fairs are known today by many different names: show, fête, festival, market, and exhibition. An ancient tradition, a fair is a temporary gathering to display and trade products, goods, and animals. From a very early date, in order to attract crowds, fairs offered entertainment in the form of musicians, acrobats, jesters, and various contests. Delicacies and dainties, such as waffles and gingerbread, were for sale in great quantities at medieval fairs; professional vendors trolled the fairgrounds with portable ovens to sell their freshly baked goods to visitors.

The modern English word “fair” originates from the archaic word “fayre” and the Latin term feria, meaning “holy day.” In medieval Europe, fairs developed as cyclical meeting places of local commerce and became, by the High Middle Ages, extremely important for long-distance and international trade. Fairs were habitually organized during the periods of saints’ feasts, in the courts of churches and abbeys, or on village greens and plains near towns. Well-known examples of age-old English fairs are those held at Westminster on St. Peter’s Day, at Smithfield on St. Bartholomew’s, and at Durham on St. Cuthbert’s Day.

A medieval fair normally began with three to eight days of preliminary work as goods were unpacked, exhibited, compared, and evaluated. The quantities for sale were revealed and prices were established, but this was a time for looking only. Next came the time for dealing, which lasted another three to eight days. The third and final stage of the fair consisted of settling and balancing accounts and arranging for credit. The layout of the fairs made comparing the quality of similar products quite easy. For instance, at the Lendit fairs, held in June on the plain between Paris and Saint-Denis, merchants from different towns (Louviers, Bernay, Lisieux, Vire, etc.) exhibited and sold their products in their own “streets.”

Among the most important fairs in medieval Europe were the Champagne fairs, a series of six events, each lasting more than six weeks, and spaced throughout the year. Originally local agricultural and stock fairs, the Champagne fairs became important in reviving the European economy as they dominated commercial relations between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. They served as a principal market not only for textiles, leather, and fur, but also for spices. For a long time, sugar and exotic spices (saffron, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger), essential for creating and flavoring cakes, biscuits, and other sweets, were very expensive and therefore available only to the wealthy classes. The best places for buying such sought-after ingredients were the fairs. The fairs were also important in the spread and exchange of cultural influences such as architectural and artistic ideas and innovations from different corners of Europe. Toward the end of the medieval period, developments in transport, especially in the sea transport of heavy goods, gradually made some fairs redundant. Better markets closer to the centers of production were available and growing. The majority of the Parisian fairs, for example, were now made needless by the permanent commercial market. While some fairs disappeared, others appeared, however, and even thrived because of their specialities—a good example are the fifteenth-century fairs at Lyons focusing on silks and spices. Frankfurt fairs remained the greatest European market for German products.

Edible souvenirs like gingerbreads and other sweet treats were sold and bought at fairs throughout Europe. In England these souvenirs were commonly known under the collective name of “fairings.” At Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, fairings of gingerbread, made from a thick mixture of honey and breadcrumbs flavored with cinnamon and pepper and sometimes colored with saffron or sander (sandalwood), were sold from 1126 to 1800. See food colorings and gingerbread. Ornamented by beautiful designs from wooden molds, the gingerbread fairings were decorated with box leaves nailed down with gilded cloves. See cookie molds and stamps. At Easter time in the northern counties of England, colored “paste eggs” were among the traditional fairings. Cornish fairings included a sweet and spicy ginger biscuit with sugar-coated almonds and caraway seeds, crystallized angelica, and macarons. See angelica.

Toward the end of the medieval period, developments in transport gradually made some fairs redundant. However, fairs took on a new life on the North American continent, where they eventually became less about trade than celebrations of regional and ethnic production. The economic significance of fairs may have changed dramatically but they are still popular today. Countless fairs are organized periodically throughout the Western world, usually concurrently with anniversaries of important local historical events, or seasonal events such as harvest times, or holidays like Christmas, and often on dedicated, traditional fairgrounds. In the United States, county fairs exhibiting the equipment, animals, sports, and recreations associated with farming are an important part of cultural life in country towns. Their larger versions, the state fairs, often including only exhibits or competitors that have won in their categories at the various local county fairs, have been held annually since 1841. Home cooks vie for top (“blue ribbon”) prizes for their pies and preserves, while fairgoers indulge in fair food both classic (cotton candy and funnel cakes) and newfangled (in Nashville, Tennessee, deep-fried Goo Goo Clusters, a milk-chocolate candy bar with caramel, marshmallow, and peanuts that is coated in batter before being fried). See cotton candy and fried dough.

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Cavaciocchi, Simonetta, ed. Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee secc. XIII–XVIII. Atti delle Settimane di Studi 32. Florence: Le Monnier, 2001.

Favier, Jean. Gold & Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages. Translated by Caroline Higgit. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1998.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Kitchen History. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.

Hannele Klemettilä

fantasy worlds made of sugar and sweets are part of the folklore of societies throughout the world. These “saccharotopias” typically combine surreal and unlimited amounts of candy and other edible delicacies with a life of leisure and carefree indulgence. They are special cases of the pastoral mode, with its sunlit paradise of natural fecundity (locus amoenus) and leisure (otium). Saccharotopias often include the “natural” foods of traditional pastoral—fruit, milk, and cheese—but they focus primarily on sweets.

The earliest saccharotopia is biblical. God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, promising to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and to bring them to “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3.17: אֶל־אֶ רֶץ זָב ַ ת חָל ָ ב וּדְבָֽשׁ).

In modern times, the most famous sugar fantasy is the U.S. hobo ballad “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” In the original version recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, the world of the Big Rock Candy Mountain is a raunchy place with lakes of gin and whiskey, cigarette trees, and a hobo’s whore, as well as lemonade springs and trees full of fruit, not to mention the rock candy crag. In 1949 the folksinger Burl Ives recorded an expurgated version that became a children’s classic. Over time, other artists produced even blander lyrics: the gin disappears and whiskey turns to soda pop. Cigarette trees morph into peppermint. But the grittier Ives version is still the iconic image of America’s leading saccharotopia, the sweetness of the candy nirvana powerfully contrasted with the portrait of the hobo life:

On a summer day
In the month of May
A burly bum came hiking
Down a shady lane
Through the sugar cane
He was looking for his liking
As he roamed along
He sang a song
Of the land of milk and honey
Where a bum can stay
For many a day
And he won’t need any money

(Chorus)
Oh the buzzin’ of the bees
In the cigarette trees
Near the soda water fountain
At the lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
On the big rock candy mountain.

Like all saccharotopias, though, this sugary Arcadia descends from a European archetype of unknown origin, the Land of Cockaigne. That legendary place of sweet-cramming debauchery and compulsive insobriety crops up in Italy (Cuccagna), as well as Germany (Schlaraffenland or slackerland), the Low Countries (Koekange), Spain (Cucaña), and in medieval England (Cockaigne). The name has even been connected, humorously, with modern London (Cockney). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Cockaigne’s etymology “remains obscure,” but some authorities hypothesize that it derives from words for “cake,” such as German Kuchen (the Brothers Grimm) or the Latin verb coquere, meaning “to cook.” In English, it can be traced to the fourteenth century; in German, to thirteenth-century Latin drinking songs found at Benediktbeuern, the Bavarian monastery, lyrics that have retained their vitality as texts for Orff’s Carmina Burana (Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis / et meum consilium est cum bibulis, which means “I’m the abbot of Cockaigne and I preside over a bunch of drunks”).

Perhaps the fullest account of Cockaigne survives in one of the Harley manuscripts now in the British Library. Written down in Ireland around 1330, this naughty Middle English poem celebrates a place where naked nuns swim in rivers of milk, honey, and wine. A monastery has walls made of pies, with cakes for shingles and puddings for the pegs that fasten the posts and beams.

Cockaigne has inspired painters from Brueghel the Elder to Goya, who depicted a contemporary enactment of a Madrid folk ritual called cucaña, for which contestants shimmied up a very tall greased pole. Successful climbers were rewarded with an edible prize at the top. There are photographs of a similar cuccagna pole in Italy.

An entirely separate “Cockaigne” tradition arose in the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, in the Andean town that Pizarro called Jauja and established as the first capital of Peru in 1534. Before their defeat, the Incas had stored a vast amount of food in Jauja, which thereafter became famous throughout Spanish America as a proverbial paradise of easy living. Even today in Mexico and its cultural hinterland across the U.S. border, the city of Jauja, la ciudad de Jauja, lives on in folklore as a mythic Shangri-La. The best evidence of this is a corrido of the same name. This popular Chicano song celebrates churches made of sugar, caramel friars, molasses acolytes, and side altars of honey. It can be heard on YouTube.

The legendary Land of Cockaigne, with its superabundant food and drink, has inspired artists for centuries. This engraving, attributed to the Netherlandish painter Pieter van der Heyden, was completed sometime after 1570. the metropolitan museum of art, harris brisbane dick fund, 1926

Pleij, Herman. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. Translated by Diane Webb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Raymond Sokolov

Farmer, Fannie (1857–1915), was one of America’s most esteemed cooking teachers and authors at the turn of the twentieth century. Renowned for her scientific approach to cooking and strict precision in measuring ingredients, she published her first book The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896. See measurement. It was reprinted countless times. Farmer also took great pride in her courses in sickroom cookery. She wrote Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent in 1904 and lectured at Harvard Medical School.

Farmer also had a whimsical side and a notable sweet tooth. Her works abound with cakes, cookies, pies, pastries, candies, ice creams, and puddings. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book includes one of the first recipes for so-called brownies. They were not made with chocolate, but rather flavored with molasses, baked in individual shallow cake tins, and garnished with pecans. See brownies. She made almond and cinnamon cookies shaped like horseshoes and studded with chocolate frosting nails. She sent her rolled wafer cookies to the table with ribbons around them and molded puddings into heart shapes for Valentine’s Day. One of her Christmas desserts was a dish of ice cream covered with crushed macarons and topped with a crepe-paper-clad doll. In her December 1905 column for The Woman’s Home Companion she wrote excitedly that she hoped it would “make many an eye twinkle at the Christmas dinner.”

Farmer never met a marshmallow she did not like or could not mix into ice cream, frosting, or, especially, gelatin. Her salads were often as sweet as desserts. She gave the world the famous (or infamous) ginger ale salad. To make it, she added ginger ale to gelatin and then mixed in chopped cherries, celery, apples, and pineapple. See gelatin and marshmallows.

Remembered today for her stern insistence on level measurements, Farmer was also the woman who introduced ices and ice creams in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by writing, “How cooling, refreshing, and nourishing, when properly taken, and of what inestimable value in the sickroom!”

In this famous photograph, the Boston Cooking School principal Fannie Farmer (1857–1915) holds a measuring cup to a student, as if to reinforce her reputation as the “Mother of Level Measurements.” © bettmann / corbis

See also christmas; ice cream; icing; pudding; and valentine’s day.

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

Jeri Quinzio

fermentation is a process by which yeasts or bacteria produce alcohol, lactic acid, acetic acid, and other chemical byproducts as they metabolize sugars derived from varied sources. All sugars can be used as substrates for fermentation.

Alcohol Fermentation

By far the most widespread form of fermentation is the production of alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are produced by the action of yeasts (primarily Saccharomyces cerevisiae but also many others) on sugars found in honey, grapes, apples, and many other fruits, as well as cacti, tree saps, grains, starchy tubers, and milk. Indigenous people of most regions of the world developed distinctive alcoholic beverages made from available local carbohydrate sources. Simple carbohydrates ferment directly into alcohol. Yeasts are generally present on sugar-rich substrates, and fermentation will generally proceed spontaneously. For instance, raw honey diluted with water will inevitably begin to ferment, as will freshly pressed fruit juice.

In contrast, complex carbohydrates must first be broken down (by enzymatic processes) into simple sugars that will ferment into alcohol. Thus, it is always more technically difficult to produce beers and other grain- or starchy tuber-based beverages than wines and other alcoholic beverages made from fruits or other simple sugars. In the Western tradition of beer making, germination of grains, known as malting, produces such enzymes. This is the process used in making hopped barley beers and ales, as well as Egyptian bouza, African sorghum and millet beers, Central American corn beers, and many others. In the Asian tradition, the primary source of these enzymes is molds (primarily Aspergillus spp. but also Rhizopus spp.) grown on grains, such as Japanese kōji, Chinese chu, Korean nuruk, Indonesian ragi, Nepalese marcha, and others. The third source of such enzymes, generally regarded as the most ancient, is human saliva; chewed grain beverages, such as chicha, made from corn in the Andes Mountains of South America, continue to be produced in several different parts of the world.

Distillation is a process that concentrates alcohol (or other volatile substances). Only fermentation can create alcohol, and distillation can only concentrate alcohol that has already been fermented. Any type of fermented alcohol may be distilled. The process takes place in an apparatus known as a still. Distillation evaporates and then condenses the fermented alcohol, thanks to the different boiling temperatures of different substances. Alcohol boils at 173°F (78°C), whereas water boils at 212°F (100°C). So when fermented alcohol—a mixture of alcohol and water—is heated, the vapors contain proportionately more alcohol than the liquid, as does the resulting liquid when the vapors are cooled. With repeated runs through the still, a purer and purer product results.

Lactic Acid Fermentation

Another widespread form of fermentation is the metabolism of sugars into lactic acid by lactic acid bacteria. Many varied foods and beverages are products of this process: sauerkraut, kimchi, and other fermented pickles are lactic acid fermentations, in which plant sugars are metabolized into lactic acid by bacteria found on all plant life. Yogurt, kefir, and many cheeses also rely on lactic acid fermentation of milk sugar lactose. Yogurt and kefir are cultured by specific microbial communities that define the ferments, but lactic acid bacteria are present in all raw milk and will spontaneously clabber (sour) the milk if it is left unrefrigerated. Grains, too, will yield lactic acid after spontaneous fermentation.

Acetic Acid Fermentation

Another important metabolic product of the fermentation of sugars is acetic acid, more commonly known as vinegar. Acetic acid is not metabolized directly from sugars, but rather from alcohol. Thus, the fermentation of acetic acid from sugars is a two-stage process: first, the fermentation of sugars into alcohol; then a distinct microbial process in which the alcohol is converted into acetic acid. Vinegar can be made from any fermented alcohol or solution of fermentable sugars.

The bacteria that metabolize alcohol into acetic acid are known as Acetobacter. Acetobacter are aerobic organisms that can convert alcohol into acetic acid only in the presence of oxygen. This is why alcoholic beverages are typically fermented under conditions designed to exclude air, to avoid conversion of alcohol into acetic acid. But when acetic acid is the desired outcome, a vessel with a broad surface area is used to maximize contact with oxygen.

Mixed Fermentation

Many ferments involve some combination of alcoholic, lactic, and acetic fermentations. Until Louis Pasteur’s 1860s research isolating yeast and other fermentation organisms, microorganisms always existed in communities, and many—arguably all—traditional ferments have involved more than a single type of fermentation. For instance, sourdough breads (and all bread until the isolation of yeast) are risen by a combination of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria. Similarly, in traditional fermented alcoholic beverages that rely on wild yeasts rather than isolated pure strains, the yeasts are always accompanied by lactic acid bacteria, and the products include not only alcohol but also lactic acid.

See also fruit; honey; malt syrup; sap; and yogurt.

Katz, Sandor. The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2012.

Mollison, Bill. The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari, 1993.

Steinkraus, Keith, ed. Handbook of Indigenous Fermented Foods. 2d ed. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1996.

Sandor Ellix Katz

festivals, unlike quotidian rituals of blessing food or saying grace at the table to honor what we eat, highlight foods and dishes that reflect a community’s religious, social, and cultural roots.

In Europe’s traditionally Catholic countries, saints’ days often have their own festivals, which are associated with particular sweets. In Sicily, to celebrate the 13 December holiday of Santa Lucia, a wheat and ricotta cream dish called cuccìa (related to the word for grain) is traditionally enjoyed. This practice has its roots in the seventeenth century, when residents of Palermo suffering from famine prayed to the Sicilian saint Santa Lucia, who hailed from Siracusa. When a boat carrying wheat arrived, the grain was quickly boiled instead of being ground into flour for pasta, and it was eaten with the local ricotta cheese. The ricotta cream version of cuccìa is specific to Sicily, where pasta and bread are banned on the holiday in commemoration of this historical event. In Sweden, St. Lucia Day is celebrated with saffron buns in assorted shapes (Lussekatter), whose golden hue brings light to the dark December days.

Christmas Eve in Provence is marked by the meatless gros souper (big supper), which is consumed before midnight mass. An important aspect of the meal is les treize desserts de Noël—the 13 desserts of Christmas, which symbolically represent Jesus and his 12 apostles. Thirteen desserts, including nougat, mendiants (dried fruit confections), and various fruits, are presented; tradition holds that each guest must taste at least one. See christmas and nougat.

In India, foods are ritually tied to the country’s many festivals. The Hindu celebration of Diwali is very sweets oriented, with laddu made of chickpea flour, cardamom, sugar, and ghee one of the holiday’s most typical offerings. See diwali and laddu. Jalebi is a popular dessert made of a chickpea-flour batter fried until crisp and then drenched in a sugar syrup flavored with saffron and cardamom. Children enjoy candy toys during Diwali. Modaka, said to be the elephant-headed deity Ganesh’s favorite treat, are small dumplings stuffed with jaggery (unrefined sugar) and coconut, either steamed or fried. Tradition calls for 21 modaka to be made as an offering during the Chaturthi festival in August. See modaka.

China’s most popular sweet is the mooncake, which although tied to the Mid-Autumn Festival (sometimes called the Mooncake Festival), has many variations. The pastry is typically stuffed with lotus seed or red azuki bean paste; it sometimes contains a salted duck egg yolk, which symbolizes the full moon. The dessert is labor-intensive and almost always prepared commercially rather than at home. Mooncakes are also associated with festivals in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where for the New Year, Tet Nguyen Dan (or simply Tet) mooncakes are part of offerings made to the kitchen god Ong Tao. Families sometimes smear honey over the mouth of an image of Ong Tao to guarantee that he will say only pleasant or sweet things during the coming year. See mooncake.

Fruit Festivals

Many festivals are based on seasonal fruits, especially strawberries, celebrations of which abound in North America and Europe. See fruit. Perhaps the most famous in the United States is held in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, which bills itself as the Strawberry Capital of the World. Bayou musicians perform at the city’s three-day Strawberry Festival in mid-April, and there is a Strawberry Strut race, a parade and auction, and a college scholarship for each year’s Strawberry Queen. Strawberries are consumed deep-fried, chocolate-dipped, blended in daiquiris, and by the dozens in a strawberry-eating contest. The festival is preceded by a Strawberry Ball at the end of March and followed by a Strawberry King and Queen Pageant and Grand Marshall Coronation at the end of May.

France’s best-known salute to the strawberry takes place in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne on the second Sunday of May. The highlight is a giant strawberry tart—as large as 26 feet across and containing as many as 1,700 pounds of strawberries—made by local bakers and served to all festival attendees.

Italy also has a variety of strawberry festivals. The Sagra delle fragole in Piedmont’s hamlet of Fosseno features a risotto alle fragole. In Lazio, the town of Nemi celebrates fragoline di bosco, prized wild strawberries. During the festival, local girls in traditional dress walk through the crowds, handing out the small berries.

In Italy’s Alto Adige (South Tyrol), apples are one of the leading crops. The three-day Bolzano Gourmet Festival, held in late May, showcases apples that have received the Protected Geographical Status certificate of Mela Alto Adige IGP/Südtiroler Apfel (Alto Adige and South Tyrol Apple). The event features educational programming and workshops in an apple orchard, as well as culinary demonstrations by top local chefs.

Confectionery Festivals

Europe’s most popular chocolate festival is held in Perugia, Italy, in mid-October, where the city’s famous Baci chocolates are prominently featured. Perugia’s proximity to Spoleto and its world-renowned Spoleto Festival of culture may account for the Chocolate Festival’s inclusion of exhibits, songs, and plays about chocolate.

Food fights are a feature of many culinary festivals in Spain. When the participants in La Merengada in Vilanova i la Geltrú—part of Carnival celebrations in late February or early March—run out of meringue pies to throw at each other, they substitute candies. A similar rite occurs in many Andalusian towns, including the regional capital, Seville, which holds the Cabalgata de Reyes Magos (Arrival of the Magi) festival on 23 December. Participants throw candies from floats, as they do during many Carnival festivals throughout the world. See carnival.

Field, Carol. Celebrating Italy: The Tastes and Traditions of Italy as Revealed Through Its Feasts, Festivals, and Sumptuous Foods. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.

Fraioli, James, and Curti, Leonardo. Food Festivals of Italy: Celebrated Recipes from 50 Food Fairs. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2008.

Doreen Schmid

Fig Newtons, trademarked by Nabisco, are popular bar cookies made of fig jam encased in cake-like pastry. They are surprisingly similar to the traditional fig rolls and maʾamoul, a sweet composed of shortbread pastry stuffed with figs, nuts, and other dried fruits, still popular today across the Middle East.

The technology that made Fig Newtons commercially viable in the United States has been subject to competing claims. One insists that Ohioan Charles Roser invented a machine around 1891 that allowed the cookies to be mass-produced by funneling the jam and the cookie dough separately but simultaneously. The other asserts that James Henry Mitchell of Philadelphia invented the cookie in 1891 when he came up with a duplex dough-sheeting machine and funnels.

Fig Newton cookies have been popular ever since their introduction in 1891, but in 2012 they were recast simply as “Newtons” to allow for an expanded line of fillings and to eliminate associations with what the manufacturer, Nabisco, feared was a “geriatric” fruit. photograph by evan amos

Folklore maintains that the cookie was named after Sir Isaac Newton, but its more likely eponym is the Boston suburb of Newton. The Kennedy Biscuit Works of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts—the first company to produce Fig Newtons commercially, in 1891, soon after the machinery had been perfected—commonly named its products after nearby towns. Within a decade, following a massive nationwide merger of biscuit companies, Nabisco acquired the Biscuit Works. Today, the cookies are known simply as Newtons and encompass several varieties: crisp Fruit Thins, a whole-grain version, and fruit fillings other than fig. The 16th of January is National Fig Newton Day in the United States.

Processing

In the past, flour was stone ground, a slow milling process that causes less friction and heat, thereby preserving more of the nutrients in the wheat. With the invention of roller milling in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth century, and its spread throughout Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century, stone-ground flour, especially in the United States, was relegated to a health-food fringe. Massive mills with high-temperature, high-speed steel rollers came to rule the industry. Although this high-speed process creates a much finer flour, it destroys many of the nutrients in the grain. Furthermore, while stone-ground flour is generally aged to improve its baking properties, industrial mills skip the expensive aging process. American mills generally bleach the flour with chemicals, including organic peroxides, nitrogen dioxide, chlorine, chlorine dioxide, and azodicarbonamide. (Japan stopped bleaching flour about 30 years ago, and the use of chlorine, bromates, and peroxides is not permitted in the European Union.) Bleaching has a negative effect on baking, as it toughens the dough, making it brittle, dry, and more difficult to work with.

Protein Content

Wheat flours are distinguished by how they are milled, the type of wheat, how it is grown, and the time of harvest. All of this affects the protein content, which in turn correlates to the amount of gluten in any given flour. Gluten helps create structure and determines texture in the final baked good. Flours with low protein contents produce crumbly tarts and tender, toothsome cakes, while higher protein results in hearty breads with a chewy crust. When the flour is moistened and then mixed or kneaded, the gluten is activated. The small air pockets that form are inflated by gases released by the leavening agent, which causes the dough to expand or rise. The more the dough is mixed or kneaded, the more the gluten develops. For this reason, batter cakes and cookie doughs are mixed only briefly, as overmixing causes the dough to toughen and dry out.

For light and airy cakes with delicate crumb, low-protein flour, either cake flour or pastry flour, is optimal. Most cookies use all-purpose flour with its moderate protein level to allow the dough to be rolled out. Pie doughs also require all-purpose flour so that they can be rolled out into large disks without breaking or crumbling. Shortbread or other butter-rich doughs that yield a fine, sandy crumb in cookies or tarts require lower-protein flours. Elastic doughs such as puff pastry need flour with more protein so that the dough will be firm enough to roll out and layer with butter. See cake; laminated doughs; pie dough; pastry, puff; rolled cookies; and shortbread.

White flour should be stored in a cool, dry area in an airtight container. Because it contains bran, whole-wheat flour easily turns rancid, and its flavor will dissipate. It should be stored in a cool, dry place for up to four months, or refrigerated or frozen for longer storage. The name given to the flour generally indicates how it is intended to be used.

Types of Wheat Flour

Bread flour is a strong flour, meaning that it has a high gluten content, usually around 13 to 16 percent protein. A handful of bread flour feels coarse and is slightly off-white in color. Bread flour is used for making crusty breads and rolls, pizza dough, and similar products.

All-purpose flour is formulated to have a medium gluten content of 10 to 12 percent, which makes it a good middle-of-the-road choice for a wide range of baking, from crusty breads to fine cakes and pastries. Even so, most professional bakers avoid all-purpose flour, preferring instead to use bread flour, cake flour, or pastry flour, depending on what they are baking.

Pastry flour contains about 8 to 10 percent protein. It can be used for biscuits, muffins, cookies, pie doughs, and softer yeast doughs. It is slightly more off-white in color than cake flour.

Cake flour, made from soft wheat, is slightly less strong than pastry flour, with a protein content of only 7.5 to 9 percent. Its texture is visibly finer than that of bread flour, and it is much whiter in color. Its fine, soft consistency makes it preferable for tender cakes and pastries.

Self-rising flour, all-purpose flour with measured amounts of baking powder and salt, is a commercial product created as a convenience for home cooks. It must be used very fresh, because when the flour is stored in the pantry, the baking powder quickly loses its effectiveness.

White whole-wheat flour is about 13 percent protein. It comes from a type of wheat that has no major genes for bran color. The bran of white wheat is not only lighter in color but also milder in flavor, making white whole wheat more appealing to those accustomed to the taste of refined flour. Its milder flavor also means that products made with white wheat require less added sweetener to attain the same level of perceived sweetness.

Whole-wheat pastry flour, or graham flour, is milled from low-protein soft wheat, with about 9 percent protein.

Regular whole-wheat flour, milled from hard red wheat, has a protein content of 14 percent. It is used in cookies, crusts, and creamed or batter cakes.

Gluten-free all-purpose flour was developed for those with gluten sensitivity. The flour can be used for cakes, cookies, breads, and breakfast items such as muffins, pancakes, and waffles. Unlike wheat flour, gluten-free flours are composed of a wide range of ingredients and vary greatly. The major difference is found in the first ingredient listed on the package label, which may be cornstarch, white and brown rice flours, or garbanzo bean flour. Each has a completely different flavor and effect on baked products, so manufacturer’s instructions should be followed for each brand. The flours may also contain milk powder, tapioca flour, potato starch, xanthan gum, potato starch, tapioca flour, sorghum flour, and fava flour. Gluten-free baked goods do not keep well, so they are best eaten the same day they are baked.

Although it is generally safe to use pastry and cake flour interchangeably, it can be tricky to substitute flours with different protein contents. All-purpose flour can be used for most pastry doughs, but if a finer product is desired, its protein content can be reduced by removing two tablespoons from a cup of flour and replacing them with two tablespoons of sifted cornstarch. Conversely, the protein content of all-purpose flour can be increased by replacing two tablespoons of flour per cup with vital wheat gluten.

See also breads, sweet; chemical leaveners; muffins; and pancakes.

Corriher, Shirley O. BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes. New York: Scribner, 2008.

McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 1984.

Jim Dodge

flower waters, produced by steeping petals in water or by distillation, have been used since ancient times in medicine, perfumes, and cosmetics. The waters are also important in the kitchen as luxury flavorings, almost magically transforming food by imbuing a delicate fragrance, especially to sweet dishes. Rosewater and orange flower water are the best known, but other flowers can be used, such as screwpine, jasmine, rose geraniums, and ylang-ylang. Because their flavor can be intense, they should be used sparingly.

Rosewater

This flower water can be made from any sweet scented roses. The most famous is the ancient damask rose, but the cabbage rose, French rose, and musk rose are also used. Eglantine flower water from a wild rose, sometimes called sweet briar, is particularly popular in Tunisia. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans extracted fragrance by steeping rose petals in water, oil, or alcohol. Although water distillation is still traditionally used in many Eastern countries, nowadays steam distillation is often the preferred method. Here, for instance, is how rosewater is made in Afghanistan today: The blooms are picked fresh in the cool, early hours of the morning. A large copper pot or cauldron is filled with water. The petals are added (the amount of water is usually about twice the weight of the petals), and the water is brought to a gentle boil. The pot is covered with a type of copper dome from which an attached pipe or tube leads to a glass bottle, into which the pipe neatly fits. Everything is sealed with dough to prevent the fragrant steam from escaping. The steam rises into the dome, and as it travels down the pipe, it is cooled by cold water, causing the steam to condense into droplets. The droplets travel along the pipe, and slowly the fragrant rosewater drips into the bottle. (Sometimes this rosewater is poured into another pot and slightly warmed again, then left to stand until a thin film of oil forms on the surface. The oil is skimmed off to make atr [attar], or oil of roses.) Orange flower water is traditionally made in much the same way.

The technique of distilling rosewater probably evolved in the third and fourth centuries c.e. in Mesopotamia. By the ninth century Persia was distilling rosewater on a large scale, and it was much used there and in neighboring regions. During the Golden Age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, famous for its lavish and sumptuous cuisine, rosewater was used extensively in sweet and savory dishes. See baghdad.

