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This morning, they have tasted a dessert that seemed very familiar.
Lyonesses? Lionesses? Lioneses?
Football? Gastronomy?
French? English? Catalan?
For a few moments, everything seemed to share the same name, and everything seemed, once again, very familiar and very dear.
After a salade lyonnaise, there should always be room for dessert. At least, that is what The Grandma and Claire Fontaine firmly believe. And in Lyon, surrounded by boulangeries, pâtisseries, chocolate shops and windows filled with irresistible little creations, there is certainly no shortage of possibilities.
But today The Grandma stopped in front of something extremely familiar. A small, round pastry. Light and hollow. Filled generously with cream. A chou à la crème. And The Grandma smiled. Because she had seen this before. Many, many times. Only at home, in Catalunya, she would probably have called it something different. Una lionesa.
And suddenly a very simple pastry raised a fascinating question. How can something so French feel so Catalan? The answer lies in one of the great travellers of European gastronomy: pâte à choux.
Few pastry doughs behave quite like pâte à choux. Flour, water or milk, butter and eggs. The ingredients could hardly be more ordinary. But the technique is unusual. Unlike most pastry doughs, the flour is first cooked with liquid and butter. The mixture is dried over heat to form what pastry chefs call a panade. Eggs are then gradually incorporated. And then the real magic happens in the oven. There is no yeast. There is no baking powder. Instead, the water contained in the dough becomes steam. The steam expands. The pastry rises. And inside, a cavity appears. The result is a light shell with an almost empty interior. And humanity, naturally, looked at that empty space and reached the only sensible conclusion: we should fill it with something delicious.
Cream. Chocolate. Pastry cream. Ice cream. Anything, really. The empty centre became an invitation.
The history of pâte à choux is surrounded by one particularly persistent story. According to the traditional account, the pastry was created in the sixteenth century by an Italian cook associated with Catherine de' Medici, who married the future Henri II of France in 1533. Different versions call this mysterious cook Pantanelli, Penterelli or Popelini. He supposedly created a preparation known as pâte à chaud -literally hot pastry- which later evolved into pâte à choux. It is a wonderful story. There is only one problem. It is almost certainly a legend.
Modern historical examination has challenged the idea that Catherine de' Medici arrived in France accompanied by an army of Italian cooks who revolutionised French cuisine. The supposed Italian creators of pâte à choux cannot be reliably documented at her court. And I rather like that uncertainty. Recipes rarely have birth certificates. They evolve. One cook changes something. Another improves it. A technique moves from one kitchen to another. Names change. Ingredients change. And eventually everybody forgets exactly where the journey began.
What we can follow more confidently is the evolution of the technique itself. Earlier preparations known as popelins or poupelins already existed in France. They involved a dough that was dried over heat before being baked. Eventually this family of preparations developed into what we recognise as modern pâte à choux. The great transformation took place particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when French pastry became increasingly sophisticated.
Two names are especially important: Jean Avice and Marie-Antoine Carême. Avice, an important pastry chef of his time, helped develop the possibilities of the dough. Then came Carême. And Carême changed almost everything.
Marie-Antoine Carême was one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of European cuisine. Born into poverty in Paris in 1784, he eventually cooked for some of the most powerful people in Europe. But Carême was much more than a cook. He thought about food architecturally. His spectacular pièces montées transformed sugar, pastry and confectionery into towers, temples, ruins and monuments. He codified. He classified. He refined. And pâte à choux became part of the sophisticated vocabulary of nineteenth-century French pastry. From this extraordinary dough emerged an entire family.
Choux à la crème. Éclairs. Profiteroles. Religieuses. Paris-Brest. Saint-Honoré. Different shapes. Different fillings. Different presentations. But the same extraordinary principle: a cooked dough inflated largely by steam, leaving space inside for the pastry chef's imagination.
But why are they called choux?
Here language becomes delicious. In French, chou means cabbage. And choux is its plural. Look carefully at a little round baked choux pastry. With its irregular, folded surface, someone apparently thought it resembled a tiny cabbage. And the name stuck. So one of the foundations of elegant French pastry bears, essentially, the wonderfully unpretentious name: cabbage pastry. French has another affectionate expression: mon petit chou. Literally, my little cabbage. But used rather more charmingly as: my darling. Perhaps pastry and affection were destined to meet.
