cookbook

There are people in this world who still think that Marie Antoinette was
Messalina and Lucretia Borgia rolled into one and it is with a pang that I recall the many years
that I thought the same way. Her name was synonymous with greed,venality and licence. But the
truth is that she was none of these things and was in fact a loving wife and a doting mother and any
serious investigation of her life will support this. The people who created the image of Marie
Antoinette did so quite deliberately and callously for their own ends and they left the Hollywood
myth-makers standing when they made a monster of the Queen of France. There is a room in the
basement of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris called L'Enfer {Hell} and the pamphlets and court
proceedings which the Revolutionaries distributed in their thousands are still there testifying to the
calumnies which are still believed today. Strangely, it is one of the lesser lies which has become
axiomatic in the Marie Antoinette legend and that is of course the alleged "Let them eat cake" .
There are many versions of this story but it was well known at that time that when bread was
expensive and in short supply then people would buy the cheaper "Brioche" and Brioche was cake.
What she really said was "Is there no Brioche?" which is quite a different interpretation.

Centuries of struggle between Islam and Christian

were never more epic than during the long life of Suleyman the

Magnificent. Most of those battles and sieges were fought

against the personification of militant religion, The Knights of

St John but Suleyman fought Christendom wherever he found it

and occasional forays into mainland Europe took him on one occasion

to the gates of Vienna. The Janissaries besieged the city for months on end but in 1629 retreated
when both sides were reduced to starvation. The Viennese celebrated the lifting of the siege with
what little that was left and at the same time developed a taste for the coffee that they captured.
It is not far from the truth to say that Turkish prisoners were prominent in the introduction of
Vienna's famous coffee-houses.The Viennese bakers played their part and crescent-shaped
pastries appeared to go with the coffee. Just over two hundred years later Maria Theresa of
Austria was still having crescent-shaped pastries with her coffee whilst marrying off her 16
children to the crowned heads of Europe. Her greatest coup was the arranged marriage of her
daughter Marie Antoinette to Louis the Sixteenth of France who took the recipe for the crescent-
shaped pastries with her and they became fashionable in Paris where they were forever after
known as croissants.