The Ottoman Turks used rosewater to add fragrance to desserts, pastries (such as baklava), and sweetmeats (such as lokum), as well as to syrups and sherbets. The Turks introduced roses to Bulgaria, where the Valley of the Roses at Kazanluk is famous for its rosewater and rose petal jams. The use of rosewater spread to Europe via the Crusaders. In Elizabethan England, rosewater was used to flavor butter and sugar paste.

Colonial Americans, too, added rosewater to confectionery and desserts. Martha Washington’s seventeenth-century Booke of Sweetmeats uses rosewater extensively in the recipes. Eliza Leslie (1857) pounded almonds for her almond pudding with “a few drops of rose-water to make them light and preserve their whiteness.” Rosewater was added to syrups for use in beverages and also in savory dishes such as chicken pies and spinach. It was often purchased from the Shakers, a religious sect renowned for the purity of their products and who themselves fragranced their apple pie with it.

Rosewater today is used extensively throughout the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey, and North Africa. It subtly perfumes biscuits, pastries, jelabi, firni, rice puddings such as kheer and shola, ice creams, faluda, and halvah, as well as drinks such as sherbets and sweet lassi, and sometimes savory rice dishes for festive occasions.

In the West adding a little rosewater to creams, sorbets, mousses, and jellies or sprinkling it over fruits, especially strawberries, transforms these dishes into something exotic.

Orange Flower Water

Sometimes called orange blossom water, orange flower water is distilled from the blossoms of bitter orange trees such as Seville orange and bergamot. It originated in the Middle East, where it is still produced, especially in Morocco and Lebanon. The water is used to add fragrance to syrups, pastries, sweets, and desserts. A teaspoon of orange flower water added to a coffee cup of boiling water, sometimes sweetened with sugar, is called “white coffee.” A few drops added to sweetened cool water make a soothing infusion that is often given to children at bedtime. Moroccans frequently add orange flower water to tagines and sometimes sprinkle it over salads.

In the sixteenth century in the south of France, bitter oranges were widely cultivated to make orange flower water, initially for use in the perfume industry. By the seventeenth century in Europe, the water was flavoring almond cakes, rich seed cakes, biscuits, dessert creams, and custards. In Britain it was often used as an alternative to rosewater and added to desserts such as trifles and fools.

Orange flower water flavored capillaire, a fashionable nineteenth-century drink whose syrup was originally infused with maidenhair fern. It was also a key ingredient in orgeat, initially a beverage and later a syrup used to sweeten other beverages. American food writer Mary Randolph (1828) called orgeat “a necessary refreshment at all parties.” Martha Washington’s Booke of Sweetmeats uses orange flower water in a recipe for Hunny Combe Cakes.

Orange flower water is an ingredient in the famous New Orleans cocktail Ramos Gin Fizz and in the Mardi Gras orange cake. In France it flavors madeleines and is added to the turrón (nougat) of Spain. Further afield, it is added to little wedding cakes and to pan de muerto in Mexico.

Kewra Water

Sometimes known as kewda, kewra water is extracted from the flowers of the screwpine (Pandanus odorifer). See pandanus. It is similar to rosewater and is often used as an alternative or mixed with it.

India is a major producer of kewra, 90 percent of which grows in the state of Odisha. Its soft, sweet scent is prized for use in Indian and Sri Lankan cooking, mainly for desserts and sweets such as kheer, barfi, jelabi, rosogolla, and ras malai. Some Bengali sweets are dipped or soaked in kewra water to imbue a floral perfume. It is added to jams and conserves and sometimes sprinkled over elaborate rice dishes prepared for festive occasions. See india.

Other Flower Waters

In Thailand flowers such as jasmine are picked at sunset when their fragrance is at its best and then steeped in cooled, previously boiled water overnight. This infused water is a traditional way of serving drinking water in Thailand, as well as an important ingredient in Thai desserts and sweets.

In Tunisia rose geranium flower water is popular in drinks, confections, pastries, and mhalbiya, a cake made with rice and nuts.

Ylang-ylang is added to ice cream in Madagascar, and in South East Asia it is used in sweets and soft drinks.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. 3d ed. Edited by Tom Jaine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Ortiz, Elisabeth Lambert. The Encyclopedia of Herbs, Spices, & Flavorings. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1992.

Saberi, Helen. “Rosewater, the Flavouring of Venus … and Asafoetida, Devil’s Dung.” In Spicing Up the Palate: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1992, edited by Harlan Walker, pp. 220–235. London: Prospect, 1993.

Thompson, David. Thai Food. Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed, 2002.

Helen Saberi

fondant (from the French for “melting”) is an opaque, creamy white sugar-based mixture that can be used variously as a confection (usually flavored); as a filling for chocolates; or as a coating for cake or pastry. Once refined sugar became more widely available, confectioners began to experiment with its use in candies and icings, among which was fondant. See icing. Changing the granular texture of sugar into a creamy substance is accomplished through a process of boiling the sugar with water and a small amount of glucose or corn syrup to 243°F (117°C) (the “soft-ball” stage) for a medium-firm texture. See corn syrup and glucose.

For poured fondant, the hot syrup is poured onto a smooth surface such as marble and agitated after being first briefly cooled. Working the syrup in this way leads to an opaque and creamy mixture in which the particles of sugar are so small that they are imperceptible on the tongue. The fondant is then ready to be used, after being flavored as desired with mint, other flavorings, or small quantities of spirits or liqueurs.

Firm rolled fondant, also known as sugar paste, is often used to decorate wedding cakes. See wedding cake. It is made by combining confectioner’s sugar, corn syrup, glycerine, and gelatin into a mixture firm enough to roll into thin sheets, which are then draped over the cake. This type of fondant is flexible enough to create decorative effects such as bows, flowers, and other ornamental flourishes. Buttercream icing usually coats the cake to act as an adhesive for the rolled fondant. See cake decorating.

See also gelatin; stages of sugar syrup; and sugar.

Edel, Matthew. “The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition.” Caribbean Studies 9, no. 1 (1969): 14–44.

Greweling, Peter. Chocolates and Confections. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007.

Robert Wemischner

food colorings have a long and somewhat problematic history. Written evidence for their use can be found as early as 1500 b.c.e. in Egypt and Europe. Color is such a strong gastronomical cue to flavor and freshness that there are strong incentives for its use not only as an embellishment but also as an adulterant. As a result, food colorings are highly regulated, and only a handful of compounds are approved for use. Colorings derived from natural sources that have a long history of use in food are generally regarded as innocuous, although naturally derived food colorings are not necessarily safe. For example, into the twentieth century, bluestone—copper sulfate—was used in pickle recipes to give the pickles a vivid green color. Unfortunately, like many natural mineral-based colorings, copper sulfate is toxic, albeit only mildly so.

The color of a substance depends on the interaction between the material and light. Light can either interact intimately with the molecules that make up a substance or can be physically scattered off of the structure of the material itself. Food colorings, whether naturally occurring or synthetic, contain a chromophore, a structural motif within a molecule that interacts with a specific wavelength of light in the visible spectrum. The molecule absorbs this light, so the remaining light reflected back to the eye no longer appears white. Chromophores that absorb green light, for example, reflect back red light.

Common chromophores found in food colorings range from the structurally simple azo and carotenoid motifs to complex ring structures and protein–pigment complexes. Most of these chromophores can be found in both naturally occurring colorants and synthetic colors. There are no natural sources of azo dyes known, and the protein–pigment complexes have not been synthesized. In addition to their chromophores, good colorings must be chemically stable, able to maintain their color while stored for long periods and during food preparation. This presents a challenge, as the structures, and therefore the colors, of many compounds are sensitive to changes in pH and temperature.

The synthetic azo dyes are also called coal tar dyes, not because they contain coal tar, but because they were first synthesized using chemicals distilled from the black, sticky residue that remained when coal was processed. Though they are no longer produced from coal tar distillates and can be synthesized from plant sources, the name has stuck. The azo colors approved for food in the United States or the European Union include Allura Red, Sunset Yellow, and azorubine.

Natural food-safe colorings are derived from a wide range of sources, including plants, insects, and bacteria. Natural colorings can be a single chemical compound, like beta-carotene, or a complex mix of pigments and uncolored compounds, as in caramel. Orange annatto powder is extracted from the seeds of the tropical achiote shrub; the color primarily results from bixin, which has a carotenoid chromophore. Paprika, turmeric, and saffron also contain a variety of carotenoid pigments. Salmon pink canthaxanthin (which gives flamingos their characteristic hue) and beta-carotene are also natural carotenoid colors. Although both these colorants can be extracted from natural sources, in practice canthaxanthin and beta-carotene are industrially synthesized.

Brown caramel color, produced by burning a mixture of sugars under controlled conditions, is a mixture of many different molecules with carbon skeletons. Natural sources of red colors include beet red—its color due to betanin, a molecule with an anthroquinone chromophore similar to that in D&C Green 5—and cochineal, a deep red powder made from crushed dried insects. Pure carminic acid, the anthroquinone pigment responsible for cochineal’s red color, can be chemically extracted from the insects, or bacteria modified to produce it. Spirulina extract is an approved natural source for blue and green color. It is obtained from spiral-shaped bacteria that live symbiotically on tropical pond algae. The characteristic blue-green color of the dried extract derives from chlorophylls and phycocyanin protein–pigment complexes.

The playful nature of many confections encourages the use of color, and sugar is a particularly attractive base for a wide range of hues. See sugar sculpture. The reflectance of the fine-grained solid produces a pure white, whereas large crystals can be clear as glass. Aqueous solutions of sugar are transparent and nearly colorless, and so will not distort or muddy colorings. Colors in food can also be created through purely physical processes. The opaque bright white of meringues is a result of light being scattered through a dispersion of two transparent materials—egg whites and air—with very different indices of refraction. Polar bears’ fur is white for similar reasons.

Madeira

The extra stability was particularly useful for the wine industry of the Portuguese island of Madeira off the northwestern coast of Africa, because Madeira’s main markets were on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Caribbean and North American colonies. Madeira’s early wines, already documented in 1450, only 31 years after the island’s discovery, resembled Malvasia Candida, a sweet straw wine from Crete. Over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wine production on Madeira grew dramatically. In the eighteenth century the increasing affluence, sophistication, and one-upmanship of American planters and merchants resulted in the importation of ever-finer Madeiras, leading to the development of the many styles we know today: dry Sercial, medium-dry Verdelho, sweet Bual (typically with 4 to 5 percent unfermented sweetness) and sweet Malmsey/Malvasia (typically with 5 to 10 percent unfermented sweetness), each named after the grape variety used. They are offered either as colheita (vintage) wines from a single year (declared on the label), or as blended multi-vintage wines of a minimum age (e.g., Reserve, which is aged 5 years; Special Reserve, aged 10 years). Bual has a rich, raisin flavor, while the lusher Malmsey offers a more pronounced interplay of acidity and sweetness. Vintage wines of both types can age for a century or more. Rainwater, mainly exported to North America, is a lighter style of slightly sweet Madeira made primarily from the Tinta Negra Mole grape.

Although Madeira’s maritime climate, with a tropical influence and its terraced vineyards ascending to almost 2,750 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, creates special winegrowing conditions, the wines are more strongly marked by a unique aspect of the winemaking process. Estufagem imitates what wines shipped in barrels through the tropics would have undergone and gives Madeira wines their peculiar caramel-like flavor. It also hastens the oxidation that leads to the deep amber color with a distinctive green tinge at the rim of the glass. In the crudest form of this process (cuba de calor), the wine is directly heated to about 120°F (49°C) for three months, but today the majority of Madeiras exported are heated by the casks being placed in a sauna-like cellar (armazém de calor), and sometimes the finest wines are not heated artificially at all (canteiro). Estufagem was introduced during the eighteenth century, before the British influence on Madeira became stronger after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, which means that Madeira is actually a Portuguese-American wine, rather than a British one, as is often claimed.

Port

Fortification also appears to have come to the Douro Valley of Portugal during the first half of the eighteenth century. By 1800 the new sweet red port wines, typically with an alcohol content of 18 to 20 percent and 8 to10 percent grape sweetness, gradually replaced the region’s previous style of more-or-less dry, full-bodied red in the main export market to England. Most of the region’s wines then were like today’s tawny ports—sweet, fortified port wines matured for between a few years and several decades in cellars located in the Oporto suburb of Villa Nova de Gaia, the home of the main port houses.

“Tawny” refers to the amber-brown color these red wines acquire through this aging process. The characteristic aromas are reminiscent of toffee, candied citrus peel, and roasted nuts. Today the finest ports of this kind are marketed either as single vintage colheita or as multi-vintage blends with declared minimum age (e.g., 10 Years Old, 20 Years Old). The older they are, the less grape tannin they contain and the more supple they taste, until, after about 30 years of aging, concentration through evaporation from the barrel increases the acidity content significantly. Unlike the single-variety wines of Madeira, port is always a blend of a handful or more indigenous grape varieties, most important Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz (known in Spain and many other countries as Tempranillo). Traditionally these grapes are fermented in shallow granite troughs called lagares, where they are foot-trodden to extract the maximum amount of color, tannin and aroma from the grape skins before grape spirit is added to arrest the fermentation. Today much of this treading is done mechanically.

Only during the early nineteenth century did the practice develop of bottling some ports after just a couple of years of cask maturation when they are still deep in color and full of fruit aromas and grape tannin. This is how vintage port tastes when released, as well as the lighter and less tannic late bottled vintage (LBV) port and the even simpler ruby port. All of these styles were at least indirectly the product of British influence on the region, dating back to the 1703 Methuen Treaty between Britain and Portugal. No other European wine has a more British image than Vintage port, which traditionalists in Britain did not consume before it had had 20 years of aging to soften the wines’ often enormous tannins. Today, in England no less than in the important U.S. market, most vintage port is drunk much younger than that.

Sherry

Sweet sherry from the region around Jerez in Spain is a special case among sweet fortified wines, since the sweetness of a Cream sherry results from the blending of a fortified straw wine called PX (after the Pedro Ximénez grape from which it is exclusively made) with a fortified bone-dry Oloroso. The latter has been aged in a solera, a collection of casks to which younger wines are added so that they acquire character from the older wines it contains, yielding a wine with a consistent mature flavor. This blend yields a dark-amber to pale-brown wine with a rich, nutty, and dried fig or date character, with at least 15.5 percent alcohol and over 11.5 percent unfermented grape sweetness. Pure PX is mahogany brown with an enormously intense raisin aroma and flavor, and at least 21.2 percent grape sweetness. It is sometimes aged in cask for decades as a rare and unctuous specialty.

