The King's Cake (galette des rois), in whatever form it took, with a "bean" baked into it, has been the king of desserts on Twelfth Night, also known as the Feast of Kings or Epiphany in France, since the Middle Ages. In those days, the French King's Cake took different forms depending on the region. It was a brioche topped with candied fruits in Provence, a flat galette with cream in the North, a dry cake in Lorraine, a puff pastry round with an almond flavored filling in Lyon. À Paris, it was a gorenflot, a sort of enriched bread raised with baker's yeast, something like a Polish brioche. The ritual of this shared cake is symbolic of the day of the Epiphany, commemorating the presentation of Jesus to the Magi on the sixth of January, but it is also redolent of other pagan traditions linked to the cult of fertility that was so popular with the Romans. The "bean" hidden inside the cake was originally an actual lima bean, a symbol of renewal and fecundity, before it was replaced by a tiny porcelain figure representing the Christ child, then by a host of trinkets.
Today, the marzipan-filled, puff pastry round has gained supremacy almost everywhere. And for good reason—few pastries can give such extended pleasure. How delicious when, under its fine butter coating, the many-layered pastry (milles-feuilles), still warm, encounters the silky, fondant marzipan on the palate—a perfect combination of the puff pastry and grainy, ground almonds. No one knows exactly when this so-called "Parisian" cake was born.
The invention of marzipan dates from the sixteenth century. The history should be treated with caution, but it is sufficiently delicious to have been inscribed indelibly in the memory of gourmets. In 1588, an Italian marquis named Murio Frangipani marketed gloves perfumed with almonds. There is nothing surprising about this because perfumers were originally glove makers. The essence of Italian frangipani, about which Catherine de' Medici was passionate, inspired the pastry cooks of the French court to create frangipane cream, an equal mixture of pastry cream and almond cream.
King's Cake, whether flavored with fruits or almond cream, is a dessert with a history. Certain Epiphanies have been retained in the annals. For instance, on January 6, 1650, at the Louvre Palace, Anne of Austria and her son Louis XIV indulged in the cake, leaving on the table, as was the custom, a share for the poor, in this case the very part that contained the bean. The next morning, there was "no other king than that of the bean," the king having fled Paris to escape the uprising known as the Fronde. Is it because of this unpleasant memory that the tradition of naming the person who finds the bean as "king" for the day was outlawed during Louis XIV's reign, the custom being officially judged to be too pagan? In 1770, Diderot recounted this anecdote in his Encyclopédie, summarizing it with this amusing aphorism: "Signe Denis, sans terre ni château. Roi par the grâce du gâteau." (The sign of Denis [patron saint of Paris] without land or château, King by the grace of a gâteau.) The joy of eating the crown is all part of the pleasure of enjoying King's Cake once a year, and more....
