “Venetian glass” pear candy along with a roast chestnut panna cotta, pine nut and blue cheese crumble, and a cardamom and long pepper sauce.
It was half-past 6 on a truly gloomy winter’s night in Manhattan, and I was perched on a stool in one of the stark classrooms of the International Culinary Center, wearing an oversized chef’s jacket and trying my best to stay out of the way. Around me, four students in the Pastry Arts program whirled around with efficiency, weighing ingredients and assembling their mise-en-places for the dessert of the day: meringues.
The chef called everyone up to the front for her first demonstration, scraping some cream of tartar into the bowl along with her egg whites and powering up her stand mixer.
When everyone returned to their stations, I hovered nearby like a good little auditor. “Um…what is cream of tartar?” I asked, a little intimidated. “I mean, I know it stabilizes the egg whites, and I’ve used it, but I don’t actually know what it is.”
The chef smiled, apparently happy someone asked. “It’s powder from wine residue,” she said. “They first found it inside wine casks.”
I said some more-professional version of “Wait, what?” and added, “Then who figured out how to bake with it?”
She shrugged. “I’m more into food science than food history. But I’d certainly like to know.”
“Well, I’m into food history. I’ll look into it.”
It turns out that using cream of tartar in meringues is not only a fairly recent trend, but also likely of American origin. That being said, cream of tartar’s story truly begins, like all good stories, long ago and far away.
In which a Swedish chemist investigates 7,000-year-old wine residue
Cream of tartar, as previously mentioned, is purified wine residue–and the earliest known instance of said residue was found inside 7,000-year-old wine barrels in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. This info comes from an excavation of “six vessels buried under the floor of a mud brick building of the Neolithic Hajji Firuz Tepe village.” (1) And it’s fairly guaranteed that the calcium tartrate inside the vessels–the unprocessed version of cream of tartar–came from grape juice, as, according to the excavation document, “there is no other common natural source.” (1)
Thusly it was found. But the life of calcium tartrate was fairly unremarkable until Charles William Scheele (also known as Carl Wilhelm Scheele) came along–the Swedish chemist credited with isolating cream of tartar in its current form. According to his biography, he isolated tartaric acid from cream of tartar and “ascertain[ed] many of its properties” in 1768. (2)
Carl Wilhelm Scheele, whose work nearly vanished until John Geddes McIntosh translated his work into English 20 years later. McIntosh dramatically honored Scheele: “He who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, is said to be a benefactor to his country. To what extent, therefore, is the world indebted to Scheele for the process for manufacturing these acids [cream of tartar, tartaric acid, citric acid, oxalic acid] alone?” (25)If you’re wondering why this weird powder is called “cream of tartar,” the answer lies in the wine casks. Etymologically, “tartar” can be traced back to “bitartrate of potash,” a late 14th-century term for the wine deposit left during fermentation. The word’s exact starting point is unknown, but it made its way through late Greek (tartaron, meaning ‘tartar encrusting the sides of wine casks,’) and transformed into Medieval Latin tartarum and Old French tartre. (3)
“Cream” is a little murkier. However, since it’s partially derived from Late Latin chrisma meaning “ointment,” and from the 1500s onward meant both “most excellent element or part” and “any part that separates from the rest and rises to the surface,” it’s a short leap from “purified form of tartar” to “cream of tartar.” (4)
So from barrels in Western Iran to chemistry labs in Stockholm, cream of tartar traveled. But at what point did people start baking with it?
In which cream of tartar is medicinal, probably
The 1886 American Encyclopedia of Practical Knowledge describes cream of tartar as “used extensively in medicine and in cookery,” and says that “its medicinal properties are numerous.” For example, it’s a cooling laxative, a diuretic, and used to help with skin diseases…mostly in farm animals, apparently, since the end of the paragraph gives the proper dosage for cattle (2 or 3 ounces), sheep (½ to 1 ounce), and dogs (5 to 20 grains). (5)
Around this same time, cream of tartar was listed in a London recipe for candied oranges, a semi-strange, let’s-just-throw-this-in-boiling-sugar use. (6) But far more commonly, cream of tartar was used in baking powder.
In which cream of tartar is used in baking powder
There are hundreds of examples of cream of tartar being used as a leavening agent for cakes, cookies, puddings, and just about any other place you would use baking powder today. For a while, cream-of-tartar-based baking powders were the only game in town, and women were making them at home by mixing together cream of tartar and baking soda. (7, 8)
Why did this work? Remember those vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano science projects from elementary school? When baking soda is combined with an acid, it produces carbon dioxide gas–and cream of tartar is 100% acid. In batters, the gas creates air bubbles that make the batter expand; the expansion gets set when the batter is exposed to heat. (9) (Sidenote: If you want a full scientific explanation of how cream of tartar affects food, this Slate article is fantastic.)
In the late 1800s, some baking powder companies started using alum powder as a cheaper substitute for cream of tartar; cream of tartar had to be imported from Europe as a wine byproduct, while alum powder could be made with inexpensive minerals in the US. (7) Faced with razor-thin margins, cream-of-tartar baking powder started losing market share in a major way. At the time, Americans were buying 120 million pounds of baking powder annually, but only 20 million of those were cream of tartar; the rest were alum. (7)
Linda Civitello’s book Baking Powder Wars goes into significantly more depth, exploring the tug-of-war between the three main cream-of-tartar-based baking powder companies as they fought for control of an ever-diminishing market share; Royal, Dr. Price, and Cleveland. An ad in an 1884 issue of Ballou’s Monthly Magazine shows off the infighting: (10)
“Facts are stubborn things. –Is there anything in any of the numerous advertisements of the Royal Baking Powder to show that the Royal does not use Ammonia and Tartaric Acid as cheap substitutes for Cream of Tartar?…
Ammonia and Tartaric Acid produce a cheap, leavening gas, which is not to be compared…with the more desirable Carbonic-Acid gas generated by the exclusive use of the expensive Cream of Tartar.
Use Cleveland’s Superior Baking Powder, and judge for yourself of its superiority.”
While Dr. Price and Cleveland ultimately lost to Royal, the American Baking Powder Association declared in 1904 that “the entire south was irrevocably lost to cream of tartar and gained by the alum interests.” (7)
Interestingly, it was right in this window–1893, to be precise–that the first mention of using cream of tartar as an egg white stabilizer, and not a baking powder, appeared.
A brief summary of meringues before 1893
The battle between the cream of tartar baking powder companies took place mostly between 1888 and 1899. And up until this point, meringues existed, but they were totally uninvolved with cream of tartar.
Meringues are hailed as French and/or Italian, and since the United States imported their cream of tartar ingredients from Europe, it seems like cream of tartar would have found its way into a French or Italian meringue before an American one.
But in French and Italian cookbooks from the same period and earlier, directions for meringues were either some version of “prenez six blancs d’oeufs; battez-les en neige” (12) or “sbattete 6 bianchi d’uovo entro un bacina distagnato con un mazzetto di fili di ferro…” (13); loosely translated, “Beat your egg whites with a whisk until they reach ‘firm snow.’” These recipes then directed the baker to add sugar, bake, and serve.
For decades, this was the way meringues were made, at least according to cookbooks. American cookbooks left cream of tartar out of their meringue recipes, too–as far as they were concerned, all meringues needed were a healthy dose of egg whites, sugar, occasional flavoring, and an oven at a fairly low temperature.
Then, one cookbook changed that.
In which a cookbook by an ostensibly fake person marries cream of tartar and meringues
Which cookbook? Choice Receipts, Arranged For The Gas Stove. Written by an almost-certainly-nonexistent “Miss Andrews,” and published by the United Gas Improvement Co. (11)
Seems legit, no? The function of the cookbook was clearly to teach consumers how to use their brand-new gas stoves, given the explanatory first chapter that painstakingly describes the nuances of gas burners (i.e. Don’t light it until you need it!).