Other Fortified Wines

By the late nineteenth century, the wine industries of South Africa and Australia were producing modestly priced port- and sherry-style sweet wines on an industrial scale primarily to supply the British market. After World War II, when Britain’s consumption of sherry declined significantly, they switched increasingly to dry table wine production. Only Rutherglen in Victoria, Australia, managed to build such a reputation for Tawny port (usually from the Shiraz, Mataro, and Grenache grapes) and similar sweet fortified wines from the Muscat grape that it defied this change in fashion. These wines can match the best Portuguese tawny ports, but they tend to be even lusher.

In recent years, with the resurgence of port’s popularity, wines in this style have been produced in small quantities in an astonishing range of other wine-growing zones from California to Germany, and from all manner of grape varieties. None of these imitators can match Banyuls, though, the port-like fortified wine produced both as a vintage wine (resembling vintage port) and a blended nonvintage product (resembling tawny port) from the part of French Catalonia closest to the Spanish border. The greatest differences between these wines and port are their lower alcoholic content, typically about 16 percent, and the use mainly of Grenache grapes.

A footnote to the category of fortified wines includes wines made where there are no clear legal requirements, such as Commandaria from Cyprus. This straw wine made from the indigenous Mavro and Xynisteri grapes typically has full body comparable to a ruby port and a raisin character like PX.

See also fermentation and sweet wine.

Hancock, David. Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

Mayson, Richard. Port and the Douro. Updated ed. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2012.

Stuart Pigott

fortune cookie is a folded, crescent-shaped wafer with a piece of paper tucked inside, most commonly distributed by Chinese restaurants in the United States. Over 3 billion are made each year.

Although the vanilla-flavored fortune cookie—with its distinctive shape and pithy sayings—has become an icon of Chinese culture in America, it most likely traces its roots to Japan, as the cookies are all but unknown in China. Similar crescent-shaped confectionery treats, known variously as tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”) or suzu senbei (“bell crackers”), flavored with miso and sesame, are still sold by bakers in the former capital city of Kyoto. See kyoto. The senbei are heated over fire with iron grills called kata and folded by hand, in contrast to the highly automated processes that produce American fortune cookies. Japanese immigrants brought the treat to California around the turn of the twentieth century. One of the earliest popular venues for the cookies was at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

By the end of World War II, fortune cookie production was largely taken over by Chinese immigrants, in part because of Japanese internment during the war. The cookies exploded in popularity in the postwar era, spreading eastward from California, to the point that they were used in a number of political campaigns in the 1960s and became an American staple by the 1980s. In addition to the original pithy and prophetic sayings, fortune cookie slips sometimes include “lucky numbers,” which many Americans now use to play the lotteries.

Although fortune cookies are universal at American Chinese restaurants, they are virtually unknown in China. These crisp, folded wafers were developed by Japanese immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. © flazingo photos, www.flazingo.com

Today, there are fruit-flavored fortune cookies, giant fortune cookies, chocolate-dipped fortune cookies, dog fortune cookies, X-rated fortune cookie messages, and even Mexican fortune cookies shaped like tacos. Fortune cookies are also made in Brazil, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Lee, Jennifer 8. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. New York: Twelve, 2008.

Jennifer 8. Lee

Fourier, Charles (1772–1837), the utopian thinker often referred to as one of the earliest socialist theoreticians, is best known for the extraordinary level of detail in his elaborate—and often eccentric—vision of the future. Seventeen years old when the French Revolution erupted, his world turned upside down and his fortune lost, he retained a lasting hatred for what he disparagingly called “civilisation,” including its sharp commercial practices (particularly those designed to manipulate commodity prices), toleration of poverty, and republicanism—especially its “Spartan” attitudes toward diet.

In Fourier’s new society, called Harmony, everyone would live as they wished, recognizing their own tastes in work and in leisure and realizing these preferences in the company of like-minded people. In agrarian communities called phalanxes or phalansteries, one person of each gender and each temperament (a total of 1,620) would live together in beautiful buildings surrounded by fertile countryside, undertaking pleasurable work in short bursts, alternated with even more pleasurable leisure, all interspersed with up to nine delicious meals and snacks a day. No one would ever have to eat anything they did not like (such as turnips or cabbages, pet hates of Fourier’s). Sex and food were to be recognized as the most important elements in this good life, taking their places together at the pinnacle of Harmonic religion. Fourier believed these were the essential human joys, especially food—and, in particular, sweet food—which, he pointed out, was the very first happiness of a child and the last one remaining to the elderly adult who had aged beyond the pleasures of the flesh.

The education of children would begin in the kitchen, and everyone would learn the science of “gastrosophy”: a combination of learning to grow food, cook it, and match it to the temperament, health, and preferences of each individual. Sugar would play its part in international diplomacy. War would be replaced with giant worldwide gastronomic contests focused on the making of fine pastries, especially Fourier’s favourite, the mirliton, a puff-pastry tartlet with an airy baked filling of beaten eggs and sugar enriched with crushed macarons and candied orange blossoms, pistachios, or other flavorings. As a result of beneficial climate change, crops—especially sweet fruits like Muscat melons and bergamot pears—would be plentiful and of a quality unimaginable in today’s conditions. Most important, sugar would be cheaper than wheat. Thus, the bread of Harmony would be fruit compote: fruit cooked with a quarter of its weight in sugar, a food with multiple benefits demonstrating many of Fourier’s core theories of economic efficiency and pleasure. First, fruit, and sugar would be cheap and plentiful, making this Harmonic bread an eighth of the price of “civilized” bread and equally accessible to rich and poor. Second, compote cuts down on wasted time and wasted food, as it can be made in advance and more quickly than bread, and it keeps better. Third, everyone prefers sweet food, especially women and children who, Fourier says, have a notoriously sweet tooth—rather like Fourier himself. Any concerns about the pernicious influence of too much sugar would be addressed by the ready supply of “balancing” acidic drinks such as lemonades and wines (and replaceable teeth). For sugar enthusiasts like Fourier, such a sweet life could be utopia indeed.

Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Bonnain-Moerdyck, Rolande. “Fourier Gastrosophe.” In Actualité de Fourier: Colloque d’Arc-et-senans, edited by Henri Lefebvre, pp. 145–180. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1975.

Fourier, François Charles Marie. Oeuvres complètes de Charles Fourier. 12 vols. Edited by Simone Debout Oleszkiewicz. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966–1968. See especially vols. 1, 4, 6, and 8.

Wilson, Bee. “Charles Fourier and the Phalansterian Banquet.” In The Meal: The Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery 2001, edited by Harlan Walker, pp. 255–264. Totnes, U.K.: Prospect, 2002.

Jane Levi

France became one of the first countries to explore the possibilities of sugar when cheap supplies came flooding in from the Caribbean and South America at the start of the seventeenth century. French patissiers became the acknowledged masters of the art of cooking with sugar, taking over from the Italians. Le pastissier françois, published in Paris in 1653, was the first European cookbook devoted to pastry, clearly written by a pastry cook though the author is unknown. By midcentury a whole table at a banquet might be devoted to sweets, which also developed as a separate course to end the meal. The word “dessert” itself is derived from the French desservir, meaning to “clear the table of dishes” from the previous course. See dessert. It was in France that sugar specialties first emerged from the more day-to-day work of the patissier: glaces (sorbets and ice cream), confiserie (candies and petits fours), and travail au sucre (sugar sculpting), with a subspecialty in chocolaterie (chocolate work). Boulangers (bakers) had long plied their métier independently, baking in the four banal (communal oven) the wheaten loaves that were the staple food of the nation.

Following this lead over the centuries, a distinguished line of French pastry cooks developed. In 1751 Le cannameliste français appeared, a definitive guide to sugar work by Joseph Gilliers, head of the cold kitchen for Stanislaus, duke of Lorraine. See gilliers, joseph. Early in the nineteenth century Marie-Antoine Carême created staggering architectural fantasies in sugar that he describes in Le pâtissier pittoresque (1815). See carême, marie-antoine and sugar sculpture. That same year he cooked for the French Prince Talleyrand (a gourmet of renown) at the Congress of Vienna, as well as Tsar Alexander I when he visited France, before moving on to become chef to the British prince regent. Other important names include William Jarrin and Alphonse Gouffé, pastry chef to Queen Victoria. See jarrin, william alexis. Today, French patisserie is global, led by pastry chefs such as the Lenôtre family, Pierre Hermé, and the Ladurée group, famous for their macarons. See hermé, pierre; lenôtre, gaston; and macarons.

Already in Le pastissier françois, the structure of classic French patisserie can be seen; here are the gâteaux and cakes, the genoises and biscuits, with the crème pâtissière (pastry cream) and crème au beurre (buttercream) to fill them. Pastries include choux and puff, immediately recognizable as the recipes we use today. Most obvious to any visitor to France are the classic French gâteaux, sometimes baked at home but most often bought in the patisserie for Sunday lunch or a birthday. Most popular is génoise, a simple sponge of whole eggs, sugar, and flour, sometimes butter too, cooked in a characteristic moule à manqué with sloping sides. See cake and sponge cake. Character is added to génoise with fillings of pastry or buttercream, with perhaps a sprinkling of rum or kirsch syrup on the cake itself. Favorite flavorings include coffee (gâteau moka), chocolate, orange (gâteau Grand Marnier), and berries such as raspberry and strawberry.

France has been known for the skill of its patissiers, or pastry chefs, since the seventeenth century. This etching by Abraham Bosse, titled Pastry Shop, depicts the activities that take place within, from rolling out dough to shaping and baking it. The verses explain that “This shop has delicacies / That charm in a thousand ways / Girls and little boys / Servants and wet nurses.”metropolitan museum of art, harris brisbane dick fund, 1926.

Biscuit is also a sponge, in which the eggs are separated and the whites whisked with some of the sugar so the finished cake is lighter and drier. The most famous is made in Savoy, perhaps because of its airy mountain location. Genoise or biscuit dough is spread on a lined baking sheet and lightly baked for a gâteau roulé (rolled cake). The filling should contrast with the sponge, with whipped cream and strawberries or red jam for a vanilla roll, or a pale filling for chocolate. Timelessly popular is quatre quarts (four quarters), the French name for pound cake, normally baked as a loaf to serve plain or with a thin lemon or orange icing. See pound cake.

French artistic talent is further sparked by the versatile fluff of meringue. See meringue. Plain meringues may be sandwiched with ice cream or coated in chocolate. For an architectural dessert, bars of baked meringue are mounted with more raw meringue and baked again to form vacherins, large or small baskets for filling with fruits and whipped cream. See vacherin. When ground almonds or toasted hazelnuts are folded into meringue and then baked in rounds, a whole series of meltingly rich gâteaux are created. Gâteau succès is sandwiched with praline cream, whereas gâteau turquois contains chocolate mousse. Most common are large or individual gâteaux Dacquoises (coming from the town of Dax) with various fillings, topped with a snowy dusting of confectioner’s sugar. See dacquoise.

These cakes follow fashion, so that at the time of the French Restoration, the elegant table would be dominated by towering meter-high architectural temples and follies covered in fondant icing or pastillage in brilliant colors. See fondant and pastillage. By the turn of the nineteenth century and Escoffier, such grand gâteaux had diminished, but traces linger in gâteau opéra, a lavish layered confection of almond sponge cake, chocolate ganache, and coffee buttercream, topped with fondant icing that is still the challenge for advanced pastry students around the world. Gâteaux today are far simpler. “Cake,” for example, is a sweet loaf flavored with combinations of coconut, hazelnuts, candied fruits, or chocolate. Chocolate mousse may be used to fill a chocolate cake, or a genoise sponge may be sandwiched simply with whipped cream and poached fruit. However, the building blocks remain the same—genoise, buttercream, pastry cream, and fondant icing are found all over the world and still convey a whiff of France.

Another family of French cakes and pastries has developed using puff pastry (pâte feuilletée), beloved for its buttery flavor and malleable, flaky layers that expand like magic into heart-shaped palmiers (shaped like a palm leaf, sometimes called “elephants’ ears”), papillons (butterflies), or langues de boeuf (cows’ tongues) glazed with sugar. See pastry, puff. Puff pastry will rise high to form puits d’amour (wells of love) filled with strawberry jam or red currant jelly. Jalousies (jealousies) can be large or small, made of bands of puff pastry filled with jam or apple purée and slashed so they resemble a window shutter (through which an illicit lover can be detected). Most famously, puff pastry is thinly rolled for mille-feuille (a thousand leaves), in the United States sometimes called a “Napoleon.” Traditional mille-feuille is stacked with whipped cream, sometimes with pastry cream, often with berries, and topped with fondant or a caramel glaze; a modern deconstructionist version comes with filling and decoration scattered on the plate topped by shards of pastry pointing to the sky.

Choux pastry (pâte à choux) is another pillar of the French pastry repertoire. See pastry, choux. Choux contains a high proportion of eggs and thus bakes to form crispy containers for fillings such as whipped cream, pastry cream, ice creams, and sorbet. Among the most famous of all French sweets are profiteroles, small balls of choux split and filled with vanilla ice cream and topped with hot chocolate sauce, and éclairs, bar-shaped pastries of choux with a piped filling of pastry cream—traditionally vanilla, coffee, or chocolate with contemporary variants running to mango, pomegranate, passion fruit, and more—topped with an icing of the same or a contrasting flavor. Choux pastry is the basis of timeless gâteaux such as gâteau Paris-Brest, a wheel overflowing with praline pastry cream and named for the Paris-Brest bicycle race that passed the door of the enterprising patissier who invented the cake. Gâteau St. Honoré is more elaborate, a wall of choux puffs stuck with caramel on a round of sweet pastry, encircling a mound of praline pastry cream lightened with whipped egg whites. The cream is named for St. Honoré, patron of pastry cooks and bakers.

In any French pastry shop window, small choux pastries play a part in the spread of petits gâteaux (little cakes). See small cakes. Mini-gâteaux Paris-Brest and religieuses (nuns) with robes created from éclairs catch the eye, as do cygnes chantilly, choux pastry swans with wings and a graceful neck, filled with a froth of whipped Chantilly cream. They may be flanked by sablés (butter cookies), the trendy ones flavored with herbs, and lunettes (spectacles) sandwiched with jam visible through two holes to resemble eyes. See sablé. Almond-based cakes, called financiers as they are so rich, are baked in rectangular molds to resemble gold bars. Yet others are called visitandines, a reminder that such treats were for visitors, often a specialty of nuns. Nearby will be biscuits à la cuillère (ladyfingers) and madeleines, often flavored with honey. See madeleine. A recent American invasion of chocolate chip cookies and brownies has scarcely changed the scene.

