Marie Antoinette never said
Let them eat cake.
Though I do imagine she might have said 'let me me eat chocolate' because the girl had a sweet tooth.
So while I examine the unconventional diet of this former queen of France I'll do so with 18th century French biscuit et creme de chocolate.
Thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video as we 'let me eat chocolate'
this time on Tasting History.
So we've established that Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake or
"Qu'ils manget de la brioche."
Namely because she was still a child when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote
"At length I recalled the thoughtless saying of a great princess who,
when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: then let them eat brioche."
And yet the spurious claim that that heartless princess was Marie Antoinette has persisted for centuries
along with many other defamations to her character some true some not and most in between.
And this can make it difficult to pick out what is actually true about the Queen's life especially
in the more mundane things like what did Marie Antoinette like to eat,
but sometimes multiple sources as well as literal receipts agree on something,
like the fact that Marie Antoinette loved dessert especially chocolate she actually brought
a chocolate maker from Vienna to France when she moved there so he could be her own personal chocolatier
so I am making two chocolate treats that would have been popular in France when Marie Antoinette was alive.
The recipes come from one of the 18th Century's most popular cookbooks on desserts by Massialot.
"Biscuits de Chocolat. You take egg white, and great chocolate into it: you don't need much;
because it is only to give the smell and the color. Then take some sugar ground with powder and mix it well with the rest;
it takes until you have a manageable dough; then you will set out your biscuits the way that you want, on sheets of paper,
and put them in the oven to cook them over a low heat, both below and above."
So this sounds like an early version of a meringue though he's completely unclear about
when he wants you to to kind of whisk up the eggs but slightly lighter editions of the cookbook, still from the 18th century,
have you whisk them at the beginning so that's what I'm going to do.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: 4 egg whites at room temperature one heaping cup or 225 grams of powdered sugar,
5 or 6 tablespoons or about 50 grams of unsweetened chocolate.
So this would be chocolate without any sugar in it that is then grated into a powder,
but if you just use cocoa powder that works just as well and it's a lot easier.
So first beat the egg whites until you start to get soft peaks then sprinkle in about half of the chocolate and keep mixing.
Then slowly add in the sugar just a little at a time and whisk as you do this.
You can also add in a little bit more of the chocolate. You might not use the whole thing you might use even more of it, it's kind of up to you. He says
to use as much to give it color and a smell but how much that's going to be is is kind of up to the person making it
so use as much as you want but keep beating it until you have what he calls a dough.
Now no matter what you do this will never be like a cookie dough, there's no flour in it
so it's it's going to be much looser than that kind of dough but it's going to be
not as fluffy as a modern meringue so something in between.
But once you do get to that dough you're going to use it to make little biscuits on a parchment lined baking sheet.
Now the shape and size of these is is again kind of up to you. Different cookbooks from the time say that they should be about the size of a walnut
and round, others say long. This one says do it however you want,
and since they're for a queen I'm gonna do fancy little swirls.
Then set them in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 degrees Celsius for one hour,
and while you do that you can clean up or gather your ingredients for the next recipe or
pop open a bottle of wine from today's sponsor Bright Cellars.
The one I'm having is a red blend called Palette Knife from Bordeaux.
It's nice and juicy but it's surprisingly light, lots of wonderful flavors like dark berries and almost like baking spices,
and they they give you these cards that tell you you know some things that they might want you to pair it with.
This one says coque au vin or sheep's milk cheese though of course I'm doing it with chocolate,
and it is exactly my type of wine and really it's no surprise because
I've been working with Bright Cellars for a while and so they've gotten to know my palette which is also the name of the wine,
and to let them get to know your palette all you do is take a simple 7 question quiz
and then they curate a box of different bottles and ship it to your door
and while Bright Cellars is a wonderful way to treat yourself it's also a lifesaver during the holidays because
you always have a good bottle of wine on hand to bring to a party or give as a gift,
unless you've gone through all of your own bottles in which then you can give a Bright Cellars gift card.
So thank you to those who have signed up with Bright Cellars, it really does help support the channel
and thank you to Bright Cellars for giving viewers of Tasting History a limited time offer
of $50 off of your first six bottle box. Just click the link in the description to get started.
