#46 - Accidental food stars of France

In today's episode we talk about some of the most well-known, classic, delicious foods of France that we know were made by accident but became total celebrities in their own right!

Find out how two sisters running a small hotel created Tarte Tatin, and the strange legends of how their accidental apple tart became super famous.

Discover how a British royal prince named a famous French dish created in error right under his nose!

And we reveal how a young chef in awe of his famous chef boss invented "flies in the wind" pastry cases that even English speakers know by their French name vol au vents!

Plus more fun facts, legends and mouth-watering dishes! 

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Transcript

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PODCAST 46: Accidental food stars of France!
 

Janine: Bonjour and a great big welcome to the Good Life France podcast where we share with you everything you want to know about France – and more! I’m Janine Marsh, your host, and I left London behind some years ago to live in rural bliss in northern France. Well that was the dream, in reality, with 52 animals and a very old house that was abandoned for years and chicken coops to clean, it’s not glamorous that’s for sure. But I do have my moments as I’m a travel writer and travel around France all year, exploring the hidden bits, the secret bits and the historic bits of the country as well as everything in between from culture to cuisine, from the wonderful architecture to the amazing wine, from coast to country. You’ll find my discoveries in The Good Life France Magazine (it’s free) and on my website of the same name (www.thegoodlifefrance.com). When I’m not travelling or writing or looking after my animals, I love to chat to you on this podcast alongside my podcast partner Olivier Jauffrit. 

Oli: Bonjour everyone – I’m Olivier, Oli for short! I live in the opposite end of France from Janine – lovely Lyon, known for its food, it’s fabulous architecture and history, it’s a great city! I love to chat to you also and when I’m not here chatting, I’m chatting on the radio, doing the drive time slot here in Lyon! Yes I am typically French – like to talk a lot! 

But enough of us – let’s get straight into today’s podcast topic! Janine what are we going to be talking about today? 

Janine: Food! That’s what we’re going to talk about. France is famous for its gastronomy which is even UNESCO-listed. The world famous cultural agency UNESCO added the “Gastronomic meal of the French” to their Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010 recognising a thousand-year-old tradition of preparing good food that includes making everyday meals a celebration. And today we’re going to discover some of the accidental stars of the culinary world. If you’re anything like me you sometime think – how on earth did someone to manage to combined those ingredients and come up with that dish? Who thought of making flour, mixing it with salt, water and yeast and making bread? Who first made yeast even? So we’re going to take some of the most well-known, classic, delicious foods of France that we know were made by accident but became total celebrities in their own right! 

Oli: That sounds like a delicious topic – let’s get stuck right in! 

Oli: One of the things I wonder about is who was it who first thought, I know, I’ll mix up some stuff together to make crepes – pancakes in English? We will never now but – thank you to that person! But some favourite dishes that are very French – and we do know how they were created – by accident in fact, happy accidents! And one of the most famous of them is Tarte Tatin.

Janine: Legend has it that the upside-down French apple tart was created by a pair of sisters, Caroline and Stephanie Tatin, who ran the restaurant Lamotte-Beuvron in central France. One version of the story goes like this: With a group of hunters gathered in their dining room, they realized they had nothing to serve for dessert and hastily began making a traditional apple tart. Stephanie placed the pieces of apples, sugar, and butter in the baking dish and then, horrors – she realised she had forgotten to line the pan with dough

Can you imagine how it might have been in the kitchen that day?

Oli you be Caroline and I’ll be Stephanie: 

Oli (as Caroline) : “Oh non, Stephanie my silly sister, what ‘ave you done?”

Janine (as Stephanie): “it’s ‘ot in ‘ere, and I am tired, that dog across the road was barking all night and kept me awake, stop moaning… “

Oli (as Caroline) “What are we going to do? I ‘ave to give our guests something and that is just fruit in a bowl with no pastry.”

Janine (as Stephanie): “I ‘ave an idea. Come back in 10 minutes…”

Oli: Caroline Comes back 

– and sees what her sister has done – basically she has plonked the fruit mix back in the tin, and put the pastry on top and baked it.

Janine: An upside-down apple tart in fact. So here’s how that might have played out. Oli – you’re Caroline again, I’m Stephanie, the clever cook! 

Oli (as Caroline): “What is that?”

Janine (as Stephanie): “Just shut up and give it to them, tell them it’s a speciality of the ‘ouse”

Oli (as Caroline): “They will laugh”

Janine (as Stephanie):: “Whatever”

Caroline comes back to the kitchen…

Oli (as Caroline): “They loved it! They want it again tomorrow! Give me a high 5”

Janine: No she wouldn’t have said that last bit but she’d have felt it I’m sure. 

