Historians agree that Marie Antoinette never uttered the most famous quote attributed to her. But legend has it she did bring the recipe for her favourite cake from Austria to France.

Mindy Ran - Let Them Eat Cake

In a scene from the 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette is surrounded by an extraordinary array of desserts supplied by the famous Parisian pastry shop Ladurée. It appears to be a pop cultural reference to her apocryphal quotation: “Let them eat cake.” However, this quote attributed to a “princess” first appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Confessions’ before Marie Antoinette had even arrived in France.

Feast or famine

So it wasn’t a cake that launched the French Revolution. But hunger certainly played a role. A series of crop failures led to a shortage of grain which drastically raised the price of bread – as much as 67% in 1789 – leading to riots by the poor. Of course, there were other factors but starvation provided strong motivation for change.

“In villages and towns, people were dependent on the success of crops,” explains Dutch food historian Lisette Kruijff. “The higher you get in social circles, food plays a different role because then you use food to show off. There’s a great difference between food to survive and food to impress other people.”

One way for the upper class to demonstrate their wealth was to host lavish banquets, sometimes consisting of as many as twenty-four different courses. “Such a meal could last all day,” says Kruijff.

Popular kugelhopf

If Marie Antoinette had a favourite cake, it would probably have been kugelhopf – a sweet bread-like cake usually served for breakfast and still popular in Austria and Germany. Traditionally baked in a round mould with a hole in the centre, the recipe often includes almonds (an expensive delicacy in the 18th century) and raisins soaked in kirsch.     

Mindy Ran visited Lisette Kruijff’s country kitchen to sort through the myths and bake a deliciously sweet kugelhopf.

Let Them Eat Cake was produced by Mindy Ran. The program was originally broadcast in July 2002 as part of the series Aural Tapestry.