Now while this one will surely go well with the biscuits I think it's really going to shine with the creme de chocolate.
So for that what you'll need is: 2 cups or 475ml of whole milk,
1 cup or 235 milliliters of cream, 2 egg yolks, 1 cup or 100 grams of sugar and 4 to 6 ounces of chocolate.
Now this chocolate really does need to be grated, you can't use cocoa powder for this
so just take your time and and grate that chocolate.
Also the amount that you use is going to be up to your taste,
just kind of depends on how chocolate heavy you want or if you want something a little bit sweeter.
Now this recipe is great because he does give specific quantities for most of the ingredients
but he doesn't give them in modern units of course he gives them in
these archaic French units like the 'chopine' and 'septier',
and the thing with these units is they weren't standardized across France or across the 18th century so
there is some guesswork but I I think I figured out what he is talking about and the rest was pretty easy.
He says to take all the ingredients except for the chocolate then "...boil it for a quarter hour, stirring with a spatula;
then add some good grated chocolate, as much as is needed to give it taste and color;
allow it five or six boils then pass through a sieve, and serve it cold."
So once you've mixed everything but the chocolate together put it over a medium heat, and bring it to a light simmer and then let it simmer for 15 minutes.
You have to gently stir it the entire time but during that time it will start to thicken.
Then add in the chocolate and quickly mix it in.
Now we want you to kind of heat this up and then take it off the heat and let it calm down,
and then heat it up again calm down 5 or 6 times but
that can lead to you overheating the chocolate and so it will seize, and then you get a lumpy oily mess,
and it can happen at the drop of a hat, it happened to me.
Luckily you can and save it, just add a little bit of cream 2 or 3 tablespoons of cream,
and keep it warm and stir that in.
Add a couple more until it eventually will come together like magic and be a nice shiny smooth chocolate
that you can pass through a sieve and then put it into dishes to let cool.
There's actually another chocolate treat that I thought about making but once I learned that the way that Marie Antoinette ate it
was with medicine mixed in I decided not to.
See the story goes that the queen was complaining of the taste of a medicine that she was receiving so the chemist
Sulpice Debauve mixed it in with some bitter chocolate that it had the cocoa butter removed,
and so it left a nice crisp chocolate coin which she dubbed 'La Pistol' and they are still sold today assumably without the medicine
at the chocolate shop that Debauve opened in Paris.
Now like so many stories about Marie Antoinette the veracity of this is questionable and seems to completely rely on the word of the chocolate shop itself,
but there are some things about what Marie Antoinette ate that we do know for pretty sure.
Maria Antonia was born not in France but in Vienna. The 15th child and the youngest daughter
of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Teresa and Emperor Francis the First.
By all accounts she was unremarkable but her tutor did admit
"Her character, her heart, are excellent...
[She is] more intelligent than has been generally supposed,
[but as] she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous she is hard to teach."
I got the same comment on my fifth grade report card and it didn't hold me back
and it didn't hold back Maria Antonia either because in 1770 at the age of 14 she moved to France and became Dauphine Marie Antoinette when she was married to
Louis Auguste the grandson of King Louis XV and Dauphin or heir apparent to the throne.
The reception to the new princess was mixed.
She was quite popular with the common people, this will change later on in the story
but many at court especially those who did not care for the Austrian Alliance agreed with her tutor's assessment that she was
"Rather lazy and extremely frivolous."
And even when she became Queen many people at court
still saw the worst in everything that she did, the friends she chose, the clothes that she wore, even how she ate.
One of her own ladies in waiting would later write
"The king ate with a hearty appetite but the queen did not remove her gloves,
nor did she unfold her napkin, in which she was very ill advised."
The insinuation being that the queen had nothing but contempt for those in attendance.
She was haughty and aloof, and maybe she was but in this instance
eating in front of an audience, actual spectators made her uncomfortable.
"One of the many customs most disagreeable to the Queen was that of dining every day in public...
At the dinner hour there were none to be met upon the stairs but those crowds, who, after having seen the Dauphine take her soup,
went to see the Princes eat their 'bouilli' and then ran themselves out of breath to behold Mesdames at their dessert."
