National French Cake Recipe.

Today’s excerpt is slightly longer, but offers us a glimpse into Parisian night-life in 1855. I love how Alexis uses extended preambles as a lead in to the actual recipes. You see this in celebrity cookbooks today.

For readers who are theater-goers, this post is a special treat!

Oh! The imagery here… “The melodramatic food of the gamins, galopins, mechanics, and semi-artists of France…”

Gamin: Street Urchin
Galopin: Kitchen Helper, or Scullion
Mechanic: Unsure, but given the associations before and after, probably not what we think of today. Anyone know?

Would love to know how Alexis procured the recipe, but, alas, that story is lost to history. What we DO have are three (3!!) recipes for French Galette. And, since we have a book for all audiences, they are presented as: Aristocratic Galette, Cottage Galette, and Poor Man’s Galette.

Today these would be 1% Galette, 99% Galette, and Twinkies – I foresee some poor food and cooking blog enthusiast trying to figure out THAT reference in 200 years.

Onto the recipes: