About

Pastries are, to loosely paraphrase several different dictionaries, baked goods made with flour, water, and fat–and, generally speaking, let’s say they’re sweet.

Pastry history isn’t all that sweet. We all know this on some level. For every moment of historical innovation–cheap sugar or shiny new ingredients–there’s a shadowy underbelly of slavery, colonialism, war, bigotry. This isn’t shocking news.

The equally complex flip side: is there a more inherently joyful food group than the pastry? (The answer is no.)

Pastries in every culture are, by their very nature, celebratory. More than any other food, they’re meant to be baked and shared with people you love. They’re meant to be eaten on special occasions–your sister’s wedding, your friend’s housewarming party, your own treat for getting through another 4-hour staff meeting. They are a truly joyful food, with rich and varied roots in cultures across the globe.

I want this blog to celebrate these global joys as fully as possible. That means digging up recipes from around the world, and exploring the ways they’re radically different and shockingly similar; talking to present-day bakers keeping their pastry traditions alive, and shouting out historically-overlooked pastry badasses; and tracing pastry’s roots and routes with a warm and honest eye.

And if I have to eat some tasty things along the way, well…that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

The world is complicated. History is complicated. Pastries are complicated. But on this blog, I will shine a light on the good stuff without ignoring the bad stuff, and come out of it with something rich, filling, and maybe even worth sharing.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dressler Parsons is a recent Brooklyn transplant, born and raised in the quite-literal desert near Fountain Hills, Arizona. She holds a BFA in Intermedia and a BS in Marketing from Arizona State University. Now she writes copy and blog posts for entrepreneurs, helps artists with administrative work and fabrication, and sometimes makes her own art. If you mention citrus around her, there is a 100% chance she will bring up how the mafia got its start in the lemon industry–depending on your personal viewpoint, this might make her someone who’s a lot of fun at dinner parties.

 

CONTACT

Send all thoughts, hellos, book recommendations, and copywriting inquiries to dressler.parsons@gmail.com.