835: Fall Cookbooks with Aleksandra Crapanzano, Anna Ansari, and Cassie Yeung

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

This episode of The Splendid Table celebrates new fall cookbooks by exploring global flavors and accessible home cooking. Host Francis Lam inte

Key takeaways

• Alexandra Crapanzano reveals how Marie Antoinette's pharmacist accidentally created the first sweetened chocolate confection by masking bitter medicine with cocoa and sugar.
• Anna Ansari traces dill-infused noodles from Iran to Central Asia, highlighting the Uzbek dish Shivit Oshi as a rare culinary relic of Silk Road migration.

Main topics

• History of chocolate in French royalty
• Silk Road culinary connections and migration

Notable quotes

"No, don't kill the chocolate guy. The chocolate guy we like."

Conclusion

Listeners gain practical recipes for elegant desserts and quick weekni

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) We all know the Beach Boys, but to really understand them you have to get to know the genius behind their songs. Brian Wilson. I'm Will Anderson, and this week on the Monday Music Club podcast, we dive into the history behind two of his masterpieces, the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds and their song Good Vibrations. I was joined by Brian's biographer, David Leaf, and we went through what drove Brian, what it was like in the studio during those sessions, and why the pressure of following them up made Brian have to take a step back from music. You can listen to the episode everywhere you get your podcasts by searching for Monday Music Club. Speaker 6 (0:36) Hey, it's Francis. And this week, we're bringing you back an episode from last year about some terrific cookbooks. Check it out. Speaker 6 (0:47) I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. Speaker 6 (1:00) You know, for cookbook fans, the best time of the year is here. The fall season, with new books fit to gift, debuting every week for months. And we wanted to highlight three of them we're especially excited about. One that reminds us that the breadth of the world's cuisines and cultures is one of the things that makes life worth living. And how even faraway places can be more similar than we thought. That's the book Silk Roads by Anna Ansari. Another book brings us, or me at least, closer to home with Chinese and other Asian recipes that I remember from growing up. Literally. That's a debut cookbook called Bad B**** and Kitch from TikTok star and my baby cousin, Cassie Young. But first, we're going to live a little. We're going to start with dessert. Alexandra Krapenzano grew up in a literary family in Paris and has had a successful career in writing and producing for film and television. But you let a kid grow up in Paris, and chances are they'll be obsessed with food. And so for 15 years, she also wrote a cooking column for the Wall Street Journal. Her latest book, Chocolat, is the second in a trilogy of cookbooks about French home baking. And we're going to get to the good stuff today. Speaker 2 (2:13) So, hey, Alexandra, so great to see you. Speaker 1 (2:15) Great to be back on the show, Francis. Thanks. Speaker 2 (2:17) So I want to dive right into the book because there's so much to talk about. You know, for sure, French cuisine has created so many of the world's favorite chocolate dishes, right? Like chocolate mousse, chocolate tarts, even the chocolate molten lava cake. But I didn't actually realize how deep the history of chocolate in France is. Can you tell us how? chocolate transformed from its origins in maya and aztec culture to when it got to france Speaker 1 (2:49) Absolutely. You have to jump thousands of years. But it really began with four different King Louis. Right? I mean, it began in the court because nobody else could afford chocolate. But it really began in 1615 when Anne of Austria, who was only 14 years old, was suddenly shipped off without her parents to France to marry Louis XIII, who was... also a teenager. He was only 14. And she arrived with a trunk full of chocolate, which was the saving grace because the two did not get along. Let's just say that. Louis XIII loved the chocolate, loved his Austrian wife less. They eventually consummated their marriage and had Louis XIV, the great famous Louis XIV with the Corte Versailles, who really, you know, is credited with inventing luxury as we know it. And But one of the things that he did is he used chocolate to keep all of his courtiers at Versailles behaving. So he had a chocolate maker who had to make a different chocolate confection every single day, which couldn't have been easy. And basically, who Louis XIV shared his chocolate with was the flavor of the day, literally, right? So if you were not getting chocolate with... Louis XIV, you knew that you were not in his graces. And Speaker 4 (4:14) so Speaker 1 (4:14) it became this