Fair enough. If you’re selling gas stoves, you want consumers to know how to use them. But the cookbook also bangs the “cream of tartar is a vital meringue ingredient” drum surprisingly hard. Miss Andrews’ definitive directions for meringues are as follows:
“…The eggs are beaten with cream of tartar (1-8 t. to each egg) until stiff and dry, and then flavored with XXXX sugar and a few drops of rose or almond; an excess of sugar in the egg reduces it to a liquid. 1-2 T. sugar to the white of 1 egg is a good proportion, and cream of tartar stiffens the whites…” (11)
This also extends to meringues used as pie or pudding toppings, as seen in the Apple Meringue Pudding:
“…Without drawing from the stove, cover with a meringue made from the whites of the eggs beaten with the cream of tartar and flavored with 2 T. pulverized sugar and the almond. Work quickly and brown lightly.” (11)
The inclusion of cream of tartar in this gas-stove propaganda lightly begs the question–were there any business ties between Royal Baking Powder and the United Gas Improvement Co.? The closest tie seems to be C.N. Hoagland, who was vice president of Royal (7) and on the board of directors of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company (14), which, oddly, seemed to be a competitor of the United Gas Improvement Co. (15).
Could the Hoaglands have cut a low-key advertising deal with the United Gas Improvement Co. to publicly diversify the uses of cream of tartar? In a market where cream-of-tartar-based baking powder was being quickly replaced, it’s not out of the question–but without further proof, it sounds a little too much like a cream of tartar conspiracy theory.
Regardless, Miss Andrews’ Choice Receipts seemed to be a one-off idea that didn’t hit the mainstream…at least until the 1960s.
When meringues finally start using cream of tartar on the reg
A 1961 New York Times article gives out “simple rules” for the “perfect meringue”–and included in these simple rules? Cream of tartar. (16) In 1969, an issue of the South African Sugar Journal printed a recipe for Apricot Meringue Surprises that included cream of tartar. (17)
But perhaps the most important meringue recipe of the time was Craig Claiborne’s “M-m-m-m–meringue” in the New York Times, which used–you guessed it–cream of tartar (18), and more importantly, was written by “The Man Who Changed The Way We Eat.” (19) Claiborne was a hugely influential food critic, and in 1979, Bon Appetit started printing recipes using cream of tartar as egg stabilizers; to make light-as-air cakes (20), praline chips (21), and, yes, meringues (22, 23).
Gourmet picked it up (24) and other magazines followed suit–and today, cream of tartar is de rigueur in meringue recipes in cookbooks, blog posts, and pastry schools.
La Bonne Cuisine Francaise: Tout Ce Qui A Rapport A La Table Manuel-Guide Pour La Ville Et La Campagne Plus De Deux Cents Dessins Speciaux. Emile Dumont. 1889.
Trattato di Cucina, Pasticceria Moderna: Credenza E Relativa Confettureria di Vialardi Giovanni, Aiutante capo-cuoco e pasticciere. Delle LL. MM. Carlo Alberto di Gl. 1854.
Texas Toast. Boston Cream Pie. Chicago deep-dish. Any time a food and a geographical location get married, there’s bound to be a little bit of drama. Emotions come into play over whether the food that’s claiming to be Chicago-style pizza can rightfully wear the crown. Suddenly, the food in question isn’t just a slice of pizza, bread or pie–it’s a slice of Chicago. (Or Texas, or Boston.)
So instead of is this food a tasty food, the question becomes does this version of this regional food accurately represent who we are as people? Which, uh, gets pretty loaded.
Such was the fate of the mostly-forgotten Bedfordshire Clanger–a hotly-debated hand pie from Victorian-Era England.
These days, political drama is always, always, always high-stakes, life-changing, and emotionally exhausting. So take a moment to waltz with me, hand-in-hand, down this delightfully low-stakes memory lane in which a bunch of Bedfordshire residents once got real up in arms about whether or not their beloved pie officially had jam in it.
“That’s $12.50,” said the woman behind the counter.
Sarah and I exchanged a look. We had just spent the last several minutes poring over the long glass pastry cases in her neighborhood Chinese bakery, scrutinizing the fluffy rolls and imagining all their possible fillings. In the end, we’d selected 10 pastries, hoping to cover all our bases. We carried the goodies back to her apartment in paper bags.
“$12.50 wouldn’t get you ten pastries anywhere else,” I remember saying. “At a French bakery, it would get you, like, two. Maybe three.”
Sarah shrugged. “That’s one great thing about Chinese bakeries.”
But once I started digging into it, “Chinese bakery” started to feel like an oxymoron. Historically, Chinese pastries weren’t baked–they were steamed. But all the treats in our paper bags had definitely seen the inside of an oven. So if traditional Chinese pastries aren’t baked, what are these pastries and where are they coming from?
