In looking at cookbooks from previous centuries, you discuss how pastries, tarts, buns, cakes, and pies were once all placed under one category. Up to the 18th century, the boundary between them seems very open. But what is a pastry proper?

A true pastry has a bottom like a cakes, it has to be filled with a jam or cream filling, and the third element is the glazing, which can be decorated. There are variations on this. It can, for example, be a ball of chocolate, but there must be something hidden inside, some kind of surprise.

The pastry proper develops in Venice. From the early Middle Ages until the late 18th century, Venice was one of the focal points of European fashion and luxury goods. We know that in the 17th century, the pastry cooks or confectioners in Venice consisted of immigrants from the poor valleys in the Graübunden province of Switzerland. After an edict passed in 1603 that allowed people from Switzerland to settle and work freely in Venice, these immigrants established themselves quickly as pastry chefs and developed the art to a new high point and organized themselves into guilds. All of this is connected to the introduction of coffee and the new custom of eating pastries with coffee, as opposed to the prior arrangement where you had a pastry as a dessert at the end of dinner with a glass of liqueur or wine. Coffee had been known in Constantinople in the 1550s but only reached Venice in 1645. At first, it was only sold in pharmacies as a drug. Around 1680, a man from Graübunden opened the first coffee shop in Venice. By the early 1700s, the Graübunden immigrants ran 105 enterprises in Venice. But then the Venetians became jealous and when the edict expired in 1766, it was not renewed. Thats when these people left and pastry culture spread through Europe. We have a lot of documents about the pastries made by these Graübunden pastry chefs when they arrived in Scandinavia. There was resistance at first, of course. When the Swiss bakers showed up in Scandinavia in the early 19th century, the local bakers would ask the city not to allow these foreigners to work there, claiming that their own breads and sweet things were enough for the public.

The whole spread of pastries was part of the process of civilizing the upper classes. Luxury was no longer just to fill your belly with more food than anyone else, but to recognize a little thing like a pastry. This was more a class phenomenon used to delineate the border against the lower classes. The lower classes still had to eat when they could and starve for the periods in between.

This is also the moment when the names of pastries became more sophisticated. They were named more and more often after famous emperors, kings, or queens. There was a similar move in fashion. In Paris, Marie-Antoinettes fashion designer named every one of the queens hats after a famous actress. There are also influences from the Far East; the idea of decorating objects with seashells, for example, leaves its mark on the culture of pastries.

But if you look, the names were simply given by one individual baker to a new creation and they have stayed. At one level, there is no rationality to these things. The Sarah Bernhardt pastry was invented by a Norwegian baker! And a pastry can also have different names in different countries.