Marie Antoinette never said Let them eat cake. Though I do imagine she might have said 'let me me eat chocolate' because the girl had a sweet tooth. So while I examine the unconventional diet of this former queen of France I'll do so with
18th century French biscuit et creme de chocolate. Thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video as we
'let me eat chocolate' this time on Tasting History. So we've established that Marie Antoinette never
said let them eat cake or "Qu'ils manget de la brioche." Namely because she was still a child when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote "At length I recalled the thoughtless saying of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: then let them eat brioche." And yet the spurious claim that that heartless princess was Marie Antoinette has persisted for centuries along with many other defamations to her character some true some not and most in between. And this can make it difficult to pick out what is actually true about the Queen's life especially in the more mundane things like what did Marie Antoinette like to eat, but sometimes multiple sources as well as
literal receipts agree on something, like the fact that Marie Antoinette loved dessert especially
chocolate she actually brought a chocolate maker from Vienna to France when she moved there so he could be her own personal chocolatier so I am making two chocolate treats that would have been
popular in France when Marie Antoinette was alive. The recipes come from one of the 18th Century's
most popular cookbooks on desserts by Massialot. "Biscuits de Chocolat. You take egg white, and great
chocolate into it: you don't need much; because it is only to give the smell and the color. Then
take some sugar ground with powder and mix it well with the rest; it takes until you have a manageable dough; then you will set out your biscuits the way that you want, on sheets of paper, and put them in the oven to cook them over a low heat, both below and above." So this sounds like an early version
of a meringue though he's completely unclear about when he wants you to to kind of whisk up the eggs but slightly lighter editions of the cookbook, still from the 18th century, have you whisk them at the beginning so that's what I'm going to do. So for this recipe what you'll need is: 4 egg whites at room temperature one heaping cup or 225 grams of powdered sugar, 5 or 6 tablespoons or about 50 grams of unsweetened chocolate. So this would be chocolate without any sugar in it
that is then grated into a powder, but if you just use cocoa powder that works just as well and it's
a lot easier. So first beat the egg whites until you start to get soft peaks then sprinkle in about half of the chocolate and keep mixing. Then slowly add in the sugar just a little at a time and whisk
as you do this. You can also add in a little bit more of the chocolate. You might not use the whole thing you might use even more of it, it's kind of up to you. He says to use as much to give it color and a smell but how much that's going to be is is kind of up to the person making it so use as much as you want but keep beating it until you have what he calls a dough. Now no matter what you do this will never be like a cookie dough, there's no flour in it so it's it's going to be much looser than that kind of dough but it's going to be not as fluffy as a modern meringue so something in between. But once you do get to that dough you're going to use it to make little
biscuits on a parchment lined baking sheet. Now the shape and size of these is is again kind of up to you. Different cookbooks from the time say that they should be about the size of a walnut and round, others say long. This one says do it however you want, and since they're for a queen I'm gonna do fancy little swirls. Then set them in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 degrees Celsius for one hour, and while you do that you can clean up or gather your ingredients for the next recipe or pop open a bottle of wine from today's sponsor Bright Cellars. The one I'm having is a red blend
called Palette Knife from Bordeaux. It's nice and juicy but it's surprisingly light, lots of
wonderful flavors like dark berries and almost like baking spices, and they they give you these cards that tell you you know some things that they might want you to pair it with. This one says coque au vin or sheep's milk cheese though of course I'm doing it with chocolate, and it is exactly my type of wine and really it's no surprise because I've been working with Bright Cellars for a while and so they've gotten to know my palette which is also the name of the wine, and to let them get to know your palette all you do is take a simple 7 question quiz and then they curate a box of different bottles and ship it to your door and while Bright Cellars is a wonderful way to
treat yourself it's also a lifesaver during the holidays because you always have a good bottle of wine on hand to bring to a party or give as a gift, unless you've gone through all of your own bottles
