Clément Faugier

crème de marrons

The shadowy, faceless, possibly partly mythical Clément Faugier is a household name in France, arguably better known even than the Beast of Gévaudan. Faugier is everywhere, but no one ever says his name because there is no need. The only situation in which you might need to speak it is if there were more than one kind of crème de marrons. Then your grandmother or best friend could legitimately say, while sending you out into a blizzard for a two-mile walk to the Monoprix, “Get the Faugier!” But no. On the shelf there will be only Clément, typically in a little tin, more recently in a functional but frustrating toothpaste-like tube. The tube deprives you of two adventitious pleasures: the sight of the beloved matter if you simply suck it out of the tube, and the joy of spooning it if you squeeze it onto things. Either way, the tube is plain wrong. Crème de marrons is not something you put on top of stuff. It is the substratum on which you may put cream, whipped or not¹.

Much as Nutella is the profligate cousin of Gianduja, crème de marrons (chestnut paste) is the demagogic but logical end-point of marrons glacés. Candied chestnuts with a sugar glaze are the ultimate luxury good, so much so that I am amazed Louis Vuitton has ignored them. Chestnuts are fragile, and their size distribution follows a fairly narrow Gaussian, such that a chestnut twice normal size is as rare as, say, a hairless cat. This means that the confiserie specialising in marrons glacés will have on display four different size classes with a price differential of about a factor of ten. Therefore, if you were my paternal grandmother exercising her keen instinct for social strata, you would rather have two of the big ones than twenty normal ones. Hidden from view but available on request would be plastic bags of the chutes, broken chestnut fragments indistinguishable in taste and texture from the whole ones and ten times cheaper again, but absent the pleasure that comes with the deliberate destruction of a rare specimen.

It is no accident that France, a country of regicides and levelers that expropriated the Church and abolished hereditary titles, should come up via Clément Faugier with a plebeian substitute for marrons glacés. Clément Faugier (1861–1941) was an entrepreneur in the Ardèche region, on the right bank of the Rhône midway between Lyon and Aix. This region supplied Lyon with silk. When the pébrine, a fungal infection, decimated the silkworms in the 1850s, Faugier’s invention of crème de marrons converted the region from mulberry to chestnuts.

Very few foods are as philosophical as crème de marrons. In that respect, it rises to the level of a drug. Much in the way that nitrous oxide makes you feel like dying might not be so wrenching after all, or opiates make you remember that everything, as George Smiley’s boss was fond of saying, is a “state of mind,” crème de marrons even in smallish doses carries a powerful message: “This too will pass.” It should be available on prescription to salve adolescent crushes. The course of treatment would go something like this: madly in love with that new girl/boy who just moved to your town from Huntington Beach, CA? Here’s a tin of Clément Faugier. Take three tablespoons and call me in the morning.

Crème de marrons is the equivalent of arrestor cables on the deck of an aircraft carrier or one of those swimming pools full of gravel they build next to mountain motorways to catch runaway eighteen-wheelers. You come in hot—the brakes have failed—and if untended, your hunger could be a danger to others. The first spoonful of Clément Faugier is pure bliss, and if you are quick, the second one, while nowhere near as good, is still so much better than the second bite of anything else that your thoughts are unlikely to wander. However, you find yourself slowing down, and that is the fateful moment. Give it a minute or two, and you realize, to your surprise and shame, that you no longer lust for it. You are cured of your crush on Clément Faugier, and only a small change of parameters should allow you to view the girl/boy from California in the same new, harsh but fair light. Once opened and stored in the fridge, crème de marrons keeps up the mood of obsolescence by quickly turning ugly, with dried-up crests and small pools of sugar syrup. Let that serve as a warning.

Part of the abstract charm of crème de marrons comes from the exalted position of the chestnut in a child’s imagination. The chestnut is one of the most remarkable objects handled by schoolchildren. Here I am talking about horse chestnuts, that object of great frustration. They are abundant and beautiful but inedible, even toxic. No one has ever seen a horse eating one, so the name is some sort of gaslighting tactic. The edible one is nowhere near as beautiful, and in any event, parks don’t carry it. Every single chestnut is an object at once beautifully made, as if by a divine cabinetmaker, and entirely useless. The join between the shiny patina of the brown part and the matte grey of the ice cap is perfect, indeed absent. Were it man-made, it would deserve to be displayed in the exhibitions of chefs d’oeuvre medieval guilds still run all over France. But for the size and sphericity, Rolls Royce should have a horse chestnut option for dashboards. By comparison, the flat, dusty, edible chestnut is a disappointment. The fact that you can either eat or admire is another thing to ponder endlessly. Perhaps bliss is composite, holding a conker in your hand while spooning Clément Faugier.

1. My son went through a period where he mysteriously had no appetite at all while not visibly wasting away. It turned out he was squeezing at least one tube of CF into his mouth each day. The proper barbaric way to enjoy crème de marrons is to buy the small tin, crack it open, pour double cream on top and go for it, adding cream from time to time as appropriate. This obviates the need for spooning as well as removing the embarrassment of stale crème.