Retrospective: about the pastry chef

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Retrospective about the pastry chefThere is something of a fairy tale in the work of a pastry chef. Not from a fairy tale in general, but from a winter, New Year's fairy tale. Maybe because he deals with creams and oranges, almonds and candied fruits - these indispensable components of holiday cooking. Or maybe because the pastry chef looks like a good magician.

After all, like any good magician, he brings joy to people. Children jump merrily and clap their hands at the sight of a cake that looks like a beautiful flower bed. Adults smile as they admire the curly decorations on the cake, which is often a real piece of art.

It happens that a pastry chef becomes a character in a fairy tale. When the little heroine of the famous work of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann - "The Tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King" - gets through the open doors of the old wardrobe into the doll kingdom, everything there reminds of the art of pastry. The gates are made of macaroons, the sidewalk is lined with slabs of sugar boiled with spices, the roofs of houses are decorated with candied lemon, the obelisk in the square is a glazed cake, and in the fountain basin there is whipped cream instead of water. Graceful princesses in this fairy tale squeeze fruit juice with their own hands, crush spices, peel almonds. In a word, they behave like ordinary pastry chefs.

About confectioners, about their skill, is said in another, no less famous fairy tale - "Three Fat Men" by Yuri Olesha. The author describes a pastry shop that resembles a fruit shop, full of juicy tropical fruits, and the sweet, dizzying fragrance standing there, and bursting bubbles on boiling chocolate, and a white cream that has a lovely pinkish tint.

It is very remarkable that pastry chefs became heroes of fairy tales. This means that their profession is truly magical if it could inspire storytellers.

Well, what happens when a fairy tale “comes to life”, becomes a reality? Oh, we know well what happens then. Then in the store "Sever" on Nevsky Prospekt, special excitement reigns, joyful and amazed exclamations of people who have come here for cakes are heard. They are bought both for the holiday and "just like that" ...

The pastry chef is one of the oldest professions. Even in ancient Rome, the creators of sweet masterpieces demonstrated their skills. In Petroniev's "Satirist Horse", for example, is described a pastry dish depicting the god of fields and gardens, the patron saint of sensual pleasures, Priapus, made of dough. He kept fruits and grapes in the hem of his tunic. At the slightest pressure, jets of saffron juice gushed from the fruits.

S. T. Aksakov spoke with delight about the almond cake that his mother made with her own hands: “I watched carefully how she doused the almonds with boiling water, how she peeled off the swollen skin, how she chose only the purest and whitest almonds, how she made them crush, if the cake was made from almond dough, or as she cut them with scissors and, kneading these scraps on egg whites, knocked down with sugar, made wonderful figures out of them: either wreaths, then crowns, then some kind of flower hats or stars; all this was planted on an iron sheet strewn with flour, and sent to the kitchen oven, from where it was brought just before dinner, completely ready and fried. " Further Aksakov described how his mother put on a high white apron, carefully removed a wonderful cake from an iron sheet with a knife, sprinkled each figurine with raspberry syrup ...

What comparisons are made to cakes and pastries! Ilf and Petrov said with a smile that the straws with cream, the very ones that should be eaten with care, so that the cream does not squeeze out from the other end, are the "grub of the gods."The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, this encyclopedia of modern cooking, emphasizes that cakes and pastries are "the most exquisite ready-made dessert."

Excellent cakes are produced in our time by the bakery industry, in particular, a flour-confectionery combine, bakery No. 16 and "Krasny Pekar" in Leningrad. Wonderful masters of their craft work here - confectioners-figurants.

Like a painting or sculpture, a cake is also born in the silence of a workshop. Only if the painter deals with paints - watercolors and oils, and the sculptor creates figures from clay and plaster, then the pastry chef has a special kind of material: flour and sugar, chocolate and almonds, nuts and fruits, eggs and wine. The artist's working tool is a brush, the sculptor's is a stack, and the pastry chef's is a so-called pastry bag made of special fabric with a set of tips and syringes. With their help, he creates his delicious masterpieces.

There was a time when cakes were made in the form of a flower basket, a basket with mushrooms or a cornucopia, from which cream chrysanthemums, roses, magnolias fell. "Such a cake in its appearance, perhaps, would correspond to the atmosphere of the hall and table setting in the Baroque, Rococo style of the 16th-18th centuries, but now, against the background of modern interiors and new serving, it does not fit into the general ensemble," he wrote back in 1969 magazine "Public catering".