France is the home of petits fours, a term that first appeared in Pastissier françois in 1653 and referred to the little ovens that had recently been invented, designed for baking miniature versions of almond cakes, puff pastries, and small cookies. These dry little cakes are often sold in bulk for nibbling at home, the nearest thing to cookies for the American cookie jar. In restaurants, a plate of petits fours covers a far wider range, including tiny sugar-glazed fours of almond paste; mini quatre quarts pound cakes; vanilla-tinged palets de dames, literally “ladies’ palettes”; skinny, brown-edged langues de chat (cats’ tongues); and baby madeleines. Recently, little macarons have appeared everywhere in a dozen flavors and colors, sandwiched with a further dozen fillings. Pastry chef Pierre Hermé created a rose macaron filled with rose cream, studded with lychees and raspberries, and topped with a red rose petal and called it Ispahan. There are now Ispahan croissants, gâteaux, ice cream, fruit jellies, jams, and even Ispahan yogurt.

Choice on the petits fours plate is widened by chocolate, whether as crisp, gold-flecked slivers or soft-centered truffles. See bonbons; chocolate, luxury; and truffles. Almost unique to dinner-table offerings are fruits glacés, fresh fruits glazed with caramel, a treat that dissolves all too quickly in moist air. Cherries are favorites, with their protective skin and stems ready-made for dipping in the scalding sugar syrup; grapes are good, too. Strawberries can be glazed, but the caramel is fragile on the juicy fruit, making melted chocolate a better alternative. Candied fruits, whole fruits preserved and glazed in baths of sugar syrup, have been sidelined in recent times. See candied fruit. However, at Christmas boxes of candied orange slices, greengage plums and apricots, rings of pineapple, and tiny white pears appear, glowing in neon colors. A stiff espresso is the best antidote to the sugar high the fruits deliver. Fruit jellies are an alternative, made from the pulp of tart fruits such as red and black currants, apples, or quince, cut in squares and arranged like a checkerboard. Marrons glacés, whole candied chestnuts, are an art in themselves. All come in coffrets, giant boxes designed for gifts. See chestnuts.

The French love of sugar flourishes in festive sweets, particularly at Christmas. The season opens with bûche de Noël, a Christmas log created in rolled sponge and coffee or chocolate buttercream, coated in “bark” of more cream. See bûche de noël. Some logs have mushrooms of meringues sprouting from the sides, with branches and even an elf perched on top. Epiphany, the end of the feasting season on 6 January, is honored with a galette des rois (Kings’ cake), of puff pastry enclosing a slim layer of almond paste. Hidden inside is the fève, once a simple dried kidney bean, but now a tiny china figurine of anything from a goose to a shepherdess to baby Jesus. Whoever wins the bean in his slice is king of the feast for the day. See twelfth night cake.

Christmas is the time for pain d’épices (spice bread), particularly in Burgundy and Alsace, where sheets of spice bread are fashioned into gingerbread houses complete with snowy gardens, tiled roofs, and Santa clinging to the chimney, all in sugar. Loaves of spice bread come with flavorings of candied orange or chocolate, and gingerbread men hang on the tree. See gingerbread. French christenings, first communions, and sometimes just a birthday are marked with dragées, sugar-coated almonds in a rainbow of colors, pink or blue for the babies, with more sophisticated earth or pastel tones for grownups; each guest receives a little bag to take home. For a wedding, croquembouche is de rigueur, a spire of choux puffs filled with pastry cream and held in place with caramel glaze. The tower may be 3 feet or more high and calls for an expert hand, particularly with the festoons of white royal icing and dark chocolate cutouts that adorn the whole gâteau. See croquembouche.

When do the French eat all these luscious cakes and pastries? The grander patisseries have a salon de thé, a space dedicated to cups of tea, coffee, and a pastry selected from the display in the main shop. See salon de thé. Ladies drop by for a morning pick-me-up or an afternoon of gossip with friends. A pastry is the reward for an obedient child on the way home from school. A tray of pastries, or more likely a whole gâteau, may be taken home to end Sunday lunch or dinner with friends. Sometimes a pastry is offered at the end of lunch or dinner in a restaurant, though dessert is the norm.

Many classic French desserts have a domestic touch, such as the custard sauce crème anglaise based on milk and eggs for serving with puddings or fruit compote. See custard. The childhood favorite île flottante is an island of poached or baked meringue floating in a sea of custard and topped with a trail of caramel; oeufs à la neige (snow eggs) are a smaller version. When set with gelatin, crème anglaise becomes a party dessert as bavarois (a creamy mold). See desserts, chilled and gelatin. Custard turns into crème caramel or flan when baked in a mold lined with caramel. See flan (pudím). If the custard is made with cream instead of milk, left to set, and topped with caramelized sugar, it sets to a tantalizingly crisp crème brûlée (burned sugar). Credit for its invention is claimed by both Christchurch College in Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge, though the first mention seems to have occurred in the French chef François Massialot’s Cuisinier roial et bourgeois (1691). See crème brûlée.

The favorite French family dessert must surely be chocolate mousse. The word for a frothy mixture, a mousse, is French, too. See mousse. The froth is most often provided by eggs, egg whites, or whipped cream, all mild ingredients that need the punch of chocolate, praline, caramel, or an acidic fruit such as raspberry, apricot, orange, or lemon. The same flavorings are popular also in soufflés, or uplift may be supplied by alcohol such as Grand Marnier or the gold-flecked Danziger Goldwasser that inspires Soufflé Rothschild. See soufflé. Soufflés may be hot, when they rise in the oven to the characteristic puffed shape, or molded as a cold or frozen soufflé with a collar that is discarded after the mixture has set. See desserts, frozen. Even simpler is an omelette soufflée, in which the egg whites and egg yolks are divided, whisked with sugar, folded, and quickly fried in a bit of butter until puffy.

The most common dessert sauce is crème anglaise flavored with vanilla, coffee, or chocolate, or an herb such as mint or basil. See sauce. When eggs are left whole and whisked with sugar and sweet wine, sauce sabayon results, in France never served alone but poured over a slice of sponge cake or berries, then browned as a gratin de fruits. Sweet sauces of fruit almost always focus on berries, like Sauce Melba of puréed raspberries with a splash of kirsch, the renowned partner of poached peaches with vanilla ice cream. As far as fruit soups are concerned, the French seem to prefer their melon or berries left whole rather than liquid, but a few refreshing combinations such as chilled soupe de cerises noires au vin rouge (soup of black cherries in red wine) do appear sometimes. Equally unusual in France today are shimmering jellies molded with gelatin, isinglass, or carageen moss. Small portions sometimes appear on the tasting plates of modernist chefs, so perhaps the magnificent molded jellies shown in early photographs will one day return.

Puddings in France are rarely labeled as such. A bread pudding, for instance, would be called by its own name, such as charlotte aux pommes (apple purée baked in a mold lined with slices of buttered bread), or pain perdu, literally “lost bread” or French toast in the United States—slices of bread soaked in egg custard and fried until caramelized. See charlotte. Bread may be disguised as a pouding soufflé thickened with breadcrumbs, or a grander version flavored with raisins and candied fruit and baked in a little timbale as pouding diplomate. Pouding de riz is just that, rice pudding often enriched with cream. When cold, rice pudding may be set with gelatin, topped with poached fruits, and presented grandly as Riz Condé, named for a royal prince. Floppy, adaptable crêpes are the foundation of several French desserts, whether folded around poached fruit, rolled with a layer of chocolate sauce, or filled and baked with a fluffy soufflé mixture, or most famously spread with orange butter and flambéed with Grand Marnier as Crêpes Suzette (said to be the lady friend of the future King Edward VII).

For a fruit dessert in warm weather, seasonal fruits are macerated in a light sugar syrup, with a squeeze of lemon juice or a measure of white wine. Red wine is used to soak strawberries or sliced fresh peaches, particularly along the Loire where the dish is called chicolle. An eye-catching alternative is to caramelize sliced fresh fruits in butter and sugar, then flambé them with a generous dash of cognac. On a chilly autumn day, what could be wrong with a compote of poached apples or plums, or spiced pears in red wine? Winter oranges may be peeled, sliced, moistened with red wine, and sprinkled with crushed caramel. Just a few fruits—sliced apples or banana, rings of fresh pineapple, and small, firm strawberries—can be dipped in batter and deep-fried. And who could forget the French beignets soufflés, freshly fried fritters of choux pastry topped with sugar or melted jam and known universally as pets de nonne (nun’s farts)?

Breaking new ground, many modern desserts cut down on the sugar in traditional recipes with variations such as mustard ice cream, or a purée of pears with parsley-root cream. The popularity of beetroot, an ingredient that is neither sweet nor savory, seems here to stay. Caramel sauce and chocolate candies are sparked with sea salt, while the chocolate itself is dark and intense rather than sweet. At the same time, sugar is straying into the rest of the meal, more as a condiment than a main ingredient. Several Paris restaurants offer savory-sweet courses (often as appetizers) such as a purple potato purée with raw and poached apples topped with a marjoram granité, both salty and sweet.

In any French patisserie, the in-house tartes aux fruits are a matter of pride. The simplest consist of a shell of sweet pie pastry filled with a single fruit, be it strawberries, raspberries, or peaches, and lightly glazed with red currant or apricot jam to pick up color and keep the fruit fresh. Often an underlayer of pastry cream adds richness and protects the pastry, particularly from a juicy fruit such as pear. Mixed fruit tarts always catch the eye with contrasting circles of red berries, red or green grapes, sliced oranges, banana, or kiwi. Many fruits are cooked in the pastry shell: pitted apricots or plums are arranged cut side upward, so the juice evaporates in the heat of the oven; thinly sliced pear halves may be set on a filling of almond paste or chopped chocolate, and baked to resemble the petals of a giant flower. Almost any fruit can be put to use in a tart—mango, quince, cherries, or lemon (often thickened to a curd with egg yolks and sugar). Apples are the most versatile filling of all, sliced, diced, or puréed.

In all these tarts, the fruits themselves are the decoration. A double-crust, covered tart is rare in France and is likely to be called a tourte, which is deeper and more substantial than a tarte. A galette, meaning a large, shallow round of pastry, can also be topped with fruit, as in the flaky tarte aux pommes légère (light apple tart) of puff pastry completely covered with thin slices of apple. See galette and tart. Small tartelettes aux fruits follow the open-face lead of larger tarts, particularly with berries, presented perhaps as barquettes (shaped like a boat). Tartlettes may hold a lemon curd filling, or almond frangipane, or a mixture of walnuts and caramel in regions with walnut trees. See frangipane. In winter, chaussons (turnovers, literally “socks”) are on display, particularly stuffed with apple or prune. A filling of fresh cheese in a dessert tart is a comparative rarity in France, found mainly in country districts where the milk is ultra-fresh.

French cooks are famous for living off the land, and nowhere is this clearer than in regional sweets. Brittany, for example is famous for its crêpes, particularly when made with buckwheat flour—buckwheat grows more easily than wheat in the thin Breton soil. For a quick snack, sweet crêpes may be simply sprinkled with sugar, spread with jam or melted chocolate, or moistened with rum or Grand Marnier. Far Breton is a batter pudding with prunes, cousin to the more famous clafoutis Limousin from central France, made with sour cherries (many a tooth has been broken on the pits). Other Breton desserts make the best of the excellent butter: Gâteau Breton, for instance, is the richest imaginable shortbread; Breton sablés (butter cookies) are scarcely less rich; whereas kouign-aman consists of croissant dough, rolled and folded with sugar to bake flat in succulent, flaky squares. Normandy, to the east of Brittany, is apple country, fertile ground for tartes aux pommes and the occasional apple dumpling (douillon).

Over to the north and east in Picardy and Champagne, the windswept land of sugar beets, sugar takes over in waffles and tarte au sucre, a yeast cake topped with butter and sugar, almost a sweet pizza. The region abounds in sugar candies with names such as the bêtises (mistakes) of Cambrai and the abeilles (honey bees) of Nancy. Bordering Germany, Lorraine is the ancestral home of madeleines and baba au rhum, while the cooks of Alsace are famous for their fruit tarts, just a little richer—topped with a cream and egg custard—and heavier—often using a yeast dough—than in the rest of France. See baba au rhum. The Alsatian orchards running down the Rhine are the foundation of plum, raspberry, and pear liqueurs and white alcohols, as well as fruits du vieux garçon (bachelor’s fruits) preserved in kirsch. The local jams and jellies are outstanding.

Three very different regions grow most of the nuts in France. See nuts. The foothills of the Alps around Grenoble shelter groves of walnut trees for walnut cakes, tartlet fillings, and liqueurs. Further to the west across the Rhône rise the mountains of the Ardèche, home of almost all the edible chestnuts in France; less versatile than walnuts, most chestnuts end up candied or reduced to a sugared purée. The Rhône valley itself is lined with almond trees, the basis of so many classic gâteaux as well as nougat from Montélimar and calissons, almond-paste candies from Aix, the Provençal capital. See nougat. There, in the Mediterranean sun, desserts yield to fresh fruits, starting with the melons of late spring and ending with the figs of fall. To fill gaps in supply during the cold months, almost every possible fruit is candied, a specialty of the hill town of Apt.

Running along the coast to the Pyrenees, fresh fruits also dominate, backed up by the occasional fruit tart, particularly flavored with lemon. In Languedoc, the local favorite crème catalane has a hint of Arab spice beneath a crisp caramel topping, in effect a crème brûlée. All across the south, deep-fried sweet pastries are common, from the twisted pastry bugnes of Arles to the oreillettes (little ears) of Toulouse, known as merveilles (wonders) in Bordeaux. Another Bordelais specialty, cannelés, chewy little cakes baked in fluted copper molds, are remarkably hard to concoct unless you know how (the batter must be cooked until it curdles and looks a horrible failure, redeemed by whisking in flour once the mess has cooled). See cannelé.

Just occasionally in France do sweet oddities turn up, particularly in the countryside. One example is Mont Blanc, a sugary mountain of meringue, whipped cream, and chestnut purée, particularly popular in autumn. Petits pâtés de Pézénas from Languedoc, small pies shaped like mushrooms and filled with ground lamb and suet lavishly sweetened with sugar, hark back to medieval times. Feuilleté Gascon must be of Arab origin, a round galette of paper-thin dough layered with walnut or olive oil, a few slivers of apple or chopped walnut, and a sprinkling of Armagnac. Burgundian tartouillats are little cherry tartlets baked not in pastry but in a cabbage leaf. The famous Tarte Tatin is a curiosity in which apples are caramelized in butter and sugar in a deep pan, then baked with a pastry topping. When turned out, the mahogany-brown caramel gleams invitingly on the chunks of apple. Two sisters, the story goes, were left penniless by their father and turned to baking his favorite apple tart for travelers to the local railroad junction in Lamotte-Beuvron (Orléanais). See tarte tatin.

So many French sweets—mille-feuille, crêpes, crème caramel, chocolate mousse, Tarte Tatin—are now household names worldwide, a reflection of the ingenuity and manual dexterity of pastry cooks at home and in the professional kitchen. Long may such inspiration last!

Carême, Antonin. Le pâtissier pittoresque. Paris: De l’Imprimerie de F. Didot, 1815.