And frankly as someone who doesn't even like their cat watching them eat I kind of side with Marie Antoinette on this,
and yes I see the irony and the fact that I have like a million million people watch me eat every week,
but you're not here in the room with me, it would be very uncomfortable and not just because it's a rather small room.
Also I did an entire video on this spectator meal
so I'll put a link in the description to where you can watch that it's really interesting and and kind of weird.
Now it wasn't always the Grand Couvert which was hundreds of people watching and hundreds of dishes being served,
sometimes it was Le Petit Couvert and this would be you know fewer dishes still a lot but fewer dishes
being served and the king and queen would eat in totally separate quarters.
Only at Campan Marie Antoinette's chambermaid wrote much about her mistress including how these meals went.
And even the Petite Couvert, quite the production.
"Before the Revolution there were customs and words and use at Versailles with which few people were acquainted.
The King's dinner was called 'The King's meat'. Two of The Body Guard accompanied the many attendants who carried the dinner,
every one rose as they passed through the halls, saying, 'There is the King's meat.'
In the evening they always brought the Queen a large bowl of broth, a cold roast fowl, one bottle of wine,
one of orgeat, one of lemonade, and some other articles, which were called the 'en-cas' for the night."
En cas meaning in case and this was basically a late night snack,
and for Marie Antoinette that was usually some sort of sweet dessert. Now
she also mentions that the queen was given a bowl of broth and about 10 years ago there was a fad diet called the Marie Antoinette diet
that really relied on this. Basically it said Marie Antoinette every night she ate bone broth and a bit of white meat like chicken or something like that,
and that's kind of true except that the word in the original writing is
bouillon and that at the time could mean a lot of different things,
yes it was usually a a soup or broth made with with bone in it but it could also refer to
the dishes that were then kind of made with that. So much more complex soups and everything so
it's not bone broth in the way that we see bone broth probably.
The diet also claims that Marie Antoinette was a teetotaler essentially and only drank water and
the truth of that is- it's confusing because
Madame Campan just said that she got a bottle of wine every evening and and later on she talks about
wine being served to the queen but then she also says
"Her sobriety was remarkable... at dinner she ate nothing but white meat, drank nothing but water, and sucked on broth,
a wing of a poultry, and a glass of water in which she dipped little biscuits."
You can see the source of confusion and I'm honestly not sure exactly what the answer was but
even the water that she drank tended not to be low cal.
"The queen had a habit... there was always some pounded sugar upon the table in her Majesty's bedchamber;
and she frequently without calling anybody put spoonfuls of it into a glass of water when she wished to drink."
So she drank sugar water like a hummingbird.
Now one thing that the diet does get pretty spot on is that Marie Antoinette tended to take in most of her calories at breakfast.
"The Queen awoke habitually at eight o'clock, and breakfasted at nine, frequently in bed,
and sometimes after she had risen, at a table placed opposite her couch...
On her bathing mornings she breakfasted in the bath... She breakfasted on coffee or chocolate...
and a kind of bread to which he had been accustomed in her childhood in Vienna."
It's often claimed that this bread was a croissant.
Unfortunately the croissant as we know it today was not invented until about 50 years
after Marie Antoinette died so it wasn't that but it might have been what was known as
a kipferl whichwas quite popular in Vienna at the time.
It still is and it's thought to be the precursor to the croissant.
They are different types of bread, the kipferl is much heartier and usually sweetened
whereas the the croissant is more like a delicate light flaky pastry but they are both crescent shaped.
Either way these rather simple meals seem to be in stark contrast with her reputation for being a spendthrift
spending all of France's money on clothes and jewelry while
the people out in the streets starve
but while I'm sure that the situation was full of nuance
she still got the blame and the people who had once adored their young beautiful Dauphine
turned on her and her entire family and this was going to really change how they ate.
Following a failed flight from Paris where the royal family dressed as servants and were
very clumsily whisked away out of the city to a stronghold in Vereen
only to be captured when King Louis insisted on stopping for a snack of wine and Brie de Meaux,
the family was taken back to their palace in Paris and put under strict guard and
this really limited what they could eat not because they didn't have access to the finer foods that
royalty were accustomed to but because of who was making the food.
