Elevating the Humble Cookie

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/magazine/elevating-the-humble-cookie.html

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Twenty-five years ago, I met Pierre Hermé for the first time. We were in a labyrinthine basement kitchen that thrummed with the low rumble of mixers and oven fans, and he mentioned ‘‘the architecture of taste.’’ I wrote the words in my notebook, sensing they were important even if I didn’t understand them — all I could imagine was blueprints of intricate confections in infinite flavors. At that time, Pierre was the head pastry chef at the Parisian food hall Fauchon. He was a pastry chef’s pastry chef, admired by professionals in France, somewhat known among pros in America and on the cusp of fame worldwide. I didn’t have a clue who he was. I had secured a 15-minute interview for an article I was writing, and I turned up on time and left two hours later, my head spinning with ideas he planted there and my pockets bulging with small cakes, chocolate bonbons and cookies. I didn’t know that I had also taken away the seeds of a lasting friendship.

Count me among the many who’ve been shaped by Pierre’s work, his books (two of which I wrote with him), his philosophy of desserts and his encouragement. His peeves too. If the desserts that I create are plain — I call them ‘‘tailored’’ — it’s because before I put so much as a squiggle of icing on a cake, I contemplate whether it would meet Pierre’s strict standards for embellishments.

Soon after we met, Pierre and I had dinner out. As dessert neared our table, Pierre’s nose crinkled, and his lips pursed, and by the time it landed, Pierre’s hand was slightly raised. In one swift move he picked off the mint leaf that topped the now-forgotten sweet, tossed it to the middle of the table and declared: ‘‘I detest this! It makes no sense! It has nothing to do with the dessert! It doesn’t add anything!’’

A fourth-generation pastry chef, Pierre began his apprenticeship when he was 14. Over four decades, he has created countless pastries — their looks becoming sparer, their flavors and textures more complex — but among the hundreds of inventions, there’s one that stands apart: the Ispahan.

Named for an ancient Persian city famous for its Damask roses, the Ispahan is Pierre’s obsession. He began to experiment with its primary combination of rose and raspberry in 1987, and 10 years later, he introduced his first Ispahan: a macaron the size of a cake. It was composed of two discs of almond-meringue batter, tinted pink, baked crisp on the outside and tender in the center, sandwiching a rose-flavored cream that cushioned bits of lychees, a fruit remarkably complementary to rose and raspberry. (The idea to include lychees sprang from the flavors of Gewürztraminer, a wine from Pierre’s native Alsace.) Raspberries, placed upright like little shoulder-to-shoulder soldiers, encircled the cake’s middle, and on top, there were raspberries and deep-crimson rose petals.

Since then, Pierre has created a family of Ispahan desserts, a clan of about 40 cakes, tarts, candies, ice creams, croissants and jams, each in Hermé style: Their exteriors are beautiful but minimally fussed with, while their interiors offer deeply considered layers of flavors, what I now know is the ‘‘architecture of taste.’’ Remarkably, you get this intricacy with even the most basic Ispahan sweet, the sablé, a French shortbread cookie.

Not long ago, I sat with Pierre in his Paris office near the Parc Monceau with a plate of those bite-size sablés between us. They had an initial crunch and then a sandiness that marks the best sablés. Their flavor was floral — the rose was subtle; the raspberries were intensely bright — and the coarse sugar around the edges was tongue-tickling. They looked homemade rather than patisserie-perfect, and they were irresistible.

Following a recipe from Pierre, I made those cookies at home, using butter, flour and sugar from the supermarket, American-distilled rose extract and freeze-dried raspberries from Trader Joe’s. The recipe was familiar to me, as it would be to most home bakers: It follows the elemental cream-the-butter-and-sugar-together method. One comfort of baking is its recurring themes and variations; the same gestures that turn out lunchbox cookies can make a French dainty. Still, I paid attention. When I mixed the butter and sugar together, I was careful not to beat too much air into the dough — air is for fluffy cakes, not sturdy cookies. And when the flour went in, I hovered over the bowl and switched the machine off the instant the dough shifted from knobby to almost cohesive. (Long experience has taught me that overmixing is a misstep paid for with tough cookies.) And I stopped midmix, when the extract was added, to literally smell the roses. We all expect to be seduced by the perfume of sweets in the oven, but it’s lovely to be surprised by small moments in the process.

The Ispahan sablés are slice-and-bake cookies — logs of dough, cut into rounds and then baked. It’s the type of cookie you’d teach a child to bake, but as often as I make them, that’s as often as a log might end up with a hollow spot hidden inside it: Air in a log will make a tiny opening in the cookie’s center. I’ve come to think that the divots are cute, but still, I tighten each log and start over if it’s not solid. And even though I cut the cookies precisely — I mark the logs with a ruler — and give the logs a quarter turn now and then, so I don’t flatten them, I seem to always have a couple of out-of-round cookies. The first time I made them, my sablés looked handmade, like Pierre’s, and inside, like his, they were architecturally sound: They tasted sophisticated and, yes, French. I shrugged off their small imperfections and ate another.

Recipe: Pierre Hermé’s Ispahan Sablés