incredibly important thing in the Speaker 4 (4:17) court of Versailles. And then later in life, and this is quite terrible, I guess, for chocolate, in any case, he ended up changing his ways completely and falling in love with Madame de Matignon, who was a young puritanical beauty. This was when Louis XIV was much, much older and she was... much, much younger and very beautiful and very religious. And she immediately insisted that chocolate be banned from Versailles because it was seductive and it had terrible effects on innocent souls. And being a man of a certain age and smitten with a young woman, he quickly banished it. And this began an incredible black market in chocolate, because chocolate at the time was really considered an aphrodisiac. So nobody really wanted to be without chocolate. And then, you know, jump ahead to Louis XV. And he was famous for preparing the hot chocolate that he would drink in his kind of amorous afternoons with his mistress, Madame du Barry. And what made this kind of a total talk of the town, so to speak, was that, you know, kings did almost nothing back then themselves, right? right? People got them dressed. They brought them Kleenex to blow their nose. They did everything, not Kleenex, but handkerchiefs. But he insisted on making the hot chocolate all by himself in his apartments. He would not let anybody in the staff touch it. So he would go to a private apartment with his mistress and he would actually cook the hot chocolate over the stove himself with a ratio, an incredible ratio of one volume of chocolate to one volume of water. And then he would... actually kind of wisely whip in an egg yolk to give it some richness. But it was not sweetened yet. Speaker 2 (6:08) You know, in all of my imagination of what like the kings of France ever did, not one of them was ever like, and then he would chill by the stove and start making his own hot chocolate. I know. Speaker 1 (6:19) No, it's crazy, right? And then, of course, everybody loves talking about Marie Antoinette for good reason. And, you know, when she was brought again over, to, you know, at the tender age of 14 to marry the future Louis XVI. At that point, she brought her Speaker 4 (6:35) own chocolate maker. And he used to, and this was quite radical because he used to sweeten the chocolate, hot chocolate, with a little bit of orange blossom and a little bit of almond. So not sugar yet, but still kind of gave it a different kind of richness because before that it had really been a kind of... a bittersweet, almost thick coffee-like fortifying drink. It was not a dessert by any stretch of the imagination. At the same time, though, King Louis XVI's chef also invented chocolate mousse. But going back to Marie Antoinette, she was famous for having headaches, probably hangovers, but let's call them headaches. And her pharmacist would bring her her headache remedy. And Marie Antoinette hated taking medicine. So he decided that he would mix it in a little bit of cocoa and put in a little bit of almond and a little bit of sugar and kind of make it into, let's just call it an early truffle, for lack of a better word. I mean, she called them pistole, but he basically would give her the medicine wrapped in chocolate. And she loved these little chocolate confections and said, you know what? Forget the medicine. I just want the chocolate. I just want the sweetened chocolate. Yeah. And that became the very, very first chocolate confection. I mean, chocolate had never been considered a candy before this pharmacist decided, hey, you know, my patient's going to be much happier taking her medicine. So that Speaker 2 (8:05) was the first time chocolate met sugar. Exactly. In recorded history. And then from there it became. chocolates as candy, chocolates as chocolate bar, chocolate as a part of dessert. Speaker 1 (8:17) Exactly. That's incredible. And this is classic French, but the pharmacist, who obviously also became a chocolate maker at that point, much more profitable, not only was the only one in the court who was not guillotined in the revolution. I mean, you know, obviously Marie Antoinette was, and obviously the king was, and all of the ladies-in-waiting. He survived, probably because of a nice little chocolate bribery. And then he became the chocolate maker to Napoleon Bonaparte. And then when Napoleon was sent off to live the rest of his days on an island, Dubov was appointed the chocolate maker Speaker 4 (9:00) to the crown for Charles X. And on the rue de Saint-Père in Paris, in the 7th arrondissement, you can still go to the shop and get the same. for the little pistole that Marie Antoinette loved. Speaker 2 (9:13) That's wild. So he is the great survivor. He survived all these violent revolutions. No, don't kill the chocolate guy. The chocolate guy we like. Speaker 1 (9:20) Yeah, we need him. We gotta have him. Speaker 2 (9:23) All right, so history