in which then you can give a Bright Cellars gift card. So thank you to those who have signed up with Bright Cellars, it really does help support the channel and thank you to Bright Cellars for giving viewers of Tasting History a limited time offer of $50 off of your first six bottle box. Just
click the link in the description to get started. Now while this one will surely go well with the
biscuits I think it's really going to shine with the creme de chocolate. So for that what you'll need is: 2 cups or 475ml of whole milk, 1 cup or 235 milliliters of cream, 2 egg
yolks, 1 cup or 100 grams of sugar and 4 to 6 ounces of chocolate. Now this chocolate really does need to be grated, you can't use cocoa powder for this so just take your time and and grate that chocolate. Also the amount that you use is going to be up to your taste, just kind of depends on how chocolate heavy you want or if you want something a little bit sweeter. Now this recipe is great because he does give specific quantities for most of the ingredients but he doesn't give them in modern units of course he gives them in these archaic French units like the 'chopine'
and 'septier', and the thing with these units is they weren't standardized across France or across the 18th century so there is some guesswork but I I think I figured out what he is talking about and the rest was pretty easy. He says to take all the ingredients except for the chocolate then "...boil it for a quarter hour, stirring with a spatula; then add some good grated chocolate, as much as is
needed to give it taste and color; allow it five or six boils then pass through a sieve, and serve
it cold." So once you've mixed everything but the chocolate together put it over a medium heat, and bring it to a light simmer and then let it simmer for 15 minutes. You have to gently stir it the entire time but during that time it will start to thicken. Then add in the chocolate and quickly mix it in. Now we want you to kind of heat this up and then take it off the heat and let it calm down, and then heat it up again calm down 5 or 6 times but that can lead to you overheating the chocolate and so it will seize, and then you get a lumpy oily mess, and it can happen at the drop of a hat, it happened to me. Luckily you can and save it, just add a little bit of cream 2 or 3 tablespoons of cream, and keep it warm and stir that in. Add a couple more until it eventually will come together
like magic and be a nice shiny smooth chocolate that you can pass through a sieve and then put it
into dishes to let cool. There's actually another chocolate treat that I thought about making but
once I learned that the way that Marie Antoinette ate it was with medicine mixed in I decided not to. See the story goes that the queen was complaining of the taste of a medicine that she was receiving so the chemist Sulpice Debauve mixed it in with some bitter chocolate that it had the cocoa butter removed, and so it left a nice crisp chocolate coin which she dubbed 'La Pistol' and they are
still sold today assumably without the medicine at the chocolate shop that Debauve opened in Paris. Now like so many stories about Marie Antoinette the veracity of this is questionable and seems to
completely rely on the word of the chocolate shop itself, but there are some things about what Marie Antoinette ate that we do know for pretty sure. Maria Antonia was born not in France but
in Vienna. The 15th child and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Teresa and Emperor Francis the First. By all accounts she was unremarkable but her tutor did admit "Her character, her heart, are excellent... [She is] more intelligent than has been generally supposed, [but as] she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous she is hard to teach." I got the same comment on my
fifth grade report card and it didn't hold me back and it didn't hold back Maria Antonia either because in 1770 at the age of 14 she moved to France and became Dauphine Marie Antoinette when she was married to Louis Auguste the grandson of King Louis XV and Dauphin or heir apparent to the throne. The reception to the new princess was mixed. She was quite popular with the common people, this will
change later on in the story but many at court especially those who did not care for the Austrian Alliance agreed with her tutor's assessment that she was "Rather lazy and extremely frivolous." And even when she became Queen many people at court still saw the worst in everything that she did, the
friends she chose, the clothes that she wore, even how she ate. One of her own ladies in waiting would later write "The king ate with a hearty appetite but the queen did not remove her gloves, nor did she unfold her napkin, in which she was very ill advised." The insinuation being that
the queen had nothing but contempt for those in attendance. She was haughty and aloof, and maybe she was but in this instance eating in front of an audience, actual spectators made her uncomfortable. "One of the many customs most disagreeable to the Queen was that of dining every day in public... At the dinner hour there were none to be met upon the stairs but those crowds, who, after having seen the Dauphine take her soup, went to see the Princes eat their 'bouilli' and then ran themselves out of breath to behold Mesdames at their dessert." And frankly as someone who doesn't even like their cat watching them eat I kind of side with Marie Antoinette on this, and yes I see the irony and the fact that I