Gilliers, Joseph. Le cannameliste français. Nancy: De l’Imprimerie d’Abel-Denis Cusson, 1751.

Hermé, Pierre. PH 10: Pâtisserie de Pierre Hermé. Paris: A. Viénot, 2005.

La Varenne, Francṃois Pierre de. Le pastissier françois. Paris: Chez Jean Gaillard, 1653.

Massialot, François. Nouveau cuisinier royal et bourgeois. Paris, 1691.

Anne Willan

frangipane refers to an almond-flavored pastry cream used to garnish cakes and to fill pastries and tarts of all kinds. An abundance of recipes demonstrates that any number of aromatics besides almonds can flavor the pastry cream (flour, butter, sugar, milk, whole eggs, egg yolks, and salt); Prosper Montagné’s Larousse gastronomique (1938) does not even mention almonds. However, Ali-Bab’s Gastronomie pratique (1928) distinguishes between basic pastry cream made with egg yolks and vanilla, and frangipane cream made with whole eggs, additional yolks, and crushed macarons. See macarons.

The name “frangipane” comes from the flowering tropical plant Plumeria rubra (also called Frangipani), an extract of which French glove makers had used to perfume their goods since the sixteenth century. According to Alexandre Dumas’s Grand dictionnaire de cuisine (1873), this perfume was also used in pastry cream. In La Varenne’s Le cuisinier françois (1651), tourte de franchipanne is a pistachio- and almond-flavored cream-filled tart. A second tourte de franchipanne for a fast day instructs the cook to “take the most beautiful flower that you can find” and soak it in egg whites. La Varenne calls for adding “flower water” to the mixture without further specifying which type to use, but presumably it is the same flower. See flower waters. Since François Menon’s La cuisinière bourgeoise (1760) recommends flavoring Crême à la Franchipane with orange flowers that have been grilled and chopped, the Frangipani flowers may have been used in the same fashion.

Since at least the nineteenth century, flavorings have included vanilla, crushed macarons, orange flower water, chopped pistachios (or mixtures of these ingredients), raspberries, and strawberries. Although Frangipani flowers are used today in salads and sweets on occasion, they do not seem to be trendy with professional bakers.

Unleavened Dough

The simplest type of fried dough is produced by frying unleavened dough. A Chinese example of this technique is jian dui, deep-fried sesame-seed-covered balls of glutinous rice flour that gain a hollow interior from the dough’s expansion. A rather different form of unleavened fried dough is made by thinly rolling out a relatively stiff dough and cutting it into strips or other shapes. These strips can be folded, braided, or even formed into loose balls, as in the case of Schneebälle (“snowballs”) from Rothenburg, Germany. Once fried, the dough can be sweetened by dusting with powdered sugar or dipping in honey or syrup. There are many regional names for this type of fried dough, including pestiños in Andalusia, cenci in Italy, merveilles in Southwest France, origliettas in Sardinia, and boží milosti in the Czech Republic. Modern recipes for fried dough strips can include chemical leavening agents. See chemical leaveners. Though the addition of a leavening agent is not strictly required, it will produce a lighter product with an open texture, such as Latin American sopaipillas and Slovak fánky.

Leavened Dough

When unrolled leavened dough is fried, the action of yeast or of chemical leavening agents produces a product with a characteristically porous interior and a crisp or soft outer surface, depending on the specific recipe. Traditionally prepared for particular festivals or celebrations, fried leavened dough is also commonly sold commercially, the doughnut being the most prominent example. See doughnuts. One variation of fried leavened dough takes the form of large sheets or disks, variously called in North American “fried dough,” “elephant ears,” “beaver tails,” or “flying saucers.” These treats are frequently sold at festivals and fairs. Variations on this style of fried dough are served with either savory or sweet toppings, as in the case of Native American frybread and Hungarian lángos; or they can be eaten with sweet toppings exclusively, as is Bulgarian mekitsa. Many examples of smaller fried leavened dough products abound. In English-speaking countries they are often collectively described as “doughnuts,” but this very large group of fried doughs includes loukoumades from Greece, South African koeksister, Mongolian boortsog, Japanese sata andagi, German Krapfen, oliebollen from the Netherlands, Indian balushai, and Lebanese awwamaat.

Hot-Water Dough

The final group of fried dough products is made from hot-water dough, produced by the addition of flour to a hot liquid, most often water and a fat. This type of fried dough is not as widely distributed as products made from leavened or unleavened dough. Nonetheless, recipes are described in the fifth-century collection of Apicius, indicating that this is an ancient method of making fried dough. Hot-water dough can be either a simple flour paste or enriched by the addition of eggs and butter to form a choux-type dough, as in the case of Italian zeppole di San Giuseppe, certain French beignets, and pets de nonne. Because these doughs are very wet, when they are fried, the outside of the dough forms a hard shell before the interior sets, resulting in a crisp-shelled, open-textured pastry that has given rise to such names as the Spanish buñuelos de viento (“wind doughnuts”). Fried hot-water dough products were common in European texts from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when recipes often called for extruding the wet and sticky dough from a culinary syringe to produce long, thin “syringe fritters.” Modern examples of syringed hot-water-dough fritters are Portuguese farturas, Spanish and Mexican churros, and Turkish tulumba.

See also fairs; festivals; holiday sweets; india; and pastry, choux.

Grocock, Christopher, and Sally Grainger. Apicius. Totnes, U.K.: Prospect, 2006.

Scully, Terrence. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Adam Balic

Frisbie pie tins, made by the Frisbie Pie Company, were the inspiration for a popular American flying toy.

William Russell Frisbie launched his career by managing the Bridgeport branch of the Olds Baking Company of New Haven, Connecticut. In 1871 Frisbee purchased the shop and renamed it the Frisbie Pie Company. Frisbie assumed executive and marketing roles, his sister Susan baked, and his wife Marian Rose managed the plant. Although pies were the family specialty, Frisbie also sold a variety of standard baked goods. As time progressed, Frisbie’s fame grew. Pie wagons supplied grocery stores, restaurants, and lunch rooms throughout southern New England. Advertisements published in the Bridgeport Telegram (Connecticut) proclaimed, “Frisbie’s is the favorite pie with thousands.” Pies of two sizes, but no specific flavors, were described as delicious, pure, juicy, and flaky crusted.

Frisbie’s pies were sold in tin plates with his name imprinted in bold letters on the base. Customers paid a nickel deposit per plate, which was refunded upon return. College students were reportedly avid consumers of Frisbie’s pies. They elevated the common pie tin to an athletic challenge in the 1920s and 1930s. Who threw the first Frisbie pie plate and when? History did not record the circumstances surrounding this event. Several universities and colleges claim the distinction, among them Yale (Connecticut), Middlebury (Vermont), and Harvard (Massachusetts).

Walter Frederick Morrison, a West Coast inventor familiar with Frisbie’s flying pie tins, began to experiment with plastic prototypes in the late 1940s. Morrison perfected the aerodynamics and capitalized on the then-current flying saucer fad. Morrison’s Flyin’ Saucer (1948) morphed into Wham-O’s Pluto Platter (1951). Wham-O introduced the Frisbee novelty flying disc to the American public on 17 June 1957.

The returnable pie tins manufactured by Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Frisbie Pie Company inspired the flying discs called frisbees that have since become classic pieces of American sports equipment.

The Frisbee Pie Company disbanded in 1958. Table Talk Pies (Worcester, Massachusetts) purchased the rights to Frisbie’s trademark but, as of 2013, no longer manufactures items with that name.

Stancil E. D., and M. D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975.

Lynne M. Olver

fritters, like the closely related fried dough and doughnuts, are a fried food preparation; the English word “fritter” derives from Old French friture, meaning “something fried.” Although considerable overlap exists among these categories, in general, fritters are distinguished from other fried foods because they are made from batter rather than dough.

Globally, there are several common fritter-making techniques: using batter to encase fruit, molding fritters with a fritter iron, and pouring batter directly into hot oil. In Europe sliced apples encased in batter are common in historic texts and remain one of the most prevalent fruit fritters. Fresh stone fruits, dried prunes, pineapple, and banana are also popular fruit fritters. In Asia banana or plantain fritters are very widely distributed. They are made either by coating the banana in batter (called kluay kaek in Thailand, pisang goreng in Malaysia and Indonesia, and pazham pori/ ethakka appam in Kerala) or by mashing ripe banana to use as the basis of the fritter batter itself (kolar pitha in Bangladesh and kolar bora in Bengal).

Fritters made using metal molds or irons may be found in many cultures and are often referred to in historic European texts. See cooking irons. Mold designs can be figurative or stylized. In the former case, they were once made in the form of coats of arms or animals and were used to garnish high-status dishes. Modern fritter irons are made in the shape of grids, stars, hearts, spirals, or flowers, and they often have evocative names. The fritters are known as rosetbakkelser (rosettes) in Norway, struvor in Sweden, and dok jok in Thailand. Turkey has demir tatlisi (iron pudding), Tunisia chebbak el-janna (windows of paradise), and Kerala achappam. Afghani fritters are called kulcha-e-panjerei (window biscuits); in Indonesia they are known as kembang goyang (swaying flowers).

The final class of fritter is made by pouring batter into hot oil. It can simply be dripped from the fingertips or from a spoon, or poured from a specialized utensil. In the tenth-century Baghdadi cookery book Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, the batter for zulābiyā mushabbaka (latticed fritters) is poured through a hole in a coconut shell, whereas the sixteenth-century German recipe collection of Sabina Welserin calls for using a funnel to make strauben. See zalabiya. Strauben are still a specialty of southern Germany, Austria, and South Tyrol and are likely the source for funnel cake, a popular carnival food in North America. See fairs. By far the most widely distributed of the poured fritters are jalebi (as they are called in South Asia), a sweet food enjoyed in both Muslim and Hindu communities in the Indian subcontinent and throughout the Middle East as well as North and East Africa. They are a very popular sweet food during both secular and religious events, especially Ramadan and Diwali. See diwali and ramadan. The batter for these fritters is poured into hot oil in the form of spirals or roughly circular shapes. After frying, the jalebi are soaked in sugar syrup and then drained. This preparation gives them a crisp texture and a syrup-rich interior.

Işın, Mary. Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012.

Krondl, Michael. The Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.

Adam Balic

frosting

See icing.

fructose, also called fruit sugar or levulose, is a monosaccharide. It is most commonly found in fruit (particularly apples, cantaloupes, pears, pomegranates, watermelon, and berries), but also occurs in animal tissues, tree saps (maple syrup), vegetables, and honey. Fructose is the sweetest sugar found in nature, about 1.7 times sweeter than glucose. See glucose.

When chemically combined with glucose, fructose forms sucrose, or common table sugar, a disaccharide that consists of 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. See sugar. During metabolism, fructose is broken down and converted into glucose, which is used for energy or stored as fat. Unlike glucose, which is metabolized widely in the body, fructose is mainly metabolized in the liver.

For the past 40 years, commercial fructose has been produced by converting cornstarch into glucose, and then into fructose. The resulting product, called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), averages about 55 to 60 percent fructose, with the remainder being glucose. See corn syrup. As HFCS is sweeter than table sugar, it is widely used in food manufacture, particularly in the soda industry but also in many commercial foods, including breads and other baked goods, candies, and fruit drinks.

Fructose has been part of the human diet for thousands of years, but recently the amount of fructose consumed has soared—as has the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndrome (a group of risk factors that predict heart disease and Type 2 diabetes). Some researchers have proposed that the intake of excessive fructose as a free monosaccharide may have adverse health consequences, but to date, the evidence for deleterious effects is inconclusive.

See also honey; maple syrup; sap; starch; and sugar and health.

Kalamaras, Paula M., and Paul T. Kraly. Sugar and Sweeteners: Trends and Developments in Foods and Beverages. Norwalk, Conn.: Business Communications, 2003.

Murphy, Suzanne P. “The State of the Science on Dietary Sweeteners Containing Fructose: Summary and Issues to Be Resolved.” Journal of Nutrition 139 (June 2009): 1269S–1270S.

Andrew F. Smith

fruit has long been appreciated as a source of sweetness. Sweetness in fruit, a primary indicator of ripeness, guarantees digestibility in those wild-gathered foodstuffs on which our ancestors depended. “The Cree Indians of Canada,” observed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1977), “believed that the Creator told humans that the first berries to be picked had to be boiled. Then the bowl had to be held first towards the sun, who was asked to ripen the berries, then towards the thunder who was asked for rain, and finally towards the earth, who was asked to bring forth her fruits.”

When and under what circumstances fruit is eaten raw rather than cooked is a matter of latitude and climate. In temperate and tropical regions blessed with year-round sunshine, fruit is traditionally eaten raw at any time of day rather than as part of a meal, a casual attitude derived from easy availability. In northern lands, however, where the growing season is short and ripeness uncertain, fruit is traditionally eaten cooked and served as an integral part of a meal—usually, though not always, at the conclusion. Fruit soups sweetened with sugar are eaten at the beginning or the end of a meal in Scandinavia and Russia, while in Germany, fruit dumplings and strudels may be served after a soup as the main dish in a traditional family meal. See dumplings; soup; and strudel.

From the limitations of climate, it seems, developed the northerner’s habit of serving sugar-sweetened fruit-based desserts, including ices and sorbets, as a pleasurable conclusion to both formal and informal meals. This is not so in more temperate climes, although times are changing. Food writer Diana Farr Louis, reporting on the traditional foodways of Crete, noted the surprise of Westerners at the total absence of fruit-based desserts in the island’s traditional menu: “For the Greeks and the Cretans, in particular, fruit is something that is eaten raw … but never, traditionally at any rate, encased in pastry or folded into a pudding” (2001).

Among northerners, sweetness in fruits is prized not only for pleasure but also as evidence of the triumph of man over nature, a costly business in Victorian Britain, when fashionable hostesses made reference to their husband’s affluence by “showing an epergne”—an ornate serving dish with an array of tropical fruits ripened to perfection in artificially heated greenhouses—on the table as a prelude to dessert and the serving of the cheese course. See epergnes. This habit persists to this day in the offering of a small bunch of grapes on formally presented cheese boards.

Sweetness in fruit is most easily perceived through scent. See olfaction. Sight may deceive, but the nose never lies when choosing, say, a peach or a melon—explaining, perhaps, the attraction of seemingly rotten fragrances such as that of durian, a scent unpalatable to those who did not accept it in childhood, and—though rather less obviously—the smell of bletted fruits like medlars. The attraction of the semi-rotted is also present in fermented fruit juices. Although alcohol is undeniably the main attraction, wine connoisseurs instinctively reach for ripe-fruit metaphors—peach, black currant, blackberry, cherry, pear—to describe the complexity of fragrance and flavor.

