12 DAYS OF COOKIES: FRENCH BRETON COOKIES

All the cookies you need for your Christmas Cookie tins: The simple French classic that has stolen hearts for centuries.

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Hello!

I’m back today with day two of our 12 Days of Cookies, with treats that take us across the pond to Central and Eastern Europe to round out our Christmas cookie boxes.

Today’s cookie is a French classic that hits all the notes for simplicity and speed without sacrificing flavor. This one is buttery, comforting, and surprisingly elegant. You can crosshatch or press in any pattern you want (I use a pastry scraper for quick, even cuts).

I made my first Breton Butter Cake, or Le gâteau breton, the famous buttery pastry from Brittany, the first summer I was a private chef in St. Tropez. Ironically, I took the recipe not from a French cooking book but instead pulled from a story on Brittany I had torn from the pages of Saveur Magazine while I was an intern the summer before (Somewhere, I have a spiral notebook from my two summers in France, with many old recipes scribbled and scratched, pinned and stapled inside—a treasure I still need to uncover!). It resembled this Martha Stewart recipe.

A little history on the Breton:

This cake was created in 1867 when Louis Crucer from Port-Louis presented it at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. It was known as the Loreint cake (Lorient = a seaport in Brittany) but quickly became dubbed Breton since every Breton family had its own recipe. (I find this last detail charming since the cake has only four ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. How much is there to tweak?) Some people add butterscotch, rum, or dried plums, but in my mind, the classic is the win.

The charm of the Breton Cake is that because of the high butter content, it stays very good for days (even weeks, some say). I’ve taken to making smaller butter Bretons, which are easy to stack, serve, and pack into cookie tins. They are slightly fragile, as all good sable (short-bread-like cookies) are, but not in the way filled or stuffed cookies can be. You can pack them in stacks of three or four cookies on their flat ends or their sides, tucked into large muffin liners, for organizing and soaking up the extra butter.

Recipe below!

xx

Sarah

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FRENCH BRETON (SABLE) COOKIE