Nowhere does April bloom with the special gaiety that is hers in Paris, where the flower vendors' trays on every corner burst forth in a riot of color, the chestnut trees on the Champs Elysée blossom in all their snowy finery, and the streets glisten with rain one moment and are dry the next. Best of all, I love the shop windows in all their Easter glory. I am tempted to press my nose like a gamin against the windows of the charcuterise tileries, cohnftseries, pâtisseries, and boulangeries, so vivid with their specialties de Pâques, the most elaborate display of the year.
Now that we are dealing with pastries. I am particularly glad that my last trip abroad took me to Paris in April, so that I could again see, after fifteen years absence (many of them spent working under the restrictions of wartime rationing), how delicate is the French pastry chef's art, what skill his exacting trade requires.
The ingenious Greeks were the first to discover and develop almost every one of the basic arts, including the art of pastry making. But the French later adopted pastry making as avidly as they have taken so many of the ancient arts to their hearts. In fact, the French have turned the making of baked foodstuffs of all kinds into an important national business. Their chefs began to specialize in one particular kind of pastry in order to concentrate their skills, and finally formal categories developed: there were pâtissiers, or pastry chefs, boulangers, who baked breadstuffs, and charcusiers, who made meat specialties. Gallic temperament being what it is, the rivalry between these groups became so heated at one point that the police had to step in to quell riots.
This is what had happened. The pastry chefs were aroused because the bakers were making let petits gâteaux-little cakes-and anting into business that properly belonged to the pâtisserie. Hut the pastry chefs themselves were not entirely without sin-they were selling hams baked in a pastry crust, which encroached on charcutiers' territory. It was not an easy moral problem to decide, since meat specialties were the province of the cbarcutier and pastry belonged to the pâtitssier, Alors, the charctiers won the exclusive right to prepare all the cooked meats, and the pâsissiers persuaded the boulangers to stop making cakes. That is the way the system works in France to this day, and no one would dream of violating this long-established gentlemen's agreement.
There arc two major differences between the French pastries of this country and those of France. In France there is greater variety in shapes, fillings, icings, and decoration. There the pastry chef works as creatively and artistically as a jeweler works in fashioning his metals, stones, and enamels. The second difference is that of size. The French gourmet believes that large pastries are the work of a chef of poor taste and inexpert craftsmanship. I remember how infuriated Madame Ritz would be if the pastries on her tea tray were one iota larger than the size established by the Ritz as being de rigeur. And Robert W. Goelet, who built and owned the old New York Ritz and who had lived a great part of his life in Paris, was as adamant about this as Madame Ritz. Believe me, this sometimes made life difficult for me and for my pastry chef, because many American guests felt they were being cheated unless the éclairs and the petis fours were as large as those they we re accustomed to seeing at home.
In France, if you have a sweet tooth (and who hasn't?), you may eat several pastries. But perfect eclairs arc never larger than your middle finger; napoleons, dartois, and other puff-paste tidbits are a mere three inches long. fruit tartelettes only a trifle bigger than a silver dollar, pet its chaussons (fruit turnovers) about two inches at their longest point. Cream puffs and little iced cakes shaped in Squares, rounds, or triangles are just bite size, like a bonbon.
In France, the term pastry covers all the sweet cakes, tarts, petits fours, fraindises, and gâteaux served at a tea or a soirée, or with dessert, particularly frozen dessert. In America, pastry usually refers to a pie or tart of some sort. while other baked sweets are called cakes, cookies, and so on. The word used for the uncooked dough with which tarts arc made is similar in English and French. Here it is called paste; that is, pie paste, puff paste, and so on. In the language of the French chef it is a pâte (not to be confused with a pâte, which is a delicately seasoned meat or fish paste). In France, all doughs and batters are pales. Puff paste, however, is also called feuilletage or pate feuilletée, and sometimes millefeuille.
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