Macarons de Saint-Émilion: Convent Macarons Without a Filling
The box promises a lot: a blue-printed scene of a nun and bakers, the line Recette des véritables Macarons des Anciennes Religieuses - the recipe for the true macarons of the nuns of old - and a red stamp reading Seule authentique, the only genuine one. Inside lies something you might not call a macaron at all: a little heap of golden, cracked discs.
Macarons de Saint-Émilion are single-shell macarons of ground almonds, egg whites and sugar - no filling, no coloring, no second half, a sweet from the days when French cuisine had no idea that a macaron would one day become a sandwich.
What Macaron Means and How Many France Has
The name is an import. The French macaron came in the 16th century from the Italian maccarone - the same root that gave the world macaroni, so the macaron and the pasta are linguistic cousins. The recipe traveled in with the Italian pastry cooks of Catherine de' Medici, and out of the trio of almonds, egg white and sugar France gradually baked a whole family of single-shell regional macarons: Nancy, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Amiens - every town with its own shape and its own closely guarded recipe. The Ottoman and Italian south knows the same trick: Turkish acıbadem kurabiyesi and amaretti from Italian cuisine are cut from the same cloth, just with a bolder dose of bitter almonds. And the two-shell Parisian macaron with ganache that the whole world knows today? A youngster - it wasn't born until the 20th century.
A Convent, a Revolution and a Dispute Over the Oldest Recipe
History here is counted from 1620, when the Ursulines settled in Saint-Émilion - an order that taught girls from poor families in the village for free and, by tradition, baked macarons as a thank-you to the winegrowers around. It is the convent that turns up in the documents, though, not the recipe: the claim that the macarons have been baked unchanged for four hundred years rests on storytelling, not on an archive. The legend carries on into the revolution: the convent was dissolved in 1792 and one of the former sisters is said to have traded the recipe for food and a roof over her head. The countryside around Bordeaux is fond of family trees like this - canelé has a convent legend of its own - and Saint-Émilion isn't alone in France either: four towns lay claim to the title of the country's oldest macaron. The only protected geographical indication, meanwhile, belongs to the macarons of Cormery, which never joined the argument at all.
Three Ingredients and No Filling
The recipe is a trade secret, yet the ingredients fit into a single sentence: sweet and bitter almonds, fresh egg whites, sugar. No flour, no fat and no coloring go into the batter. The almonds are ground coarsely, so the finished macaron has none of the smoothness of a pastry shop - it has a grain to it - the surface cracks as it bakes and the center stays moist and chewy; the bitter almonds add a note that keeps almond sweets from turning bland. It's essentially the same trio that half the Christmas cookies we bake back home are built on - only in Saint-Émilion they don't live off it for one December afternoon - they live off it all year round.
These days people come to Saint-Émilion for the macarons as a souvenir. The only workshop that lays claim to the Ursulines' recipe sits on rue Guadet and sells its boxes alongside wine and chocolate corks filled with Bordeaux. A macaron without cream needs no fridge, so unlike the Parisian one it survives a trip across half of Europe in a backpack - and if it has a natural companion anywhere, it's a glass of the local red. Don't go looking for it elsewhere: outside Saint-Émilion and the Bordeaux area you probably won't come across it.
A Box from rue Guadet
I bought my own box right in the wine village of Saint-Émilion, in the workshop of Nadia Fermigier, the current keeper of the recipe. The macarons tasted like the ancestor of the modern version: the almonds ground coarser than I expected, the surface crunched and fell apart, and inside it stayed moist and dense, with a bitter almond aftertaste. Years later a comparison came to me that might startle the pastry cooks of Saint-Émilion: this sweet reminded me a little of padobranci, the North Macedonian cookies made of egg whites and walnuts - the chain of egg whites, sugar and nuts clearly runs further across Europe than one village suspects. Nobody is going to settle the fight over France's oldest macaron. For me, coarsely ground almonds are better proof than any archive.
