In my quest to make the perfect Christmas Yorkshire pudding, I’ve been reading a lot of recipes lately. Like a lot of recipes. A LOT of recipes. None of which are optimized for high altitude baking, which is my current problem. I figured a better understanding of the science of what makes a perfect pudding would allow me to create a successful high altitude recipe, which led me to read up on choux pastry. (This is all going somewhere, I promise). Choux, for those who don’t know, is a twice cooked batter-dough (it’s first cooked together in a pot to make the batter, and then the batter is baked or fried) and is used in loads of stuff, like cream puffs and eclairs. A lot of these recipes mention the origins of choux pastry, and that, dear armchair food historians, is why we’re here today.

Most of the sites I found cite the origin of choux thusly:

Pantanelli, the head chef of Catherine de Medici of Florence, invented choux pastry after moving to France in 1540. That pastry named after him was, essentially, a hot dried paste with which he made gateaux and pastries which spread across France. Its irregular shape after baking earned it the name ‘choux’ (French for cabbage). Further refinement and perfection were introduced in the 19th Century by Antoine Careme.

It’s worth noting that Catherine (also called Caterina, more famous for being married to Henry II and the Queen Consort of France than her culinary contributions) is also credited with bechamel sauce, omelettes, French onion soup, and sorbets, depending on who you talk to. This woman (and her chef(s)) apparently single-handedly invented French cuisine in the mid 16th century.

Here’s the problem: not only can I not find evidence that Pantanelli single-handedly invented choux pastry in 1540 something, I can find recipes that predate choux pastry by literal centuries that are very similar. And they’re not even French! Or Italian!

We’ll get to that in a moment. First, we’re going to take a relevant little detour, to the history of pies. Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC) wrote about pies in his plays, so we know pie is more than two millennia old (or at least, the concept of pie. A lot of roman pies had crusts that were supposed to cook the meat inside, not necessarily to be eaten. Then pie crust acted more as a storage vessel than a part of the food, mostly for sailing ships. Pies go through a lot of iterations. The important point here though is pie dough has existed for a really long time.) “Now hang on,” I hear you saying. “What does pie have to do with anything?” Well, pie has crust. Most pie crust is made with cold water, cold fat (pro tip: lard makes the best pie crusts), and flour.

Some pie crust, though, especially for meat pies, is hot water crust, and this is where we start to get back to choux pastry. This crust has a couple of advantages, primarily that it’s tasty and that it can hold a shape, even when rolled thin. You can cook a hot water crust pie without a tin if you finagle it a bit (useful in the less refined medieval kitchen that doesn’t have mass produced everything), something a cold water crust pie could ever hope to achieve. Hot water crust is made by boiling the water and fat (usually butter) together, and then adding and cooking the flour. Recall how choux pastry is made, and you’ll see this is quite similar. In fact, all we have to do to go from hot water crust to choux is change up the ratios of flour and water, and add some eggs once our paste has cooled down. Here’s the thing: hot water crust has existed since at least the 1300s in Britain, and quite possibly existed earlier, just not in written down cookbook form (or at least, any cookbooks that survived). Incidentally, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote down the first recipe for apple pie in the 1380s, so “American as apple pie” is also incorrect. This doesn’t in and of itself disprove that Pantanelli invented choux pastry, but he certainly didn’t whip it up out of thin air--at best, he was improving on a well established recipe that was itself already centuries old and used regularly throughout Europe. That no one ever added eggs to hot water crust between 1300 and 15(??) also seems dubious, given that eggs were regularly used as a baking ingredient. In fact, A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye, declarynge what maner of meates be beste in season, for al times in the yere, and how they ought to be dressed, and serued at the table, bothe for fleshe dayes, and fyshe dayes published in 1545, explicitly lists a recipe for hot water crust that adds “the yolckes of two egges and make it thynne and as tender as ye maye.”

The point is this: Pantanelli may or may not have invented choux, along with all of Catherine de Medici’s other chefs who supposedly invented the rest of French cooking. But he didn’t invent the concept of choux, i.e., adding eggs to a hot water, twice cooked pastry dough, despite what the recipe blogs say. Most likely, he played around with the ratio of a well established and well known recipe, possibly in an attempt to make thinner pie crust, and the world has been a tastier place since. Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have to figure out how to make a high altitude Yorkshire pudding.

Sources:

A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye, declarynge what maner of meates be beste in season, for al times in the yere, and how they ought to be dressed, and serued at the table, bothe for fleshe dayes, and fyshe dayes, 1545.

Pie, A Global History. Janet Clarkson. 2009.

Food and Museums. Ed. Nina Levant and Irina D. Mihalache. 2019.

Londoner’s Larder: English Cuisine From Chaucer to Present. A. Hope. 2011.