Pastoral sweetness, pretentiousness and luridness, which reigned undividedly in confectionery shops in the recent past, have now given way to a new thematic content in the design of products. For example, the Bride, Groom, and Circus cakes were created at the flour-confectionery plant. There is no "sweet bad taste" in them. The graceful oval Bride cake is all white. Its decoration is white roses of various sizes. In the "Groom", which looks somewhat similar to the previous cake, dark tones prevail. Round cake "Circus" is decorated with figures of clowns. Their bodies are made of meringue, their collars are made of a tiny sand basket, their faces are made of white cream, their hair is made of chocolate, the cap is made of a sugar tube, and the pompom on it is made of colored cream. The "Circus" cake has received all-Union fame.

Confectioners from Metropol, updating their products, decided to treat Leningraders with a cake called Leningrad Souvenir. They made it without a single gram of flour, only from sugar, eggs and almonds, and on top they decorated it with an image of the Summer Garden grate made of pure chocolate. The cake was a success.

Who are they, these master wizards who own the art of creating culinary masterpieces from such an unusual material?

In the first post-war years, Vasily Nikolaevich Semenov was famous in Leningrad. It was an old master. He received his pastry chef diploma back in 1900. For a quarter of a century, Semyonov worked at the Krasny Bekar bakery. There he created the original layout of the Pushkin Drama Theater. The walls were biscuit, the doors were chocolate, and the columns were sugar. Not a single detail was forgotten by the skilled craftsman. Even the ornaments on the façade were reproduced (from marzipan) with amazing accuracy.

Another model depicted the Petrodvorets Park. The Great Palace, balustrade, fountains - and among them the famous "Samson". Only not water gushed from the fountain, but "jets" from transparent candy.

Another model is the Spit of Vasilievsky Island with the building of the former Stock Exchange and Rostral columns. And here the same unusual material was used: sugar, biscuit, chocolate.

All these works Vasily Nikolaevich performed with his students. After the war in Leningrad, it was decided to organize the training of master-figurants, and the training was entrusted to the old pastry chef. Young specialists mastered not only the confectionery business. They learned both modeling and drawing: knowledge of these subjects is necessary for those who work on making curly cakes.Nowadays, modeling and painting are also included in the confectionery groups of vocational schools.

Among those who consider V.N.Semenov as their teacher are such masters as Nikolai Rogachev, Nikolay Rumyantsev, Oleg Pyabus. In the manual for confectioners "Flour confectionery", you can see a photo in which Nikolai Rogachev is filmed with his product - a decorative cake "Admiralty". This cake weighed 15 kilograms. The material for the "facing" of the roof stech, the Admiralty spire, the production of 48 columns and 44 sculptural figures was sugar mastic... Small details of the building, the towers were made of glaze.

At the flour and confectionery plant, the confectioner-figurant Izabella Mikhailovna Pimenova is famous for her art. She is the author of the cakes "Bride", "Groom", "Circus".

The well-known Severa confectionery is produced under the guidance of the production manager Veronika Nikolaevna Savchenko and the master pastry chef Tamara Sergeevna Smirnova, holder of the Order of Lenin. It is interesting that Tamara Sergeevna brought her three sisters, Lidia, Galina and Lyudmila, to work in the Sever. All of them also became skilled pastry chefs. But the leading "party" in this "quartet" of sisters still belongs to Tamara Sergeevna. Her wonderful cakes are awarded the VDNKh Gold Medal.

Among the best confectioners at Metropol is the young master Lyudmila Timofeeva.

It has already become trivial, talking about a cook or pastry chef, to say that his interest in this profession originated in his childhood. But what can you do if it really is. Lyudmila Timofeeva recalls that even in her school years she wanted to become a pastry chef. Every time she passed the pastry shop, she stopped, leaned her face to the window and looked at the cakes displayed behind the glass. She was interested in how these beautiful products are made, how cream curls, flowers, monograms are made ... At home she was given money for movies, for ice cream, but she bought cakes. Each time is different. No, she was not a sweet tooth. She just wanted to know how one cake is different from another. Today she ate "bouchet" and "straw", next time - "potatoes" and "basket". Friends, having learned about her hobby, slightly teased her, but she continued her "research".

With such a serious interest in business, the most direct road was to confectioners. And Lucy, already working after graduation as a laboratory assistant at a medical institute, decided to change the white coat of a medical worker for the same white one, but a different one - a coat of a catering worker. She came to Metropol and asked to teach her the specialty of confectionery. She was taken as a student.

Now she was most directly involved in the manufacture of cakes and pastries. She began by helping to lay meringues on iron sheets, fill tartlets and eclairs with cream. Nine months passed, and she was entrusted with independent work: first, over the branded weight cakes - "Fairy Tale", "Gift", biscuit-cream, and then over custom-made cakes for weddings, anniversaries and other celebrations.

