Stroll around Place Gambetta square in the city Bordeaux and you may notice many shops selling red boxes of spool-sized rum and vanilla pastries for which this city is famed.
This is the canelé (pronounced kan-el-AY), a by-product of winemaking.
Sometimes legends take precedence over history. The origin of this Bordeaux delicacy remains a mystery. Does the miraculous creation of the canelé date back to 1519 in the religious community of the Annonciades convent, located behind St. Eulalie church? … The Lord moves in mysterious ways! They indeed made a small pastry, called “canelat”, cooked with lard. Created with flour and egg yolks recovered from the quays of the port of Bordeaux, it disappeared at the same time as its creators, driven out of the city by the French Revolution in 1790.
Another story tells it was the 17th century, the Faubourg Saint-Seurin, the heart of Bordeaux, where the first canauliers made the canaules, ancestors of canelés. The recipe was simple: flour and egg yolks. They were so popular that there were 39 canauliers in 1785!
Many revolutions and battles happened within this time period, which would explain the lack of more precise history (as many books were destroyed), but it appears that these cakes have come and gone numerous times from various convents around the winemaking regions of Bordeaux in Southern France. Winemakers used egg whites to clarify wine and would give the excess egg yolks to nuns to make food for the poor. With the addition of a few other ingredients, the canelé was born.
It wasn’t until 1930 that a similar recipe appeared in a particularly fashionable bakery in Bordeaux. Preserving the cylindrical shape of the canelat, the pastry, improved with rum and vanilla, had immediate success. It was called “cannelé” (“fluted”). It is believed that the current 12-flute shape was inspired by the typical Doric shape of the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux columns!
Another half a century later, around 1985, a group of patissiers’ (88 to be exact) came together to protect and cement the recipe and standard of these delicate pastries and make them the property of Bordeaux. These chefs took an oath to uphold this standard and use a secret recipe, which is kept in a vault and hopefully will be passed down to future generations. To confirm their authority, they dropped one “n” to create “canelé,” which has been seen around the globe.
What make canelés so famous? For once, the double effect of texture: crispy outside and soft inside… And the double fragrant, vanilla and rum flavour, a nice taste of islands. The crackly yet rubbery outer crust has a colour between molasses and dark brick, while the golden honeycombed interior tastes like custard and rum.
The combination of all these fragrances in the little morsel creates a mind-blowing effect and it tastes even better than it sounds.
Another beauty of canelés is versatility. They can be served for breakfast or dinner, as an appetizer or dessert—served whole, or sliced in half and stuffed with ice cream—and will complement coffee, tea, red wine or cognac.
We do bake weekly runs of canelés, using original copper moulds imported from Bordeaux. Come and try them – you won’t be disappointed!