Who invented fondant?!


Question:

Who invented fondant?


Answers:
We just don't know, in the sense of being able to put a name to the person. (I'm assuming you mean fondant icing here.) Sugarwork didn't gain major culinary focus till the mid 18thC for the simple eonomic reason that sugar was ferociously expensive and/because in short supply, and having to be shipped huge distances in perilously dangerous conditions.

The first icings were in effect of the royal icing variety, using egg white and icing sugar, and this of course was an icing that went rock hard with time -- that was its purpose where 'sculptures' in icing were concerned. In the 1740s you'll be hard pushed to find any mention of icing work in culinary tracts, yet by the 1770s it is appearing in 'bourgeois' cooking manuals as well as in professional treatises, where you would first expect to find them.

Even in early icing work, there was a desire, already early on, to delay the hardening effects of the royal icing mixture, for instance by mixing a percentage of 'fine starch' (1) or similar non-glutenous farinaceous matter to 'dilute' the 'cement effect' of sugar mixed with albumen. Gum arabic featured too, though Carême preferred that (2) for greater plasticity to manipulate his 'pastillage' in the creation of his staggeringly complex, 4-6ft tall architectural Grandes Pièces Montées, rather than for any enhanced, 'melting' eating qualities.

Meanwhile, Italian kitchen masters had been forging ahead with syrups and icing sugars and albumen from, let's say, the 1670s onwards -- Venice had, comparatively speaking, a reasonably healthy supply of sugar which the aristocracies governing the different city states didn't hesitate to avail themselves of -- and somewhere around the 1720s, let's say, those two approaches must have met and melded, more likely than not in the wake of the frequent exchanges of kitchen masters between Italian and French aristocratic households and, of course, repeated intermarriages between the French royal house and Italian princesses, who tended to arrive in Paris 'fully kitted up' with their Italian master cooks in tow. That's our current best guess that I am aware of.

Hope this helps.

Source(s):
prof. patissier.
(1) e.g. Mrs. Elizabeth Raffald in her "The Experienced English Housekeeper" (1769)
(2) Antonin Carême, 'Le Patissier Pittoresque' (1815)

I'm not sure but I do know that Lindt invented chocolate fondant.




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