Read some of the fascinating history of French Brioche – or just a few tidbits!
Of course, Marie-Antoinette is famously said to have cried out to the famished masses, “They don’t have any bread? So let them eat brioche!” That was one evening from her window at Versailles in October 1789.
Let them eat cake!
In famine-struck France of the late Middle Ages, aristocrats typically responded to bread-starved protesters with heartless retorts such as “Let them eat hay”, “Let them eat grass”, or “Let them eat cabbage stalks.” … Qu’ils mangent des trognons de chou.
In this case, the retort was “let them eat cake” – as Americans translate it.
Yet the whole thing is believed to be an old wives’ tale spun by the Queens’ adversaries.
They supposedly took the unkind words of a hobnobbing noble dame a century earlier and attributed them to her. An episode alluded to by the wigged philosopher Rousseau in his Confessions.
As the Nouvel Obs reported a few years back:
I remembered the last resort of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread and who replied: “Let them eat cake.”
“The formula is from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his ‘Confessions’, probably written when Marie-Antoinette was 10 years old. The sentence was therefore not uttered by the queen during the famine of 1789.
“No matter, it remains in people’s minds as an ironic illustration of the distance between social classes. At that time, brioche was considered a luxury product. You have to add eggs, butter and sugar to differentiate it from bread (water, flour, salt), and above all replace the leaven with yeast. But the techniques to make it are the same: kneading, pushing, resting, shaping and cooking.”
Today, some even portray the queen as “a victim of fake news” for this story. (Once we called this gossip!)
Brioche in a Book: Zola’s Germinal
Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette’s legendary utterance has inextricably associated brioche with luxury. And those denied its charms, live a life of poverty. The social divisions between the brioche ‘haves and have nots’ were immortalised by Emile Zola. I will never forget the craving I felt reading Germinal as a teenager. The scenes when ivory-skinned Cécile dips her brioche into a bowl of chocolat chaud, the surplus crumbs falling on the floor from her fleshy, overfed little mouth.
In his book, Zola brought alive the exquisite smell and taste of the freshly baked, butter-rich bread. As much as he did the appalling hunger of the maids’ children watching on – their eyes glued to the brioche. When Cécile cuts off two chunks, urging them to share it among their brothers and sisters, they struggle to hold on to it with their tiny hands – “paralysed” with cold. I can sob with grief just reading this today!
How could anyone not feel a sense of injustice being deprived of such pleasures? I certainly did… And all the terrible injustices that went with it, that sadly persist today.
On a personal level at least, I’ve been doing my best to make up for that in my consumption of pastries in my life in France.
My top 5 places for the best brioche in Paris coming soon. Meantime, be careful what you say. It could turn into a nasty (but oh so tasty! rumour).