Salted at the start
A salty recipe at the start if we are to believe our culinary grimoires. In the 17th century, if you order profiteroles, you are served a kind of small bread filled inside with a kind of stew, for example sweetbreads. Pheasant is also sometimes added. It is eaten in slightly chic taverns. They are often served with soup. François Massialot, cook to Louis XIV’s brother, and credited with inventing crème brûlée, serves profiteroles garnished with minced ham and poultry, with asparagus and small mousserons (mushrooms). He adds rooster combs and veal rice, which makes one think of a kind of queen’s bite. And so these stuffed profiteroles are drizzled with a soup, just like we drizzle our profiteroles today with liquid chocolate.
Sweetened for almost 2 centuries thanks to Monsieur Carême
The sweet arrived much later, probably at the beginning of the 19th century. The king of cooks and cook of kings Marc Antoine Carême, in his royal cook, in 1828, talks about our current profiteroles with chocolate, which is not surprising since he was THE specialist in the wedding cake and therefore in the choux pastry. Today we continue to serve them the old way, with pastry cream, but we often also see profiteroles with a much simpler recipe since they are simply garnished with vanilla ice cream. In both cases, we cover them with melted chocolate and it sticks an incredible number of calories on your hips. But it’s so good!
French cuisine is often great recipes, but it’s always a lot of heart.