Oli: Well not everyone believes that this is a true story.  

Janine: Well this is true of many French stories that evidence or proof are not always essential. I have learned that in France a good story is to be appreciated for the telling, not necessarily for the facts and that French people, if you challenge them about a fact where there is no real proof either way just say “Well, it could be true! 

Oli: Hmmm! Like what for example. 

Janine: Well like the legend of tarte tatin for instance! 

Oli: Ok , it is a fact that no one actually knows for sure that the sisters actually invented the dish, since upside-down tarts were said to have existed many years before, but they can certainly be credited with making the dessert famous (it was then called “tarte des demoiselles Tatin,” translated to “tart of the young Tatin women”) and news of it spread, lots of people copied the recipe. So, it could be true! 

Janine: Exactly! There is also a legend that Louis Vaudable the proprietor of Maxims, the famous Paris restaurant, apparently tried the dish and loved it so much that he eventually added it to his restaurant menu, bringing national recognition to what is now known as a tarte tatin. Less certain is the legend that he Supposedly he sent a cook/spy, disguised as a gardener, to the Restaurant/Hotel Tatin to discover the secret. In another story, Vaudable even claimed to have stolen the secret formula himself from Stéphanie after posing as a gardener at the hotel. However, as he was born in 1902, and the sisters retired from the hotel in 1906, that would make Vaudable 4 years old by the time he obtained the recipe. Highly unlikely.

Oli: But it could be true!

Janine: Ah no, what have I done! Lol. And yet another legend says tarte tatin was made famous by a French food critic called Curnonsky who included it in a travel guide!

Oli: Ok let’s move on to Crepes Suzette, a sublime creation of delicate, sweet pancakes doused in brandy, then flambeéd. The story goes that these delicious pancakes were accidentally invented by an apprentice waiter named Henri Charpentier who worked at the Café de Paris in ritzy Monte Carlo. 

Janine: The story goes that while preparing crêpes for the visiting Prince of Wales (the future English King Edward VII), the cognac that he’d drizzled on the pan caught fire, accidentally flambéeing the dish. Whoops. That’s not how it’s supposed to be down said his boss mostly likely, or something like that. 

Oli: But young Henri was an enterprising lad, he couldn’t keep the Prince waiting, and tasting a little bit decided it was delicious and served it to the royal guest. 

Janine: After the dinner, he was called to the table and asked for the name of the dessert. He answered, “Crêpes Princess,” but since the prince was with a girlfriend called Suzette, His Majesty asked if the dish could be named after her: “Crêpes Suzette.”

Oli: It could be true.

Janine: I’m ignoring you! 

Oli: The great French cook Auguste Escoffier eventually published a recipe for this creation in 1903, adding his own touches to the sauce—juice of an orange, and curaçao orange liqueur (though today it was more usual to use Grand Marnier.

Janine: Ok here’s another happy accident in the kitchen – vol-au-vents – which in English is literally translated as “flies in the wind.” These little puff pastry morsels which you fill with savoury things like prawns in cream and curried ham or whatever, very popular in the 1970s in the UK at least. Well they too were an accidental recipe! 

Oli: The legend it that a young chef got a job working for yet another iconic French chef – we have a lot in France. This was Marie-Antoine Carême, known as the King of Chefs and the Chef of Kings as he worked for so many royal families. It was the early 19th century and Carême was very famous and the young chef was a bit overwhelmed by it all and he forgot to prick his puff pastry before popping it in the oven. 

Janine: Pricking the pastry means it stays flat, so when it ballooned in size because of his mistake, the young chef is said to have exclaimed: “It’s flying in the wind!” Carême, instead of telling the man off apparently spotted the potential and filled the pastries with savoury things and so an ever-lasting buffet favourite was born. And before you say it – it could be true! 

Oli: It could! How about Carambar – one of my favourite sweets – long thin toffee bars – mmm. They were created in 1954 in the Delespaul-Havez chocolate factory in Marcq-en-Baroeul on the outskirts of Lille. The story goes that one of the machines malfunctioned blending cocoa and caramel and producing much longer bars than usual. 

Janine: Ooh yes I love them too – though they can pull out your fillings! I remember writing about these sweets for one of my books and they make something like 82,000 kilometeres of chewy toffee a year! And they include an awful joke with each sweet – inside the wrappers. Like “Why should you not tell jokes to a balloon?”

Oli: Ermm… because it might burst out laughing? 

Janine: Yes – you’ve had that joke before right. What about “What is a female hamster?”

