Chiboust and how one thing leads to another

"It’s a simple mixture of 3 parts crème patissière to 1 or 2 parts Italian meringue. The two are gently folded together and the resulting cream is used mainly as a filling for large pastries like Paris-Brest or Gâteau St. Honoré." Joe Pastry

And I could leave it at that, but already I have crème patissière (I think I know what that is but I'm not sure) and Italian meringue - what's that? and so I am off. Oh and what are Paris-Brest and Gateau St. Honoré? You will eventually see where it all leads with an actual recipe along the way. Maybe it will show you how scatty my brain is. So here we go.

Remember that item on the dessert menu from yesterday? Today I am dealing with 'raspberry and lemon chiboust meringue' and in particular with chiboust which was a word completely unknown to us - and we did not consider ourselves to be uneducated in the minutiae of food. I'm not sure whether I felt better when I found that it was also unknown to my (admittedly 1980s edition) Larousse Gastronomique. So I looked online and found out what it was, and also some pictures (see above). The picture is of chiboust cream atop something else amazing but I don't know what, and topped with a very pretty bit of some kind of caramel I'm guessing. Fancy patisserie food anyway.

As was my dessert. The chiboust bit was the round circle under the raspberries and the sorbet. I should have taken the photo from the side as well because it was creamier than it looks from above.

So I thought I had a definition, albeit with things in it that I didn't know about, but it turns out that it's not that simple. That definition did not hold for everyone. Some people seem to put gelatine in it as well - or even double cream. Wikipedia seems to think it's crème patissière lightened with egg whites. So I'm sorry I have no real conclusive definition. They all seemed to agree on the crème patissière though.

So let's begin with crème patissière.

"that thick, creamy yellow custard thickened with a little flour. I do like this, even though it is a bore to make." Nigel Slater

I did know it was some sort of custard - and I was sort of right, but the flour makes it thicker. It's the basis of thousands of delectable pastries, such as those French glazed fruit tarts, vanilla slice, in eclairs ...

Light is not the right word though and neither is it pale in colour like the chiboust cream at the top of the page.

You can find heaps of recipes on the net and I will give you one example at the end.

Italian meringue.

"Italian meringue is the most stable kind of meringue known to men! And because Italian meringue is so stable, it won’t leak, weep or collapse. On top of that, it is light as a feather! " The Tough Cookie.

The difference from ordinary meringue is that you beat a hot sugar syrup into your egg whites. Which sounds like the potential for disaster to me but that seems to be what you do. Maybe I should try it because I have to say I have given up on meringue. I just can't do it. Mine turn out soggy and chewy which is pretty horrible.

Ok - so that's chiboust in its most basic form - pastry cream + Italian meringue. But why is it called chiboust? It's named after M. Chiboust who had a patisserie in the Rue St. Honoré in Paris in the early 1800s. I don't know whether the M stands for monsieur or a name such as Michel, Maurice, Marc, Marcel ... Well, like everything, there doesn't seem to be consensus on this - words like alleged, and supposedly are used, but nobody has come up with a contrary theory and I don't know why there is any doubt.

La Rue St. Honoré rang a bell. In my head it had some sort of fashion connection as indeed it does, but not quite. Pissarro painted it a few times - here is one of his paintings. It's a road that runs north of the Louvre and it does have lots of fashionable boutiques and museums in it, but it is its extension the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore which has all the fashion houses in it, the Elysée Palace, and the British and American embassies as well as others, not to mention several museums and art galleries. Faubourg I learnt means outside the city walls. This was the dividing line between the original Rue and the Rue du Faubourg.

But my education did not stop there. Who was St. Honoré I now wondered. Now here is serendipity - sort of - he is the patron saint of bakers and patissiers, although not always!

His real name is Honoratus of Amiens and he lived around the 6th and 7th centuries. He was always virtuous and eventually became the Bishop of Amiens.

"According to a legend, when it was known in his hometown that he had been proclaimed bishop, his nursemaid, who was baking bread for the family, refused to believe that Honoratus had been elevated to such a position. She remarked that she would believe the news only if the peel [paddle] she had been using to bake bread put down roots and turned itself into a tree. When the peel [paddle] was placed into the ground, it was transformed into a mulberry tree that gave flowers and fruit. This miraculous tree was still being shown in the sixteenth century." Wikipedia.

There were lots of miracles associated with him and eventually in 1202 a baker donated some money for land to build a chapel in his name in Paris - on what is now the Faubourg St. Honoré. In the 17th century he was proclaimed the patron saint of bakers and pastry cooks. The connection with bakers comes from the story of the nursemaid and the bread paddle. That't the thing you see in the picture above at his feet - the thing you slide the bread on when putting the dough in the oven and taking the bread out. But there was a bit of competition from St. Lazare who had something to do with leprosy with which bakers were particularly familiar, though I'm not sure why. Whatever the reason St Honoré was installed as the patron saint in the seventeenth century, and in Paris there are three days of celebration of bread around his saint's day.

But back to chiboust and M. Chiboust of Rue St. Honoré. In honour of his patron saint and the street in which he lived and worked, M. Chiboust invented the Gateau St. Honoré - a patisserie classic.

Gourmet Traveller has a recipe by Damien Pignolet if you can be bothered. I give you the link to the recipe because it includes mini-recipes, for crème patissière, chiboust, Italian meringue, puff pastry and chooux pastry - all of which are a bit daunting on their own. I think this one is for the professionals really. Paris-Brest? Well who knows where that would take you, so I don't think I will. Here's a photo though.

So chiboust - basically a technical patisserie term, but why would you put it in a menu item description? Nobody knows what it is, not even Larousse, and it must annoy the hell out of the waiting staff when people ask. Still I learnt a few interesting trivia things.

Yuzu tomorrow.