DE CONSTRUC T LORRAINE QUICHE Never mind notions of a light lunch — this French classic has


traditionally been considered a hearty, warming dish. And whether or not it should contain cheese is a matter for debate


WORDS: FE L I C I TY CLOAK E. PHOTOGR APHS: L AU RA EDWARDS FOOD ST Y L I S T: POL LY WE B B -WI L SON


It’s been four decades since we learned that Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. The tongue-in- cheek book mockingly rebranded a hearty peasant dish as rabbit food, and in the words of the author, humourist Bruce Feirstein, ‘Could John Wayne ever have taken Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the entire Wild West on a diet of quiche and salad?’ Dated gender stereotypes aside, it’s also an


unfair characterisation of the dish — Wayne would have been well fuelled by quiche lorraine, as the genuine article is anything but delicate. In fact, though in Britain it’s often regarded as a light lunch — ‘a must for any summer party, picnic or gathering’, according to Mary Berry — in its eastern French homeland it’s more often served as a warm main course that’s particularly associated with the winter months. And with an average of 25 days of snow, winter in Lorraine is a serious business, requiring serious fuel. There’s a lot about quiche that doesn’t fit


with its popular reputation. Though it may seem quintessentially French, its origins are less clear cut. Its distant roots probably lie in the baked cheesecakes of ancient Rome, but the first recognisable ancestors of the modern


quiche can be found in the medieval kitchens of Europe, where the term ‘custarde’ was used to describe a ‘coffyn’ (pastry case) filled with beaten eggs and cream and flavoured with pieces of meat or fruit. These could be sweet or savoury, and were often very rich affairs. The ‘crustade with flesch’ included in the


15th-century East Anglian recipe collection held by Corpus Christi College Oxford contains chopped veal ribs and chicken joints in a spiced custard sweetened with honey and wine. This, as editor and translator Constance B Hieatt observed, ‘must have presented a problem to mannerly medieval diners, with all those bones baked into a custard tart’. The crustade might bear a strong family


resemblance to the quiche, but until the 19th century, the word ‘quiche’ (which is probably the plural of ‘küche’ in the Alsatian dialect, itself a diminutive of the German ‘kuchen’, or cake) suggested a quite different dish. Historian Guy Cabourdin tracked references back as far as the 1605 accounts of the hospice of Saint-Julien in the city of Nancy, where it seems to have described something much thinner and crisper — more like the tarte flambée still enjoyed in neighbouring Alsace


than a modern quiche. Like the tarte flambée, this ‘quiche’ would have been made from scraps of bread dough topped with a thin layer of everyday ingredients, which back then would have meant eggs, cream and herbs, rather than luxuries such as bacon. Jeanne Loesch, an expert on the cuisine of the Grand Est region, calls early quiche ‘a Lorraine version of pizza’, and a 1607 recipe for a plum or damson example makes it clear that, like the custarde, it came in many flavours. Although it is occasionally made with a


bread dough crust to this day, a shortcrust or puff pastry case is now far more common, and it was this development — probably spearheaded by professional bakers rather than home cooks — that allowed for a more generous filling, turning the quiche from a snack into a full meal. This modern quiche was one of the


local favourites that refugees fleeing the Franco-Prussian war brought to Paris in the late 19th century, along with the brewing traditions they put to use in the city’s first brasseries. Once they began serving a little food alongside beer, quiche found a whole new audience — and it wasn’t long before


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