The final flourish of your meal arrives at the table — a rich pudding of chocolate cremeux ("creamy" in French), candied pistachios, a crumble made from ground pistachios, and both dehydrated and frozen mandarin. Its deliciousness almost obscures the effort that went into its making. Behind the chocolate, cream and fruit are the blood, sweat and tears that were shed for the sake of dessert — years of practice and hours of production.
It's true. The life of a pastry chef isn't all butter and glamour. And the status that comes with it has had its ups and downs. Pastry king Antonin Careme in 18th century France might have been considered the first celebrity chef, but it wasn't until the late 1980s that the names of the people responsible for your sugargasms even regularly appeared on menus, credited alongside executive chefs.
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More recently the decline in the economy (the Great Recession) and the rise of the gastropub (the Small Plates Revolution) might have displaced the pastry chef. All those architectural spun-sugar towers of cake and mousse already had given way to homier, more comforting (and more easily prepared) dishes — the seasonal crostatas and buttermilk panna cotta that were the legacy of Berkeley's Chez Panisse and proliferated by the likes of Nancy Silverton in Los Angeles and Claudia Fleming in New York. When money got tight, chefs figured they didn't need experts to bake pie or bread pudding. They could make their own rustic desserts (but could they, really,
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