The desire for additional sweetness in fruit in its role as pleasure-giver—as well as the need to add shelf-life—is satisfied by the ancient process of preserving or candying in honey or sugar-syrup, and in the preparation of fruit leathers and fruit pastes. See candied fruit and fruit pastes. Fruits were preserved in honey in ancient China, India, throughout the Middle East, ancient Egypt, and classical Greece. In Europe, on the rise of the Roman Empire, sweetness in the form of preserved fruits became a metaphor for civilization and the virtues of the rule of law, a concept as much philosophical as practical. Their equivalent today—fruit drinks and fruit purées sold fresh, canned, or frozen, particularly those marketed as without additional sweetening—rely on the ancestral memory of goodness associated with sweetness, and are commonly sold as health-giving whether or not this is true.

Fruit as pleasure-giver has long been explored in paintings, poetry, and myth. When Eve offered Adam a bite of that rosy-cheeked apple—or golden quince, as biblical scholars suggest—temptation lay in the sharing of sweetness as a metaphor for desire. Quince preserves remain the traditional symbol of happiness at Mediterranean weddings. In portraiture, a bowl of cherries conveys desirability and a ripe strawberry is a token of love; figs and pomegranates split open to show the seeds deliver their own libidinous message. If sweetness makes fruits desirable, there must also be sharpness: no rose without a thorn. The palate rejects blandness even when attracted by sweetness. Naranjas de caña, sugarcane oranges—the fruits of decorative orange trees planted in Spanish courtyards—are unpleasantly bland even though the taste is overwhelming sweet. The same was true of Europe’s native wood strawberry, Fragaria vesca, considered of no interest to gardeners until the development of hybrids cross-bred with big-berried, sharp-flavored New World varieties from Chile and North America. Victorian gardeners and plantsmen, experts in crossbreeding, nurtured new varieties of native species and experimented with seeds from elsewhere, resulting in the spread of fruit families into regions they would never otherwise have reached.

From these hothouse beginnings grew consumer expectations of fresh fruit on demand all year, leading to the development of methods of cropping and conserving freshness suitable for long-distance transportation. The results, as the Cree nation would certainly recognize, do not always deliver on expectations. Sourness can be softened by the heat of the fire, but sweetness is the gift of the sun.

See also dessert; dried fruit; fruit preserves; ice cream; and sherbet.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Roast and the Boiled.” In The Anthropologists’ Cookbook, rev. ed., edited by Jessica Kuper, pp. 246. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Louis, Diana Farr. Feasting and Fasting in Crete. Athens, Greece: Kedros, 2001.

Roach, F. A. Cultivated Fruits of Britain. New York: Blackwell, 1985.

Wilson, Constance Ann. Food and Drink in Britain. London: Constable, 1973.

Elisabeth Luard

fruit desserts, baked, refers to a grouping of desserts made of fruit baked with some version of a crust. Occasionally referred to as “spoon pies,” the recipes are as much defined by their essential fruity nature as they are by their whimsical and often onomatopoeic names, which include “cobbler,” “crisp,” “crumble,” “buckle,” “betty,” and “pandowdy.” Their origins, along with their monikers, are universally murky. Some are closely associated with New England, indicating vague British derivations, but each has long passed into the collective American culinary lexicon.

With elements of folk tradition and unfussy informality, these desserts typically fall under the category of “country” or “rustic” recipes. Less exacting than pies or cakes and typically baked in pans and deep-set dishes, they double or triple easily to feed a crowd. Biscuit dough, breadcrumbs, free-form pie dough, or crunchy streusel largely comprise their toppings. See pie dough and streusel. All of them benefit from a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When pulled from the oven as the fruit bubbles and the buttery pastry turns golden, these baked fruit desserts are winningly straightforward—that is, until it comes to strictly classifying them. Their plainness and universality invite myriad interpretations, which can vary from state to state or even town to town. Cooks can be vehement in insisting that their familial or regional version is the only correct rendering. And confusion frequently sets in when variations are subtle: What, for instance, exactly differentiates a crisp from a crumble?

The following definitions of individual desserts address their basic forms, with commentary on widespread variations if applicable:

• Betty (or Brown Betty). A New England favorite, in which fruit is layered with breadcrumbs (often mixed with butter), or sometimes cubes of bread, before baking. Apple is the fruit most commonly associated with a betty, though chopped rhubarb or thinly sliced bananas also work well.

• Buckle. More akin to a coffee cake, a batter is poured over or among fruit, often with the addition of a streusel topping. The finished dessert looks collapsed, or “buckled.” Blueberry is the classic fruit for buckle; the berries stay handsomely suspended in the cake while maintaining their shape.

• Cobbler. No dessert in this group inspires as many broad interpretations. To many Americans, a cobbler is a deep-dish pie crowned with baking-powder biscuit dough (made with cream or buttermilk), which is often cut in circles or dropped by the spoonful atop fruit to give an appearance that is “cobbled together.” Like pie, the versatile format works with almost any fruit that grows in North America, alone or in combination. Some cooks from the southern United States have variations that they defend vehemently: to them a cobbler is a rectangular pie, cooked in a pan with a bottom and top crust. And barbecue restaurants (and some home cooks) across the South and in Texas adhere to a cobble variation that resembles a buckle, with a milk-based batter poured over the fruit before baking.

• Crisp and Crumble. These deep-dish pies crowned with streusel, rather than dough, are practically interchangeable. Semantics come into play over differences in the streusel ingredients: some cooks and food writers insist that crisps include oats (in addition to or in place of flour) along with butter, sugar, spices, and sometimes chopped nuts, whereas crumbles call solely for flour. Others say it is the other way around. In any case, the term “crisp” is more common in the United States; the British use the name “crumble” more frequently. The French, too, have also enthusiastically adopted “le crumble.”

• Pandowdy. A variant of the biscuit style of cobbler, except that the biscuit dough (often rolled out to form a solid covering over the fruit) is broken up during baking and pushed down into the fruit, allowing the juices to burble up and create a crisp, fruit-stained crust. The result is delicious but dowdy in appearance, hence the name.

• Slump (or Grunt). Solidly linked to New England, slumps and grunts resemble the biscuit approach to cobbler, except in this case the sweetened dough is often called a dumpling rather than a biscuit. These desserts are typically steamed atop the stove, though they may be finished in the oven for a few minutes to crisp their topping. The dumplings are said to grunt while steaming, and the final product certainly has a limp, or slumping, look.

• Sonker. The most obscure of the bunch is a soupy adaptation of cake-style cobbler particular to western North Carolina. Previously cooked fruit or sweet potato is baked with a flour–milk–sugar mixture the consistency of pancake batter.

Though they lack visual elegance, and popular recipes suggest vanilla extract and common spices like cinnamon and nutmeg as simple flavorings, imaginative cooks can elevate the aromas and tastes of these desserts to sophisticated heights. For example, in her book Nancy Silverton’s Pastries From the La Brea Bakery, Silverton, one of the country’s most accomplished pastry chefs, includes a chapter entitled “Cobblers, Crisps, and Crumbles.” In it she advocates specific use of seasonal fruit (apples and pears in the fall, strawberries and rhubarb in the spring, stone fruit like peaches and apricots as well as berries in the summer) and in several recipes outlines a luxurious twist: she simmers a vanilla pod and its seeds in butter until the mixture browns and gives off a nutty, toasty perfume, and then she pours this over the prepared fruit of the dessert before adding the topping.

Soft Pastes

Fruit Butter

Fruit butter is a thick but spreadable syrupy paste, usually made from sweet or sharp apples or pears. Made in tenth-century Arab kitchens from fruit pulp and honey vinegar, and in Victorian English kitchens using rum, today butters are best known in the Netherlands (appelstroop), Belgium (sirop de Liège for apple or birnenhonig for pear), Germany (Apfelkraut), Poland (powidło), and the United States (apple butter). The fruit is stewed with apple cider or vinegar for added sharpness and with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves. The strained fruit mixture is then cooked with sugar in a ratio of about 3 parts sugar to 1 part pulp until dark, thick, and creamy, and stored in jars. Usually a deep brownish black due to the long cooking and spices, it is eaten spread on bread or as an accompaniment to cooked meats, as well as being used as an ingredient in baking.

Fruit Jellies

The most yielding of the firmer fruit paste family, these jellies are nonetheless a quite different preparation from a light, fresh, gelatin-set dessert jelly. See gelatin desserts. Intensely fruity, jellied fruits or fruit jellies are soft yet firm sugar-covered sweets that keep for several months. In France, they are called pâtes de fruit; in Spain, dulce de fruta, often translated into English as Sephardi fruit paste. Pectin is a crucial element in the set of these jellies, so although they may be made in a multitude of fruit flavors (and therefore colors), they often contain apple purée as a thickener and to ensure the right texture and firmness. Two parts of puréed fruit or apple purée–thickened juice is cooked to 240°F (115°C) with one part sugar. Pectin is incorporated at a rate of up to three-quarters of a part, the mixture is returned to the boil, and lemon juice added to taste. The mixture is poured into prepared trays, sprinkled with granulated sugar, and left to set for a minimum of two hours before being turned to coat the other side with sugar. Once completely cooled, the jelly is cut into pieces—usually squares—and each one fully coated in granulated sugar. Fruit jellies keep for several months, at least. An alternative version may be set with agar instead of pectin. However, as a result of the protein content in agar, these jellies do not keep as long: weeks rather than months.

Medium to Firm Pastes

Fruit Cheese

Fruit cheese is a thick fruit paste, often set into a mold and presented as a shallow block for cutting, although it may also be set in a jar and either cut or spooned out. Commonly made with quince, apple, damson, gooseberry, or blackberry, fruit cheeses have a relatively high sugar content and an intense fruit flavor, and are usually eaten with hot or cold roasted meats, and sometimes with cheese. They are included in some of the earliest English recipe collections: in Delightes for Ladies (1609) Sir Hugh Plat gives a recipe for a version of plum or damson cheese that involves cooking the fruit to a pulp with rosewater or wine before finishing with sugar and molding. See plat, sir hugh. The basic method for preparing a standard fruit cheese is to chop the fruit and cook it to complete tenderness in a small amount of water, then push it through a sieve to make a smooth, thick pulp. This pulp is then combined with sugar in a ratio of 1 pint (600 milliliters) of pulp to 12–14 ounces (350–400 grams) of sugar. The mixture is gently heated and stirred until the sugar has dissolved, and then cooked, stirring frequently, for an extended period of up to an hour, until a channel is left in the paste when a spoon is drawn through it. Poured when hot into molds or shallow jars, fruit cheese sets firm when cool.

Quince Pastes

Quince pastes seem to have been known in most European cultures for many centuries, and quinces were stewed in honey for long keeping by the Romans in at least the fourth century c.e., and quite probably earlier. Medieval Arab confectioners developed the technique of stewing fruit pulp with refined sugar to make long-keeping pastes, and it is likely that the recipe arrived in Spain along with sugar in the twelfth century.

Cotignac is a version of pâte de coings, thick quince paste that originates in Orleans, France. It is molded in small, plain wooden boxes, or in large patterned molds that are sold as decorative blocks. This traditional delicacy was exported from France to England in the sixteenth century, where it was recorded with variable spellings, such as Sir Hugh Plat’s “Quidini of Quinces.”

Membrillo or dulce de membrillo is a very thick quince paste, perhaps the best known of this family of pastes, that takes its name from the Spanish word for quince. It is similar to fruit cheese and follows the same preparation method but generally contains more sugar—a 1 to 1 ratio of cooked fruit pulp to sugar—and requires even longer cooking. When the paste is done, the mixture not only holds a channel made with a spoon but also starts to come away from the sides of the pan. Membrillo is generally molded into rectangular blocks for slicing and is served with dairy cheeses, in particular Manchego, the Spanish ewe’s milk cheese. It keeps extremely well in a cool, dark place, for at least a year. It can also be refrigerated for even longer keeping, though it may become sticky after some time in the refrigerator.

Quittenkäse or Quittenpästli is a centuries-old German or Swiss quince paste very similar to the southern European versions, though it can be even thicker than the Spanish membrillo, and is often made slightly tart with lemon juice or lemon zest. It is made all over Eastern Europe, from Croatia (kotonjata) to Hungary (birsalmasajt). The Hungarian version sometimes contains whole walnuts or almonds, or its outside is sprinkled with chopped nuts, and may be seasoned with cinnamon or cloves.

Very Firm Pastes

Fruit Leather

Fruit leathers are very solid fruit pastes that have been cooked as usual for a paste and then additionally dried out, either in a low oven or in the sun, for longer keeping. These drier pulps have also been recorded over the centuries, and Delightes for Ladies gives instructions for a medicinally tart dry cherry pulp, cooked with no additional sugar, and made even more sour with lemon juice or verjuice according to taste. Contemporary leathers usually have a little added sugar or honey—perhaps 2 tablespoons to 500 milliliters of fruit pulp. The pulp is cooked until very thick and then spread out in thin layers on trays and dried in a cool oven.

See also fruit; fruit preserves; marmalade; middle east; persia; and spain.

Day, Ivan. “The Art of Confectionery.” http://www.historicfood.com/The%20Art%20of%20Confectionery.pdf (accessed 20 January 2014).

Greweling, Peter P. Chocolates and Confections: At Home with the Culinary Institute of America. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010.

Lal, Girdhari, G. S. Siddappa, and G. L. Tandon. Preservation of Fruits and Vegetables. New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1960.

Mason, Laura. Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets. Totnes, U.K.: Prospect, 2004.

Nasrallah, Nawal. Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2010.

Tate & Lyle Refineries Ltd. Home Economics Department. Sweet Success: The Tate & Lyle Cookbook. London: Sackett and Marshall, 1977.

Jane Levi

fruit preserves are an attempt to capture the magic of seasonal fruit and hold it in suspension for the months (or even years) to come. Sugar is the ingredient that offers the prospect of long keeping, and it is generally concentrated at around 60 percent in the jams, jellies, conserves, and syrup suspensions that make up the core members of this family. Shorter-keeping fruit preserves like compotes and curds may be less sweet. Almost all fruit preserves are cooked to a greater or lesser degree, both to kill microorganisms that might cause spoilage and to evaporate the right amount of water, depending on the texture and level of set desired. Uncooked fruit preserves keep for short periods of up to a week or depend on the presence of alcohol to preserve the fruit.

Preservation of whole and chopped fruits in honey is an ancient technique, recorded in Roman texts like Apicius. See ancient world. Citrus peels were salted for a day, then rinsed and conserved—as was done with dates or quinces—in boiled honey and spices; apples were stewed with honey and sometimes vinegar to make a thick sauce for immediate eating or keeping. Similar techniques are recorded in tenth-century Arabic texts as well as in the earliest English-language manuscripts. Preservation depends on boiling the fruit and the honey, and on keeping the product well sealed in cool, dark conditions. The introduction of refined sugar expanded the possibilities for preservation and the availability of these sweets to a wider group of people. Often used to medicinal ends, the technique of safely preserving fruits through successive boiling in sugar solutions was an important skill for the apothecary and the confectioner. It was a confectioner, Nicolas Appert, who in 1810 invented the first bottling process that safely preserved foods by boiling them in sealed glass jars, a technique later developed into industrial canning.