Not every pastry chef, even with experience, gets such a task. Not everyone is entrusted with the execution of ordered cakes, such as, say, the cake created by the Metropol staff for the filming of the movie Blue Bird. This cake-cone, a giant cake decorated with pineapples, with numerous decorations (not a cake, but a whole architectural structure!), Was made by the head of the confectionery production of Metropol Lyudmila Ivanovna Ivanova and her deputies Lyudmila Semyonovna Denisova and Galina Pavlovna Shishlina. Lyusya Timofeeva, Valya Belova and other young confectioners performed auxiliary operations - they made marzipan flowers, curly meringues for finishing the cake.

Timofeeva took part in competitions four times, winning first places in them.But she especially remembers the very first competition, to which she presented the cake "Fantasy" invented by her - a wonderful, tasty cake filled with orange peel mixed with cream.

It all started with an orange that Lucy ate. She thought: why not make a zest filling for the cake? First, she soaked the crusts for three days so that they lost their inherent bitterness, then boiled them in sweet water and began to turn the zest into a soft mass. There was no meat grinder at hand, and Lucy crushed the crusts on the most ordinary grater. The resulting mass was mixed with cream.

The jury appreciated her "Fantasy". The cake was highly appreciated.

Timofeeva is not yet thirty. But there are also younger workers among the creators of biscuit and cream masterpieces.

Confectioners are well aware of the name of Marina Kolotvina from the kitchen factory of the Vyborg district. A recent graduate of the culinary school, she has twice won citywide competitions for young catering specialists, and for one of them she was awarded a trip to Czechoslovakia. At this competition, each pastry chef had to submit 4 cakes and 30 pastries to a strict jury. One of the cakes is a must for children.

What does it take to make a cake? In fact, not much: flour, sugar, eggs and ... fantasy. Marina made a cake with chickens. Cream-colored chickens (themselves - yellow, beaks - red, eyes - blue) "swarmed" on the green grass (the grass, of course, is also from the cream). And so that they would not "run away", Marina surrounded the area with a "fence" of choux pastry. The jury recognized all of Marina Kolotvina's products as meeting the highest requirements.

I met Marina when, preparing for a new, now all-Union competition, she was doing an internship in the "North" under the direction of Tamara Sergeevna Smirnova.

At the entrance to the "North", an unusual picture attracts attention: on wooden hangers, stretched out in one long row, there are women's sweatshirts and blouses of various styles and colors. You will not see anything masculine on this "confection". It turns out that only women work in the "North". Their outfits create a picturesque variety at the entrance of the enterprise. Somewhere there was also Marina's blouse, which she, like everyone else, had changed for sanitary clothes.

Retrospective about the pastry chef
Photo natapit

“Our production is essentially small, but there are a lot of things to do,” Tamara Sergeevna said when, having put on, as expected, a white coat, I followed her to Marina’s workplace. “Our plan is fifteen to eighteen thousand cakes and three tons of cakes. ...

- In Week?

- What are you, a day! And here is Kolotvina ... Meet.

A large long table was filled with half-finished cakes. Marina was holding a rather heavy piping bag with a tip in her hands. Walking around all the cakes in turn, bending over each one, with quick, dexterous movements, she squeezed the cream out of the bag, bringing out beautiful curls on the surface of the cakes. Her face was serious, focused. After all, one wrong move - and the cream curl will be "smeared".

There was also a plate of lemons cut into wedges on the table. Marina took a whole handful and quickly, dexterously laid out the golden slices on the cakes. Each had eight slices.

- This is the Aurora cake, - said Tamara Sergeevna. - Our most popular product. And not only among Leningraders. Foreign tourists are also familiar with him, many even take him to their homeland. The cake, as you can see, is simple in design, but at the same time elegant. And in general, the century, when cakes were necessarily made pretentious, bright to luridness, has passed.
- At least Leningrad cakes are made mainly in brown and white colors, - confirmed Marina. “With pale pinks and pale greens, like the sky over the Neva, when the white night turns into dawn,” she added. And she explained: - Brown and white is chocolate and lipstick, pale pink and pale green - cream.

In the "North" they do not make a secret of their work for anyone, including the buyers themselves. At VDNKh, for example, visitors to the café served by the workers of the Sever were handed out printed memos. From them it was possible to learn how the cakes "Thumbelina", "Wedding", some pastries... For example, here is a recommendation for making the Lotus cake:

“The shortcrust pastry is rolled out to a thickness of 5-6 millimeters, and is divided by a star-shaped circular notch into 25 gram pieces, which are baked in the oven. Then, creamy cream is applied to the chilled shortbread dough pieces. On top of the cream is laid an airy semi-finished product baked in the form of a meringue-lotus, and sprinkled with nuts on top. "

I learned all this from a conversation with Tamara Sergeevna and her young student. Marina did not stop working while talking. She put each finished cake on a scale, checked its weight, and only then put it in a box and closed it with a lid. Now the cakes will be sent to the expedition, and from there, without delay, they will go straight to the store.

Medvedev N.M. Country Cooking

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