PICASSO OF PASTRY
Pleasure is the only guide, says Pierre Hermé of his confections
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The most abiding impression I have of Pierre Hermé is his smile. It comes naturally to him––and he starts looking like a boy in an entertainment store who has found a PS3 game that his friends have only heard about. He must be smiling like this each time he invents a brilliant combination of flavours that promises to be the rage till he produces the next.
The Alsatian genius has earned a string of alliterative sobriquets from his breathless fans: ‘Picasso of Pastry’, ‘Dior of Desserts’, ‘Marquis of Macaroons’ (which he insists must only be called macaron the way the French say it with their Gallic sensuality). But he sees himself as a scientist who has invented “a new universe of tastes, sensations and pleasures”. As we settled down for tea after he had the who’s who of Delhi literally eating out of his hand at the India Today Conclave 2014 (the second day’s proceedings took off with Pierre Hermé macaroons, which had been flown in from Paris especially for the occasion, being served to all delegates), I asked him if his art was similar to that of a perfumer. He gave that million-dollar smile of his and said, “A perfumer uses only his nose. A patissier works with both his nose and his palate.”
Hermé started talking about l’Immortelle (The Immortal), the flower that grows wild in the
scrublands of Corsica (his wife’s home) and forms the base of a popular L’Occitane perfume. A perfumer, would be happy to draw a memorable fragrance out of it, but for a patissier, it must not only smell divine, but also taste perfect in combination with the other ingredients of a confection. To re-emphasise his point, he mentions his Gar
den of Iris macaroon, which marries the flavours of smoked tea, saffron, carrots, violets and iris; you’d say it’s a marriage made in hell, but like a seasoned matchmaker, Hermé brings them together on the palate like one happy family. It is how he combines tastes that sets apart the master from the maverick.
He doesn’t play around with flavours just because it’s fashionable to be different, but because it is his business to provide his ‘high net worth’ customers exclusive collections of macaroons (each like a dress that a haute couturier makes exclusively for a favoured client) that are never repeated. Unsurprisingly, at his “creation laboratory”, three chefs are constantly at work, perfecting as many as 30-40 new flavour combinations at any given point.
Hermé is like a sponge––wherever he goes, he returns with the idea of a new flavour. It was in Bulgaria, many moons ago, that Hermé got the inspiration for what became his global best-seller: the macaroon Ispahan, where he surprised the world by combining whole raspberries, litchi and rose petal cream in the filling. The idea started with Hermé’s fascination with the extensive use of rose flavours in Bulgarian cuisine and today, he has 42 recipes with these three ingredients in his repertoire!
On a recent visit to Hong Kong, he was drawn to the flavours of Eight Treasures Tea (Ba Bao Cha), which comprises jasmine tea leaves, chrysanthemum, red dates, ginseng, wolfberries, the edible
fruit longan, rose buds and rock sugar. During his India visit, he said he had satisfied his old desire to taste mustard oil, which at once triggered speculation about a future macaroon inspired by our favourite cooking medium, like the one he did with ‘first press’ olive oil and vanilla. Hermé evaded an answer, choosing only to smile like a magician before he pulls out the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.
Hermé’s profession was determined by his birth. As he says, he grew up in the pastry shop that his great-grandfather opened (now owned by an employee of his parents) and he was helping around in the kitchen by the time he was nine. But what he made out of his legacy is a story worth repeating.
He was all of 14 when he went to Paris for an apprenticeship under Gaston Lenotre, the pastry chef and caterer from Normandy who was one of the inspirations for the character of Gusteau in the much- acclaimed animated film
Ratatouille (2007). Lanotre, as Sabyasachi ‘Saby’ Gorai, one of the country’s more talented chefs, will tell you, is the ‘Harvard of Pastry Making’.
At Lenotre’s kitchen, Hermé was known as the boy who asked too many questions, for, as he explained to a gathering of chefs and food bloggers at a high tea organised by India Today Spice and The Leela Palace New Delhi in Chanakyapuri, he wanted to know more than what his teachers were willing to share. Ask and you shall know more. That seems to be the philosophy defining Hermé’s creative career.
A guest at the high tea asked him what made him turn to macaroons. Hermé took us back to 1974, when he was Lenotre’s apprentice. It was then that he realised that the macaroon was one confection that had escaped the creative eye of pastry chefs. “It used to be two biscuits with four standard fillings,” Hermé says, remembering those early days. The lowly place of macaroons in the evolutionary ladder of desserts fired his imagination. All his life he has been rising up to this creative challenge, sourcing ingredients from all over the world––from Sicilian lemons and hazelnuts from Piedmont to cinnamon from Sri Lanka and single-origin cocoa from places as remote as Chuao in Venezuela, a community of only 122 farming families that can only be reached by boat ––to invent yet another unique taste.
So does he fear that a time will come when there won’t be any new combination left to create? “If that happens, I will die. My creativity is my life,” the maestro said with a sudden rush of emotion. And then that smile returned. It told us that it would be a long time before he runs out of ideas for new taste sensations.