And we’re back! If you missed Part 1 of “Who Really Invented Puff Pastry,” click here to read it and get some intriguing backstory on Claudius Gele, a guy that Google insists invented puff pastry, but (spoiler!) didn’t actually exist.
So why has this false “Claudius Gele” story stuck around?
This is total speculation on my part, but why do any of these stories stick around? People like to believe that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly, or that Albert Einstein was a C-student, because it gives you a sense of justice or comeuppance or whatever.
The Claude Lorrain story probably kept circling around because it’s intriguing to think that someone who’s great at one thing (i.e. landscape painting) might have also been a genius at another, completely separate thing. A double-threat, if you will.
This is enough! You don’t need credit for puff pastries TOO, Claude!
But this vague story can be twisted to fit whatever worldview you favor. In one version, an amazing painter was ALSO the inventor of puff pastry, and wow, what a Cool Multitalented Dude.
In another (probably the most correct one), a kid was sort-of okay at baking pastries, but then found his real talents elsewhere, in landscape painting.
In the Claudius Gele story, some nice dude, in a burst of empathy for his #poorsickfather invents an ENTIRELY new way to bake dough that CONFOUNDS and amazes the so-called expert at the time.
So whether you’re someone who likes to hear about multitalented people, or people flailing a bit before finding their niche, or people totally upsetting the status quo for charmingly down-to-earth reasons (i.e. baking a loaf for their sick father, not baking a loaf To Change French Cuisine As We Know It)–there’s something in some version of this story to hang on to.
That stickiness, combined with the prevalence the myth built through the sheer number of times the Claudius Gele story was copied-and-pasted, is how an untruth becomes a truth.
So what do we actually know about who REALLY invented puff pastry?
First of all, puff pastry is much older than the above myth would have you believe. Like, four whole centuries older.
Puff pastry isn’t JUST for croissants. Arguably, it’s the foundation of many, many pastries as we know them today. It’s a technique that lets you enjoy warm, flaky layers of dough instead of literally everything being a biscuit.
But if you Google “Who invented puff pastry?” right now, the answer you get is Claudius Gele. And that’s SUPER wrong. Like, wildly wrong. Because Claudius Gele didn’t exist.
Insisting that a dead white guy didn’t invent puff pastry might seem like yelling at a cloud. Who cares, right? Isn’t that just…croissant dough? Dressler, we have bigger fish to fry here.
Look at these LAYERS. //Rebeca Siegel, Flickr Creative Commons
But here’s the thing–puff pastry is a majorly important technique, not a one-off party trick. We see it in bakeries, coffee shops, store-bought dough. It’s a huge part of our culinary landscape, so whoever pioneered the technique has influenced the way we eat today to a mind-boggling degree.
How in the world did a technique like this get so badly misattributed? And who is ACTUALLY responsible for that happy little pain au chocolat you’re eating while you read this at a cafe?
One of the streets that bordered my college campus was, not-shockingly, totally packed with loud and crowded bars. But, somehow, it also housed the most magical used bookstore.
The hours were completely unpredictable. A lovely elderly couple owned and ran the shop, and whenever they felt like it, they’d unlock their itty-bitty building packed with literal piles of books. Stacks and boxes, and narrow shelves. And the owners knew where absolutely everything was.
So if I found myself walking Mill Avenue and the doors to Old Town Books were open, I went in, almost always. And one day, I stumbled into their used cookbook section.
“Inglenook Cook Book” rhymed, so I picked it up–but once I started flipping through, my curiosity was super piqued. Wait, this book is from 1911? These recipes are all crowdsourced. Are they all written by nuns? Why the “Sister” in front of all the names?
Now, this book lives happily with me, covered in Post-It notes that mark interesting (and sometimes ill-advised) recipes.
And deep in the “Pie” chapter, Sister Mary E. Crofford lays out a pie recipe that she straight-up admits is weird; “It will make a queer-looking pie to those who have never seen it, but will taste far better than it looks. Try it.”
It’s called Rich Man’s Pie, and to make it, you need five ingredients (not counting the crust): melted butter, sugar, flour, nutmeg, and milk.
Bitter Butter 