They make us salivate.
You only have to hear their names to think of cream cakes, golden petits fours and crispy soufflés.
The reputation of French gastronomy is well established.
A quick glance at the French language confirms this: a constellation of culinary metaphors is strewn across our dictionaries.
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Do you know where
“rum baba”
comes
from
? The word
"baba"
originates from Poland, where it means
"kind of pastry"
. It would have been, like the cake which it designates, introduced in France by the court of Stanislas Leczinski, duke of Lorraine and former king of Poland, one reads in the Treasury of the French language. The meaning of
"cake"
is derived in Polish from that of
"old woman"
, due to a certain analogy of form.
"Baba"
is in the latter sense a Slavic word, formed from an onomatopoeia of children's language.
Little anecdotes like this abound in the history of the names of our pastries.
do you know them?
Le Figaro invites
you to check it with this short test.