lesson aside, the book is primarily this fabulous collection of recipes. I love how a lot of them are very much home-friendly recipes and some of them are the home-friendly recipes from renowned pastry chefs. But I really want to start with the chocolate mousses. And I say mousses because you have, I counted, nine different chocolate mousses. I don't mean chocolate raspberry, chocolate caramel. No, these are nine different chocolate mousses, like chocolate-flavored mousses. So why that many? And what's the difference between them? Speaker 1 (10:00) Oh, I love that question. Okay, first of all, mousse is obviously my favorite dessert. It actually, I think, is most people's. Nine of them. favorite dessert. No, actually, I had to eliminate a few just to keep page count down. But there's something really paradoxical about mousse to me, right? Because it's light, but it's dense, it's airy, it has body. It's voluptuous, but it's also ephemeral. It is all of these things. And as Speaker 4 (10:27) I was really kind of delving into mousse, I realized, wait a second. There are so many different approaches. I mean, one is that kind of classic eggy mousse that we know from Julia Child here, which is kind of springy, a little sexy. It's just got an amazing texture to it. But there is also a fantastic lighter mousse that comes from a wonderful chef in Paris named Christian Constant, who makes one with just egg whites. And it's kind of incredible because it just vanishes on the tongue, but you're left with this kind of... fantastic echo of chocolate flavor. Then there's, you know, if you can't eat raw eggs, I remember in pregnancy, I wanted a whipped cream chocolate mousse. So I made one. Yeah, no. So anyone who cannot eat eggs for any reason should definitely check out this recipe by Cyril Lignac, who again, a great chef. And he just uses a very, he uses a very dark chocolate and just enough whipped cream essentially to create a very chocolatey. mousse still, but without any eggs. You know, Hervé Thysse, who we know, who, you know, a kind of a cult figure among foodies like us, French chemist, found a way of marrying chocolate and water, which Speaker 1 (11:41) nobody Speaker 4 (11:41) thought could work because usually water will break down chocolate. And there's a mousse I include in this book, which I absolutely love, which is only made from two ingredients, chocolate and water. And you... You know, you bring the water to a nice steamy heat and you whisk it on, you know, over an ice bath with chocolate and you whisk a lot, but it becomes this absolutely beautiful kind of billowy, very rich chocolate mousse. Because it's Speaker 2 (12:08) literally just chocolate. Chocolate and water. Yeah, Speaker 4 (12:11) and dark chocolate. So it's actually really healthy, amazingly enough. And then, you know, I think one of my discoveries was a recipe I love. from Gaston Le Nôtre, which, you know, one of the great, great pâtissiers ever to live, I think. And, you know, trained everybody, by the way, including Alain Ducasse. And he has a great recipe that is, it can be a filling, it can be a mousse, it can go in a pavlova, it can go between even an American chocolate layered cake. Basically, it is the most incredibly versatile. what they call a ganache montée, which is essentially a whipped ganache. So that is really just chocolate and cream, but only just enough because obviously cream will dilute the chocolate. And the French are so serious about their chocolate. They really want their chocolate to be dark and rich and to have a real depth of flavor. So you don't get a lot of kind of very sugary chocolate or very milky chocolate generally, at least at a high level of cooking. Speaker 6 (13:17) Alexander Kravitzano is the author of Chocolat, Parisian Desserts and Other Delights. We'll be back with more with her in just a minute. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. Speaker 7 (13:30) I'm Shilpa Uskakovich. And I'm Jazzy Sepchak. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake. Send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking. Speaker 7 (14:12) Are you the one that gets the plans out of the group chat and into an actual restaurant? Let me help you out. I'm Brandi Fullwood, host of Seattle Eats, and I gotta say, this podcast is for you. Every week I talk to chefs, critics, industry people about the best places to eat in Seattle, so you always know where to go next. Listen to Seattle Eats on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (14:45) I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters. We're talking with Alexandra Cropanzano, author of Chocolat. Let's get back to it with her. Speaker 2 (14:55) I love a good chocolate tart. I think it's like one of the most unbeatable desserts. There's one that I was really intrigued by because it was also quite simple as you described in the book, but it sounds