Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs starts with a broad base of essentials — food, warmth and the like — and builds up to an apex of art, literature and fashion. They may not be necessary, but these are the facets of life that define a culture.
In a hierarchy of dietary needs, staples such as potatoes and rice would be at the bottom, cakes right at the top. You don’t eat gateaux to survive, any more than you recite poetry to ward off marauding wolves, and, if pastries are nutritional civilisation, then macarons are its haute couture.
In Paris, they take fashion seriously and they take macarons seriously, too, debating where to go for what is best as they might the latest trends in coats or handbags. This was first brought to my attention when I began taking my daughter to Paris 30 years ago. We stayed in a two-room, third-floor apartment in the 1st arrondissement. The owner lived in the flat above.
'Hédiard is for food, Fauchon for theatre'
Madame Mouret was a retired art teacher. A native Parisian, she loved her great city and, in particular, its cake shops and cafés. During every stay, we trooped up to her apartment and settled among the potted ferns and books on Degas and Matisse, sipping Chamberyzette and nibbling financiers bought at Hédiard rather than its more illustrious neighbour Fauchon because, our host informed us: ‘Hédiard is for food, Fauchon for theatre.’
During these visits, Madame Mouret would quiz us on what we had been up to, reacting always with great enthusiasm to our wanderings. She took much interest in what we ate, particularly sweet things. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of her city’s salon de thé and uncompromising opinions on what you should order when you went to them. ‘At Angelina, you must have the Mont-Blanc, never the baba au rhum,’ she admonished. ‘You go to Maison Stohrer for that.’
When it came to macarons, however, even the redoubtable Madame Mouret sat on the fence. Would she pick Ladurée ahead of Gérard Mulot, who trained at Dalloyau (‘One goes there for the opera cake, of course’)? That fellow Jean-Paul Hévin at Le Petit Boulé, a farmer’s son from the Loire, was not to be discounted either. ‘Hmm, it is hard to judge,’ she would conclude eventually, ‘but you have time. Best you go to them all and decide for yourselves.’ We have been trying ever since.
Originally, the macaron was a simple biscuit, believed to have been brought to France in 1533 by the chefs of Catherine de’ Medici, bride of the future Henry II. The name comes from the same source as macaroni, meaning ‘fine dough’, and the first macarons were as plain as pasta — small and made from roughly ground almonds, icing sugar and egg whites. For several centuries, such macarons were a standard item on trays of petits fours, popular yet anonymous. All that would be changed at Ladurée.
'The world seems such a mess… but when you’re in Ladurée, you feel everything will be alright'
Louis Ernest Ladurée had opened his first cake shop on the rue Royale in 1862. It was his second cousin, Pierre Desfontaines, who would transform the macaron in much the same way Prof Henry Higgins refashioned Eliza Doolittle. Searching for a means to revive his firm’s selection of petit fours, Desfontaines hit upon the splendid notion of sticking two macarons together with a toothsome layer of ganache. The result was a sensation, the appeal of the new double-decker macaron instantaneous. As the great French food writer Pierre Rival noted, the macaron is ‘small, discreet, and yet so appetising—without a moment’s hesitation in one mouthful it is gone — it is an innocent pleasure par excellence’.
There is something comforting about the macaron, too. It evokes nostalgia. Today, you can sit in the stylish verdigris and gilt upstairs parlour of Ladurée on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte — the third branch of the shops to open — eating Desfontaines’s great culinary innovation and soon you’ll find yourself agreeing with those elegant Parisians who comment during turbulent times: ‘The world seems such a mess… but when you’re in Ladurée, you feel everything will be alright.’
Modestly, Desfontaines chose not to name his new creation after himself, nor, of course, could he patent his invention. Soon, his style of macaron was being copied all across Paris. Today, there are more than 1,600 patisseries in the French capital selling them.
Competition bred invention. A macaron that tasted of almonds and chocolates was not enough and the colour was, well, a little boring. Soon, the pastry chefs of Paris were refining the chewy little biscuit, making it pink with raspberry, green with pistachio and purple with blackcurrant. French gastronomy had been built on seasonal ingredients and the macaron adapted to the changing seasons — Alpine strawberries in the summer, blackberries in autumn, sweet chestnuts in the winter.
As the 20th century came to an end, the Parisian macaron experienced its own nouvelle vague. It was sparked by the arrival, at Ladurée in 1997, of renowned pastry chef Philippe Andrieu. Monsieur Andrieu introduced more exotic flavours: basil and lime, salted-butter caramel and Yunnan tea. He also followed the fashion houses and, each year, released special spring and autumn ‘collections’ of flavours. It was a necessary evolution because by now Ladurée had serious competition, not only from older rivals such a Gérard Mulot, who had opened his first shop in 1976, and Jean-Paul Hévin, who had burst onto the scene a dozen or so years later, but from a new breed of wildly inventive pastry chefs. Pierre Hermé, a man at the forefront of the revolution in French patisserie that was begun by his mentor Gaston Lenôtre in the 1970s, opened his shop in rue Bonaparte in 2001, creating a sensation with a crêpe-suzette macaron that fused caramel, orange and Grand Marnier.
Japan’s influence on French food began back in the 1970s when the godfathers of nouvelle cuisine, such as Paul Bocuse, rejected the elaborations of classical French food in favour of simpler, cleaner arrangements and flavours. Fusing the luxury of French pastry with the sobriety of Japanese aesthetics is not the easiest trick to pull off, but Sadaharu Aoki, who trained in Tokyo and opened his shop near the Jardin du Luxembourg in the first year of the new millennium, manages it in specialities that use Far Eastern ingredients, such as black sesame, yuzu and matcha.
Later, others would arrive on the scene. Hugues Pouget, formerly pastry chef with Guy Savoy, opened Hugo & Victor to great fanfare in 2010. He offers regular three ‘star flavours’ of chocolate, vanilla and caramel supplemented by five seasonally changing varieties that might include kaffir lime or citronella (from his own garden in southern France).
Former world-champion pastry chef Emmanuel Ryon, who made his name at the über-glitzy Franco-Muscovite Café Pouchkine, set up Une glace à Paris and, focusing on natural ingredients, Monsieur Ryon concocts the kind of flavours that might draw a nod of approval from Heston Blumenthal, including smoked vanilla with pine, strawberry and hibiscus and buckwheat, almond and nougat.
For those who don’t want anything avant-garde, the traditional macaron flavours remain, of course. In Paris, there is room for the classic vanilla macaron as well as those flavoured with jasmine, just as there is space for the Hermès scarf as well as the Miu Miu cone bra.