have like a million million people watch me eat every week, but you're not here in the room with me, it would be very uncomfortable and not just because it's a rather small room. Also I did an entire video on this spectator meal so I'll put a link in the description to where you can watch
that it's really interesting and and kind of weird. Now it wasn't always the Grand Couvert which was
hundreds of people watching and hundreds of dishes being served, sometimes it was Le Petit Couvert and this would be you know fewer dishes still a lot but fewer dishes being served and the king and queen would eat in totally separate quarters. Only at Campan Marie Antoinette's chambermaid
wrote much about her mistress including how these meals went. And even the Petite Couvert, quite the production. "Before the Revolution there were customs and words and use at Versailles with which few people were acquainted. The King's dinner was called 'The King's meat'. Two of The
Body Guard accompanied the many attendants who carried the dinner, every one rose as they passed through the halls, saying, 'There is the King's meat.' In the evening they always brought the Queen a
large bowl of broth, a cold roast fowl, one bottle of wine, one of orgeat, one of lemonade, and some other articles, which were called the 'en-cas' for the night." En cas meaning in case and this was basically a
late night snack, and for Marie Antoinette that was usually some sort of sweet dessert. Now she also mentions that the queen was given a bowl of broth and about 10 years ago there was a fad diet called the Marie Antoinette diet that really relied on this. Basically it said Marie Antoinette every night she ate bone broth and a bit of white meat like chicken or something like that, and that's kind of true except that the word in the original writing is bouillon and that at the time could mean a lot of different things, yes it was usually a a soup or broth made with with bone
in it but it could also refer to the dishes that were then kind of made with that. So much more complex soups and everything so it's not bone broth in the way that we see bone broth probably. The diet also claims that Marie Antoinette was a teetotaler essentially and only drank water and the truth of that is- it's confusing because Madame Campan just said that she got a bottle of
wine every evening and and later on she talks about wine being served to the queen but then she
also says "Her sobriety was remarkable... at dinner she ate nothing but white meat, drank nothing but water, and sucked on broth, a wing of a poultry, and a glass of water in which she dipped little biscuits." You can see the source of confusion and I'm honestly not sure exactly what the answer was but even the water that she drank tended not to be low cal. "The queen had a habit... there was always some pounded sugar upon the table in her Majesty's bedchamber; and she frequently without calling anybody put spoonfuls of it into a glass of water when she wished to drink." So she drank sugar water like a hummingbird. Now one thing that the diet does get pretty spot on is that Marie Antoinette tended to take in most of her calories at breakfast. "The Queen awoke habitually at eight
o'clock, and breakfasted at nine, frequently in bed, and sometimes after she had risen, at a table
placed opposite her couch... On her bathing mornings she breakfasted in the bath... She breakfasted on coffee or chocolate... and a kind of bread to which he had been accustomed in her childhood in Vienna." It's often claimed that this bread was a croissant. Unfortunately the croissant as we know it today
was not invented until about 50 years after Marie Antoinette died so it wasn't that but it might
have been what was known as a kipferl whichwas quite popular in Vienna at the time. It still is and it's thought to be the precursor to the croissant. They are different types of bread, the kipferl is much heartier and usually sweetened whereas the the croissant is more like a delicate light flaky pastry but they are both crescent shaped. Either way these rather simple meals seem to be in stark contrast with her reputation for being a spendthrift spending all of France's money on clothes and jewelry while the people out in the streets starve but while I'm sure that the situation was full of nuance she still got the blame and the people who had
once adored their young beautiful Dauphine turned on her and her entire family and this was going
to really change how they ate. Following a failed flight from Paris where the royal family dressed as servants and were very clumsily whisked away out of the city to a stronghold in Vereen only to be captured when King Louis insisted on stopping for a snack of wine and Brie de Meaux, the family was taken back to their palace in Paris and put under strict guard and this really limited what they could eat not because they didn't have access to the finer foods that royalty were accustomed to
