Chronicle No. 20 · Incidents

The Pudding That Came Out Upside Down at the Hotel Tatin

Two sisters, a hunting-season rush in the Sologne, and the most forgiving mistake in French pastry.

In the flat hunting country of the Sologne, some 169 km south of Paris, the small town of Lamotte-Beuvron had a railway station, a steady traffic of shooting parties, and a hotel run by two unmarried sisters.

Stephanie and Caroline Tatin kept the Hotel Tatin through the 1880s. Caroline ran the front of house. Stephanie cooked, and she cooked for men who came in cold, muddy and impatient.

The story every French pastry chef repeats is that Stephanie, working under pressure, left apples too long in butter and sugar until they caramelised, laid pastry over the top of the pan to save them, finished the whole thing in the oven and turned it out upside down. The dining room asked for it again the next day.

It is only fair to say the anecdote is not documented:

• The sisters never published a recipe and never used the name tarte Tatin
• The name was popularised only after their deaths, by the food writer Curnonsky and by the Paris restaurant Maxim's
• Upside-down apple cakes were not new: Antonin Careme described glazed versions in 1841
• A rival account credits the cook of a local count

So the tart may be older than the accident. What is not in doubt is that a modest provincial hotel, not a grand kitchen, is the address the world attached to it.

That is the useful part. Tarte Tatin survives because two women serving a hungry room decided that a ruined pan was still worth carrying out. Most kitchens throw away the very thing they might have been remembered for.

Lesson: A kitchen that is allowed to rescue its mistakes in front of guests will occasionally invent something better than the recipe it lost.