"[The pastry chef was] so furious a Jacobin that he dared to say it would be a good thing for France if the King's days were shortened."
So obviously they didn't feel comfortable eating this guy's food for fear that he'd poisoned them
and instead of getting a new cook "it was determined that in future the King and Queen should eat only plain roast meat;
that their bread should be brought to them by the intent of the smaller apartments,
and that he should likewise take upon himself to supply the wine."
But King Louie's love of pastry could not be ignored and so Madame Campan says
"I was directed to order some, as if for myself, sometimes of one pastry cook, and sometimes of another.
The pounded sugar, too, was kept in my room."
She would bring them their food and then the king and queen would eat alone
but after a while things got worse...
Now the situation is way too complex to cover here in this video. It is very interesting but
I can't cover it now but essentially they went from being very unpopular
to being enemies of France or considered enemies of the state,
and so they were imprisoned,
not in one of their palaces but in the Temple Tower.
There any food coming in was suspect,
not of poison but of plans- of letters giving details of a plot for them to escape.
"Macarons were broken in half to see that they did not contain letters;
peaches were cut open and the stones cracked."
And eventually both macarons and peaches just fell off the menu.
"They were no longer to be allowed either poultry or pastry; they were reduced to one sort of basic food for breakfast,
and soup or broth and a single dish for dinner, and two dishes for supper and a half bottle of wine apiece.
Tallow candles were to be furnished instead of wax, pewter instead of silver plate, and delft ware instead of porcelain..."
Still sounds actually pretty nice to me but I guess it was a big step down for royalty,
and over the next year King Louis was put on trial, found guilty,
and guillotined.
Some months later Marie Antoinette was moved to another prison to await the same fate.
According to some stories the night before she marched up the scaffold the Queen's last remaining servant
Rosalie Lamorlière begged her to drink a bit of soup but the Queen said
"Child, I want nothing more, since for me everything is finished..."
But Rosalie begged her and finally the Queen said
"Very well, Rosalie, bring me the bouillon."
She managed to get down a few spoonfuls and that was it.
That was Marie Antoinette's final meal
maybe because just like pretty much everything else to do with Marie Antoinette
the stories in the years after she died all differed.
One claims that she had a soup with vermicelli noodles in it and one story even claimed that on the morning of the execution
she was allowed to have a hot chocolate and pastry.
I think that's very, very unlikely and the author was probably just looking through rose-colored glasses trying to remember
the Halcyon Days when the queen could enjoy all the chocolate she wanted.
And while this is not Versailles clearly I am going to enjoy all the chocolate that I want.
So once the biscuits are baked turn off the oven and let them cool inside with the door still closed for at least another 30 minutes preferably more like an hour or two.
And once both they and the creme de chocolate are cooled they are ready to eat.
And here we are biscuit de creme de chocolat as might have been enjoyed by Marie Antoinette.
First I think a biscuit by itself, here we go.
Hm! This is very much like a merengue but a little
but a little denser. A little closer together because it well it's done in a slightly different way.
It's not quite as fluffy but it definitely has that Crunch and then that kind of
gently gooey inside, just a little soft and it's really, really sweet.
I am getting chocolate but just mildly and I think that that's the point he says just add enough for the scent and the color
and I think you get that but it's not like it's not super chocolatey.
And as for the creme super chocolatey.
There's enough sugar that it's that it's not bitter but
it's like a really dark ganache. Cross between a ganache and the eggs and everything it's a creme anglaise or something
but it's thick like a ganache
but nice and smooth and delicious. Also a word about this glass so it's a champagne coupe
and there are often stories told that the shape
of the bowl is modeled after the bosom of Madame Marie Antoinette.
That is not true, nor was it shaped after any
famous lady. That is that's all wives tale but it's definitely one that persists.
So thumbs up to both of the chocolate treats they're absolutely fantastic
especially I personally like the the creme de chocolate and the texture. That nice creamy texture and it's and
it's super chocolatey which I love chocolate so make both,
and if you like chocolate definitely make the creme de chocolate.
So don't forget to check out bright sellers follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.