but because of who was making the food. "[The pastry chef was] so furious a Jacobin that he dared to say it would be a good thing for France if the King's days were shortened." So obviously they didn't feel comfortable eating this guy's food for fear that he'd poisoned them and instead of getting a new cook "it was determined that in future the King and Queen should eat only plain roast meat; that their bread should be brought to them by the intent of the smaller apartments, and that he should likewise take upon himself to supply the wine." But King Louie's love of pastry could not be ignored and
so Madame Campan says "I was directed to order some, as if for myself, sometimes of one pastry cook, and sometimes of another. The pounded sugar, too, was kept in my room." She would bring them their food and then the king and queen would eat alone but after a while things got worse... Now the situation is way too complex to cover here in this video. It is very interesting but I can't cover it now but essentially they went from being very unpopular to being enemies of France or considered enemies of the state, and so they were imprisoned, not in one of their palaces but in the Temple Tower. There any food coming in was suspect, not of poison but of plans- of letters giving details of a plot for them to escape. "Macarons were broken in half to see that they did not contain letters; peaches were cut open and the stones cracked." And eventually both macarons and peaches just fell
off the menu. "They were no longer to be allowed either poultry or pastry; they were reduced to one sort of basic food for breakfast, and soup or broth and a single dish for dinner, and two dishes for supper and a half bottle of wine apiece. Tallow candles were to be furnished instead of wax, pewter
instead of silver plate, and delft ware instead of porcelain..." Still sounds actually pretty
nice to me but I guess it was a big step down for royalty, and over the next year King Louis was put on trial, found guilty, and guillotined. Some months later Marie Antoinette was moved to
another prison to await the same fate. According to some stories the night before she marched up
the scaffold the Queen's last remaining servant Rosalie Lamorlière begged her to drink a bit of
soup but the Queen said "Child, I want nothing more, since for me everything is finished..." But Rosalie begged her and finally the Queen said "Very well, Rosalie, bring me the bouillon." She managed to get down a few spoonfuls and that was it. That was Marie Antoinette's final meal maybe because just like pretty much everything else to do with Marie Antoinette the stories in the years after she
died all differed. One claims that she had a soup with vermicelli noodles in it and one story even claimed that on the morning of the execution she was allowed to have a hot chocolate and pastry. I think that's very, very unlikely and the author was probably just looking through rose-colored glasses trying to remember the Halcyon Days when the queen could enjoy all the chocolate she wanted. And while this is not Versailles clearly I am going to enjoy all the chocolate that I want. So once the biscuits are baked turn off the oven and let them cool inside with the door still closed for at least
another 30 minutes preferably more like an hour or two. And once both they and the creme de chocolate
are cooled they are ready to eat. And here we are biscuit de creme de chocolat as might have been enjoyed by Marie Antoinette. First I think a biscuit by itself, here we go. Hm! This is very much like a merengue but a little but a little denser. A little closer
together because it well it's done in a slightly different way. It's not quite as fluffy but
it definitely has that Crunch and then that kind of gently gooey inside, just a little soft and
it's really, really sweet. I am getting chocolate but just mildly and I think that that's the
point he says just add enough for the scent and the color and I think you get that but it's not like it's not super chocolatey. And as for the creme super chocolatey. There's enough sugar that it's that it's not bitter but it's like a really dark ganache. Cross between a
ganache and the eggs and everything it's a creme anglaise or something but it's thick like a ganache but nice and smooth and delicious. Also a word about this glass so it's a champagne coupe and there are often stories told that the shape of the bowl is modeled after the bosom
of Madame Marie Antoinette. That is not true, nor was it shaped after any famous lady. That is
that's all wives tale but it's definitely one that persists. So thumbs up to both of the chocolate
treats they're absolutely fantastic especially I personally like the the creme de chocolate and
the texture. That nice creamy texture and it's and it's super chocolatey which I love chocolate so
make both, and if you like chocolate definitely make the creme de chocolate. So don't forget to check out bright sellers follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
