Our Patisserie is pleased to bring you a (much anticipated) colorful assortment of french confections! Choose from a range of flavors like Sea Salt Caramel, Pistachio, and Chocolate Mint to pair with your daily Cappuccino. Indulge your aching sweet tooth and stay tuned for a few custom Paris Market flavors coming soon!
The History of the Macaron
The lore of macarons often suggests that Catherine de' Medici brought them to France in 1533 when she married Henry the 2nd. The word macaron comes from the Italian maccherone or macaroni, which defined is a "pasta dish with cheese." Macaron long referred not just to a cookie, but a savory preparation as well, which seems to have consisted of lumps of flour-based "paste" cooked with spices and grated cheese and served with a liquid. Almond-based foodstuffs were popular in the Middle Ages already. One way or another, a cookie made from almonds and sugar became popular in France, where various cities, such as Paris, Reims, Montmorillon, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Amiens, went on to develop it into their own specialties.
Nuns were often the driving force behind macarons, which they made for both nutritional and commercial purposes (baked goods, honey, and other such food products were a source of revenue for most monastic orders, which had very limited ways of making money). Such is the case in Naney, another French city famous for its macarons, which are flatter than Parisian macarons and don't have a smooth surface.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, recipes for macarons had begun appearing in French cookbooks. The 1692 Novelle Instruction pour les Confitures, les Liqueurs, et les Fruits states that macarons are a combination of sweet almonds, sugar, and egg white, and offers instructions that include flavoring the batter with orange blossom water and icing them once baked. From that point on, macarons appear regularly in cookbooks. And if nineteenth century books about Paris are to be believed, by then the city was teeming with macaron street vendors.
The macaron as we best know it-two shells sandwiching a filling-is a more recent invention. Laduree, the famed Parisian tea salon and pastry shop perhaps most associated with them today, was founded in 1862, but it was not until the early twentieth century that Pierre Desfontaines, second cousin of Louis Ernest Laduree, had the idea of piping ganache on a shell and topping it with another. It is now the ubiquitous way to sell and serve Parisian-style macarons around the globe.
Macarons now available at The Paris Market!
Bon Appetit!
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