Victorian-era food manufacturers often advertised their products alongside images of plump, happy toddlers to signify the new industrial age of safety and plenty, as in this advertising card for Thurbers’ Fruit Preserves and Jellies, produced sometime between 1850 and 1900. library of congress

Chemistry of Jelled Fruit Preserves

All conserves are variations on a theme of cooked, set fruit preserves made with fruit and sugar. Although the specific techniques for making each one vary slightly, all depend on certain basic qualities of the core ingredients and how they interact under the application of heat. Every conserve relies on sugar for its preservation qualities and on pectin (or other jelling agents like carrageen or agar) for its jelling action; acid balance is required for both set and good flavor.

Fruit

Jams and jellies can be made from any fruit, alone or in combination. It should be dry, fresh, and ripe and, depending on size, used in whole pieces, chopped, or pulped. Since overripe fruit is lower in pectin and higher in acid, it is advisable to make jams and jellies from perfectly ripe or slightly underripe fruit, both to ensure a good set and to give better flavor.

Pectin

Pectin is the naturally occurring jelling agent contained in the skins, pith, cores, pips, and cell walls of fruits. The amount of pectin in fruits varies considerably, and before making jams or jellies, its level needs to be considered and the recipe adjusted accordingly. More pectin can be added to lower-pectin fruits, either by using jam-making sugar with pectin already added to it, or by adding apple juice.

Acid

Levels of acidity vary considerably among fruits. In making preserves, acid works to release pectin in addition to influencing the flavor of the final product. To release pectin, lemon juice should be added during the cooking process; as a flavor adjuster, it may be added once the setting point has been achieved.

Sugar

Sugar sweetens, preserves, helps the jelling action of pectin, and stops it from breaking down while the conserve is boiling. Since sugar also toughens fruit skins and slows down the initial release of pectin, it should be added only when the fruit is already softened, and should be fully dissolved before bringing the mixture to a boil. Coarser-grained sugar works best, since the larger crystals dissolve more quickly. The quantity of sugar to include is a matter of taste, but since it also affects the keeping qualities of the conserve, being aware of sugar’s preservation effect is important. Traditional jam and jelly recipes usually suggest equal quantities of sugar and fruit, and if properly potted and sealed, these will keep in a cool dark place for at least a year. In some jams, sugar may be reduced to as little as one-fifth of the weight of fruit. However, as the sugar level reduces, so does the keeping quality, and at very low levels the jam will need to be used quickly (within a few weeks) and kept refrigerated to prevent spoiling.

Jam

Jam is a jellified preserve made with whole fruits and sugar. The fruit is boiled with sugar in solution until sufficient water has evaporated and a set has been achieved. As the mixture cools, the network of pectin molecules developed by the interplay between the sugar solution (measured by temperature and concentration) and acidity levels (measured by pH) ensures the formation of a firm yet soft jell, capable of supporting whole pieces of fruit. The fruit should be cooked but not overcooked, and the mixture should be sweet but not cloying. Overboiling and excessive reduction are to be avoided while ensuring that there is enough sugar and sufficient evaporation to allow long keeping. Some fruits, such as raspberries, apricots, or rhubarb, are macerated with sugar overnight to draw out the juice before cooking, but this preliminary step is not essential. The basic jam technique is to very slowly bring the softened fruit and sugar to a simmer in a nonreactive pan, stirring to make sure that all the sugar is dissolved as the fruit begins to cook. The mixture is brought to a rolling boil, where it is held until the setting point (approximately 220°F/104.5°C) is achieved. The set can be tested by dropping a spot of jam onto a cold plate, allowing it to cool, and gently pushing it with one’s finger. If the surface wrinkles, the jam is done. Froth may be skimmed off as the jam cools, or a little oil or butter added to make it disperse. While still hot (185° to 195°F/85° to 90°C), the jam should be packed into sterilized jars, which should be filled to the top and well sealed. Because jam thickens as it cools, mixtures containing large pieces of fruit should be allowed to stand for about 10 minutes before packing to improve the distribution of fruit pieces. Alternatively, the jars may be filled, sealed, and processed in a boiling water bath.

Jelly

Whereas jams are prized for their fruitiness, jellies are judged on their clarity. The starting point is cooked fruit juice, produced by gently cooking the chosen fruit in the appropriate amount of water and then allowing it to drip through a fine mesh bag for up to 24 hours, resisting the temptation to squeeze the bag, as this will produce cloudy juice. The juice is cooked with sugar following a technique similar to that for jam, taking great care not to make it dark or syrupy through overboiling. As an alternative to the plate test, jelly can also be easily tested by dripping it from a wooden spoon: if it falls from the spoon in sheets, it is ready.

Compote

Stewed fruit compotes, often sweetened with additional sugar, are generally eaten as accompaniments to other foods, whether as a side dish to cooked meats or fish, spooned over breakfast cereals, or served with custard or cream as a simple dessert. Although they are not made for long keeping, the action of pectin and sugar seen in jams and jellies has the effect of preserving this fruit for several days. Compotes of fruit with honey were made for Roman tables, and similar dishes of sweetened stewed apples with almond milk and fig compote appear in The Forme of Cury (1390), the earliest English-language cookery manuscript.

Curd

Fruit curds are very thickly set egg and fruit custards that keep for an extended period of time in the refrigerator. See custard. Generally made with acidic fruits, particularly citrus, they are eaten on bread as a spreading preserve and used as fillings for tarts or in composite desserts such as lemon meringue pie (lemon curd) or key lime pie (lime curd). Egg yolks, sugar butter, and fruit juice are stirred constantly over a bain-marie or double boiler at gentle heat until a thick set is achieved, then used either immediately or packed into jars and sealed for later use.

Preserved Whole Fruits

There are many ways to preserve whole fruits, usually in syrups. The syrup may be made with sugar, honey, or a mixture of the two; flavored with spices or fragrant oils; or enhanced with alcohol. It might be a heavy, cooked syrup, or a simple one made through the action of the fruit leaching its juices slowly into sugar.

Bottled Fruit

Cooked bottled fruit. In his 1810 guide to preserving fruits, Nicolas Appert suggests simply cleaning fruit, adding it to a glass container, sealing the jar, and following the Appert process of boiling the jar until the fruit is cooked. Since the fruit is softened by cooking during this process, he suggests using slightly underripe but highly flavored fruits from the middle of the season; for some, such as strawberries, he recommends the addition of sugar to bring out their flavor and aroma.

Raw bottled fruit may be kept in sugar without cooking, though for a much shorter period than the cooked version. Rysteribs, shaken red currants, are a Danish technique for keeping fruit for a week or so to be eaten as a dessert or as an accompaniment to savory dishes. Cleaned currants are put into a jar with two-thirds their weight in sugar, kept in the fridge, and shaken periodically. In Sweden, rårörd lingonsylt is a raw-stirred lingonberry jam that keeps the fresh flavor of the berries intact.

Fruit in Syrup

Fruits may be preserved in syrups of varying strength depending on how long you wish to keep them and how sweet you want the end result to be. They are generally blanched or cooked in syrup, then preserved in a sealed jar covered in syrup, often thickened. The blanching and cooking process may be repeated multiple times, for a more candied fruit, or just once, for a fresher presentation. In general, the longer the cooking and the thicker the syrup, the longer the keeping.

Mostarda di frutta. To make this traditional northern Italian preserve, blanched fruits, usually firm ones like quince, pear, or apple that will retain their shape during repeated heating, are simmered in an 80 percent sugar syrup for 10 minutes every 24 hours, for three to five days. The fruit is weighed down and left to soak in the syrup between simmerings. Just before bottling the fruit in its honey-like syrup, mustard oil is added. See mostarda.

Spoon sweets. These Greek sweets are generally made in bite-sized pieces, of a size that will fit neatly into a teaspoon, and served with strong coffee as a snack. Fruits or green nuts like walnuts are simmered in very heavy sugar syrup (a ratio of 4 to 1 sugar to water), left to stand for 24 hours, and bottled in hot syrup. They keep for at least four months in a cool, dark place. See spoon sweet.

Fruit in Alcohol

There are several techniques for producing sweet, long-keeping fruit preserves in alcohol.

Cooked fruit. Fruits such as peaches, apricots, or pears are blanched, peeled, and briefly poached in sugar syrup. The fruit is placed in sterilized jars, to which equal quantities of thickened and cooled syrup and the chosen spirit (e.g., brandy, rum, bourbon) are added. The fruit should be kept for a month before eating and is preserved for a long time.

Raw fruit. German Rumtopf, French confiture de vieux garçon, and Anglo-American tutti-frutti are mixtures of soft summer fruits in rum, kirsch, or brandy. The fruit is gently mixed with up to 60 percent of its weight in sugar, placed in jars, and covered in the chosen alcohol. Left for a month before serving, the fruit must not be stirred until it leaves the jar. Other versions using stone fruits such as cherries depend on shaking to dissolve the sugar. The fruit is combined with 15 percent of its weight in sugar, covered with strong alcohol such as eau de vie, and shaken regularly. Such fruits may be eaten after 6 weeks and will keep for 12 months or so. See tutti frutti.

Dried fruit can be soaked in grappa, eau de vie, or sweet wine to flavor and preserve it. No additional sugar is required. The fruit should be soaked for a month before eating and keeps well, improving in flavor for over a year.

See also candied fruit; fruit; fruit paste; and marmalade.

Appert, Charles. The Book for All Households; or, the Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years. Translated by K. G. Bitting. Chicago, 1920.

Henry, Diana. Salt Sugar Smoke: How to Preserve Fruit, Vegetables, Meat and Fish. London: Mitchell Beazley, 2012.

Mason, Laura. Sweets and Sweet Shops. Princes Risborough, U.K.: Shire, 1999.

Tate & Lyle Refineries Ltd. Home Economics Department. Sweet Success: The Tate & Lyle Cookbook. London: Sackett and Marshall, 1977.

Jane Levi

fruitcake is a mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and beaten egg, fragrant with spices and packed with dried fruit. Echoing medieval flavors, it is one of the glories of British baking and long considered a luxury food. According to Barbara Wheaton in Savoring the Past, the first “recognizable cakes” appear in La Varenne’s 1651 Le pâtissier francois. In England, Robert May’s 1685 recipe for “an extraordinary good Cake” is a yeast-leavened fruitcake, a style that lasted until the Victorian era. It was Ann Blencowe (1694) who pointed the way to today’s cakes by using whisked eggs to aerate her yeast-free Brandy Cake.

Until the early nineteenth century, making a fruitcake, also known as a plum cake, was time-consuming: butter needed to be washed and rinsed in rosewater; the sugar was pounded and sieved; currants were sorted, washed, and dried; muscatel raisins were de-seeded and chopped; candied citrus peel was thinly sliced; almonds were blanched and slivered; and spices were freshly ground. Egg yolks had to be well beaten and the whites whisked with a wooden fork for hours until stiff. See whisks and beaters. The cake mixture was spooned into a tin ring or a wooden “garth” resting on a metal sheet and lined with layers of paper to prevent scorching. Hours earlier the wood-fired bread oven had been heated with bundles of dry wood, then raked clear of ashes so that the temperature could be judged by sprinkling flour on the oven floor. See measurement. The cake baked in the heat stored in the brickwork.

When the cast-iron cooking stove with its closed oven and more controllable temperature was introduced during the nineteenth century, cake making became easier, which in turn led to many more recipes. Mrs. Beeton (1861) includes 10 fruitcake recipes with beaten eggs and sometimes bicarbonate of soda to leaven the mixture. She also gives a recipe for an “economical” fruitcake. See beeton, isabella and chemical leaveners.

Various ways have been devised to ensure that a cake made with less butter, sugar, or dried fruit than usual is still satisfying. A “boiled” fruitcake is made by first simmering dried fruit in milk or water before cooling and adding to the mixture, a method that helps to ensure a moist cake. Australian bakers sometimes add crushed pineapple to a fruitcake mixture to obtain a similar result. Particularly ingenious solutions were found during British wartime food rationing, such as a Christmas cake recipe advising that grated carrots could replace dried fruit, and gravy browning would improve the color of a fruitcake that lacked black treacle.

Regional and seasonal versions of fruitcake represent valued traditions. Simnel cakes, the light fruitcakes with a layer of marzipan baked into the center and associated with Mothering Sunday and Easter, were originally identified with certain towns in the north of England. See marzipan. Scotland’s Dundee cake, a light fruitcake with a crust of toasted almonds, is popular throughout Britain, whereas Scotch or black bun, a dark fruitcake enclosed in pastry and baked to celebrate Hogmanay, is rarely found south of the border. Bara brith is still baked today in Wales, and even in England. French bakers respect the origin of their fruitcakes and name them le plum cake and le gâteau anglais. Both are light mixtures in the style of a Genoa cake, or a guard’s luncheon cake—a fruitcake served at the end of the midday meal in Victorian and Edwardian London, mainly in gentlemen’s clubs. Although fruitcakes are normally baked in a round or square tin, some American fruitcakes are baked in a ring mold and encrusted with glazed candied fruits and nuts. See candied fruit and dried fruit. Commercially prepared fruitcakes in this style, packaged in decorative tins, are available for sale online. During the Christmas season, thousands are shipped throughout the United States; a particular favorite comes from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, whose family recipe, studded with pecans, is said to date from 1896.

The association of rich fruitcakes with the past has given them considerable cultural significance in Britain. During the seventeenth century, the cakes were iced with a poured sugar syrup, dried in the doorway of the oven. Opaque icing made with sugar and egg whites (later known as “royal icing”) dates from early in the following century, with the next advance credited to Mrs. Raffald (The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769), who introduced the custom of placing a layer of marzipan between the cake and the icing. See icing. This style of iced fruitcake has become the epitome of celebration.

Fruitcakes intended for weddings, anniversaries, and Christmas are usually made well ahead to allow the flavor to mature; they are iced not long before the celebration. A Twelfth Night cake—the forerunner of the traditional Christmas cake—is a fruitcake made to celebrate the feast of Epiphany on 6 January, which should “eat well if twelve months old,” as Dr. William Kitchiner wrote in The Cook’s Oracle (1817). See twelfth night cake. Adding extra alcohol to a baked fruitcake with regular doses of brandy or sherry trickled into small holes in its base enhances both the cake’s flavor and keeping quality.

The finest celebration fruitcake should be capable of being divided into numerous small portions suitable for serving to a large number of guests. Moreover, the cutting of a wedding cake is a significant moment during the celebration when the married couple both hold the knife to symbolize their new life together. See wedding cake. And by tradition the small cake at the summit of a tiered wedding cake is reserved for celebrating the christening of the firstborn.