Oli: I don’t know that one – what is a female hamster? 

Janine: An ‘amsterdam…. Amster dame… get it? 

Janine: Ok moving swiftly on. A local legend in my region is the famous Bêtises de Cambrai – apparently, these mint sweets which are said to be good for digestion, originated in the 19th century as the result of a mistake by a confectioner – and in fact there are two confectioners, Despinoy and Afchain, who claim to have invented them! It’s said that they were originally made with mint and flour but by mistake the confectioner added sugar instead of flour. And he also, according to the story “inadvertently new air into the dough” hmm. Not sure how you can accidentally do that but anyway the sweets turned out delicious. Betise means “stupid mistake” and they are really popular in my part of France. 

Oli: It could of course be true – we were not there, but it’s most likely what we now call a marketing concept, as historians say it’s a fact that boiled sweets have been made in Cambrai since the 13th century. 

Janine: Right – let’s talk Roquefort! In 1925, Roquefort cheese became the first French foodstuff to enjoy the protection of an appellation, a qualification that indicates the geographical origin and quality of a product. A thousand years before that, Roquefort, or something very similar, was offered to the great Emperor Charlemagne by the bishop of Albi. The king thought the cheese had gone off, so he picked out the blue-green veins with his knife, until the bishop explained that these were the tastiest bits. After that, Charlemagne enjoyed it so much, he asked the bishop to send him two crates a year.

Oli: Legend has it that a young sheep herder in Roquefort in the Aveyron region was having a lunch of bread and sheep's milk cheese in the caves when he saw a beautiful girl and ran after her.

Janine: A little bit creepy! 

Oli: Well he never caught up with her because she saw him running after her and she ran too. The legend is he kept running for months and when he came back to the cave eventually he was hungry but the mould from the bread had turned his cheese into blue cheese! Et voila, Roquefort was born.

Janine: And you know eventually the shepherd had a happy ending as he did meet the shepherdess and likely offered her a taste of his Roquefort and they got married. 

Oli: I never heard that story. 

Janine: It could be true! 

Oli: Pfft. And some accidental dishes are still being invented now, like blonde chocolate. In 2004, Frédéric Bau, a chocolatier, accidentally left white chocolate simmering for several hours in a bain-marie. When he realised what he had done, he noticed that the colour had turned blonde. The chocolate tasted of “toasted Breton shortbread” he said. The chefs and inventors at the famous Valrhona chocolate company spent several years working on the invention and finally launched blonde chocolate in 2012!

Janine: I bought some of that when I was in Valrhona last year! It’s not something you see commonly in the shops anywhere but it is absolutely delicious, pretty much everyone in the queue in the shop at the brilliant chocolate museum there, had some blonde chocolate! 

Something savoury now – how about Poulet Gaston Gerard?!  The recipe was created in 1930 by the wife of the Mayor of Dijon, Gaston Gerard. She was cooking for an esteemed guest, Curnonsky, the food critic I mentioned earlier who was very famous in France and nicknamed The Prince of Gastronomy. Well Madame accidentally put too much paprika in a chicken dish she was cooking and to rectify it added crème fraiche and white wine and called it Poulet Gaston Gerard. Curnonsky loved it, and it’s now a Dijon classic.

Oli: Let’s end this review of culinary serendipity with one last lucky foodie acciden. The specific origin of Pineau des Charentes is rather uncertain, but it is said that, in 1589, a winegrower accidentally poured grape juice into a barrel of cognac. Years later, the barrel was discovered and with it a unique drink: a limpid wine with golden hints. Pineau des Charentes was born.

Janine: It could be true! 

Oli: We hope you’ve enjoyed all this food talk, and if it has made you hungry, there are recipes for most of these dishes and more on The Good Life France website – www.thegoodlifefrance.com.

We just want to say a huge thank you to all of you listening to our podcast and to everyone for sharing it too. We really love sharing the France we know and love with you, the authentic and real France with its wonderful history, culture, gastronomy, wine and more. It always amazes us that people are listening in about 150 countries around the world!

Janine: Yes thank you so much everyone, wherever you are, we really appreciate it. You’ve been listening to me Janine Marsh and Olivier Jauffrit. You can find me and a ton of information about France – where to visit, culture, history, recipes – everything France - at thegoodlifefrance.com where you can subscribe to the podcast, a weekly newsletter about France and my totally brilliant, completely free magazine which you can read at magazine.thegoodlifefrance.com.

But for now, it’s au revoir from me.

Olivier: And goodbye from me.

Janine: Speak to you soon!