And then something even more interesting happened. Pâte à choux travelled. French pastry techniques became enormously influential throughout Europe, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Pastry chefs moved. Cookbooks circulated. Hotels adopted French culinary terminology. Restaurants imitated Parisian fashions. Local pastry shops absorbed foreign techniques. And recipes that had once belonged to professional French pastry kitchens began appearing in bakeries far beyond France.
Portugal. Italy. Catalonia. Each culture adopted them. And often renamed them. This is where our story becomes particularly close to home.
In Catalonia, those small filled choux pastries became known as: lioneses. The word is completely natural to Catalan speakers. A lionesa literally means a woman or something from Lyon. And yet the irony is wonderful. The French themselves do not normally walk into a pâtisserie asking for a lyonnaise when they want one of these pastries. They ask for a chou à la crème. What Catalans call lioneses belongs to the wider French tradition of pâte à choux, rather than exclusively to Lyon.
Even modern descriptions of Lyon's gastronomy sometimes have to explain this curious distinction: the pastries popularly known elsewhere as lionesas are choux and are made throughout France, not just in Lyon. So somewhere during the pastry's journey south, geography became a name.
France gave us the pastry. And we gave it Lyon.
But something even more beautiful happens when food crosses a border. Eventually, we stop thinking of it as foreign.
In Catalunya, lioneses became completely at home. They entered neighbourhood pastry shops. They appeared in Sunday assortments. They were carried carefully inside cardboard boxes tied with string. They arrived after family lunches. And they acquired the fillings that generations of Catalans recognise immediately. Nata. Crema. Trufa.
The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana itself defines the lionesa as a small pastry made from what is sometimes called pasta choux, baked and then filled with chocolate, cream or custard. That definition tells us something important. The lionesa is no longer simply a French pastry eaten in Catalonia. It has entered the Catalan culinary vocabulary. It belongs here too.
And now we reach one of those questions capable of dividing otherwise perfectly reasonable people.
Which lionesa? Nata? Light whipped cream against the crisp pastry. Crema? Thick pastry cream, richer and more substantial. Or perhaps: Trufa? Cream transformed by chocolate.
There is no correct answer. Although every Catalan family probably contains somebody absolutely convinced that there is. Sometimes the pastries are finished with icing sugar. Sometimes chocolate. Sometimes they appear together on a tray, allowing everyone to choose. And perhaps that tray tells the story better than any history book could. Because the technique is French. The name points towards Lyon. The fillings have become familiar within Catalan pastry culture. And nobody sitting around the table needs to think about any of that. They simply reach for another one.
We often think about cultural exchange through enormous historical events. Wars. Empires. Migrations. Trade routes. Political borders. But culture also travels through much smaller things. A cooking technique. A recipe copied into a notebook. A pastry chef moving to another country. A word misunderstood or transformed. A customer tasting something abroad and wanting to recreate it at home. Food crosses borders remarkably easily. And when it arrives somewhere new, it changes. That is not corruption. That is culture.
The croissant travelled. Chocolate travelled. Coffee travelled. Tomatoes travelled. Potatoes travelled. And pâte à choux travelled too.
Eventually it crossed the Pyrenees and became so familiar that generations of Catalans would know one of its descendants simply as: la lionesa.
And this is why The Grandma finds today's dessert particularly charming. She travelled from Catalunya to Lyon. But the pastry had already made the opposite journey long before her. Perhaps not directly from Lyon. Perhaps not in one single journey. And certainly not with a passport identifying its birthplace. Recipes do not travel like that. They move from kitchen to kitchen. From chef to apprentice. From cookbook to cookbook. From country to country. And eventually they become part of somebody else's memories. That is what makes culinary history so fascinating. A recipe can belong to more than one place. France can recognise the chou. Catalunya can recognise the lionesa. And both can be right. Because food does something that borders sometimes struggle to do. It allows identities to overlap.
So today, sitting in Lyon, The Grandma looks at a little chou à la crème and sees something simultaneously foreign and familiar. France calls it chou. Catalunya calls it lionesa. The pastry itself does not seem particularly concerned. It has spent centuries crossing borders. And it knows that, sooner or later, wherever it goes... someone will fill it with cream.
More information: Mad About Macarons
la peinture, la sculpture, la poésie,
la musique et l'architecture,
laquelle a pour branche principale la pâtisserie.
The fine arts are five in number:
painting, sculpture, poetry,
music and architecture,
whose principal branch is pastry.
Antonin Carême
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