Egg Yellow

That was quick! Reader Sue asks: why do some eggs have darker yolks than others, and does a deep yellow color mean the yolks are more nutritious?

As far as I know a deep yellow yolk isn’t necessarily more nutritious than a pale yellow yolk. However I do know what makes one yolk darker than another: the diet of the hen. Chickens are omnivorous scavengers, which means they’ll eat all different sorts of things…pretty much whatever they come across. Hens that “scratch” in the barnyard (or the suburban back yard, as the case may be) eat everything from grains and legumes to grasses, leaves, roots, insects, worms, mice…even the carcasses of dead animals.

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Next Up: Baked Alaska

I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while now, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. Maybe a surplus of eggs, which I’ve certainly got this week thanks to a generous neighbor/reader by the name of Patrick. Between the ice cream, the génoise and the meringue I should have no trouble using […]

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Making Tarte Tropézienne

Tarte Tropézienne is nominally French, but the thick stripe of rich cream filling through the center betrays its northern European origins. Say what you will about the French and their love of dairy products, they seldom go hog wild with cream the way Poles and Germans will, bless them. Because let’s face it, excess can be a beautiful thing. Or so says an American.

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Let them eat cake!

I don’t know about you, but whenever the topics of brioche and headlessness come up, I can’t help but think of Marie Antoinette. Few people know that when Marie Antoinette uttered the line above, what she really said was “Let them eat brioche” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”). Fewer people still know that she never even uttered those words at all. The line was falsely attributed to Marie later on in her life…just about the time she was beheaded, right at the height of the French Revolution.

The day she was supposed to have declared “let them eat cake”, on her marriage to the Dauphin Louis-Auguste, the world-class competitive eater and future King of France, the line had already been written down by Rousseau in his Confessions, attributed to some other princes of some other country. When were the Confessions published? Four years prior to Marie’s wedding, when she was 10 years old and still living in Vienna.

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Where does brioche come from?

Does it come from southern France? That’s very hard to say, reader Peg. “Probably not” is about the best answer I can come up with for that excellent question. Brioche is a very old bread, or rather to be more precise, it is a very old word for bread. Brioche as we know it now, […]

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Not exactly what I was expecting.

There really was a Saint Tropez, you know. Though in Catholic circles we know him as Saint Torpes of Pisa, patron saint of mariners (ship navigators). Almost nothing is known definitively about St. Torpes other than his given name was Caïus Silvius Torpetius and he was a Roman who lived during the time of Nero’s persecutions.

Details are sketchy at best, however it’s thought he was a member of the Roman military who was somehow “outed” to Nero as a Christian. For that he was summarily executed. What happened next is a legend and a weird one at that. It’s said that Nero had Torpetius’ head cut off and thrown into the Arno river. His body he had set adrift in a small boat along with a dog and a rooster as an odd sort of corpse disposal crew.

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The Bardot Connection

Tarte Tropézienne is commonly linked to Brigitte Bardot. This is because St.-Tropez itself is commonly linked to Brigitte Bardot. She is credited with putting the place on the map, as it were.

Did she? In a way, yes. St.-Tropez was already a well-known as a tourist destination when Bardot showed up in 1956 to film the not-too-pretentiously-titled And God Created Woman. It was Bardot’s first “serious” acting role, and while the film is considered something of a dud these days, it caused an international sensation in 1957. The rich, the famous and the wanna-be rich and famous have flocked there ever since.

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How old is Tarte Tropézienne?

Not very, reader Sue, which is why we can say definitively who invented it: one Alexandre Micka. Micka was born in Poland, though his family emigrated to the Lorraine region in extreme northeastern France when he was but a lad, about 1915. It was there that Micka worked as an apprentice pastry maker. For exactly how long is unknown, or at least it is unknown to me.

What’s clear is that in time Micka relocated to St.-Tropez, probably about the year 1950, and opened his own pastry shop. He created Tarte Tropézienne soon after and sold it with only modest success. That is, up until the 1960’s when St.-Tropez caught on as a tourist destination and visitors began enjoying what they thought was an indigenous delicacy. Tarte Tropézienne has been famous ever since.

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