In the quaint walled town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, I passed the birthplace of Michel de Nostredame—called Nostradamus by most—a physician and astrologer best known for his prophecies, not for his recipes. Nearby is a small bakery called Le Petit Duc. Owned and operated by Anne Daguin and her husband, Hermann van Beeck, the bakery, which has a branch in Paris called La Grande Duchesse, specializes in Renaissance recipes. They include those of the prominent Nostradamus, who came from a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism in 1504, when he was just under a year old. When I spoke with Anne, whose mother is Jewish, she told me that she had wanted to open her shop in Saint-Rémy but felt that there was no real pastry tradition there. So she turned to old books for inspiration, and found many recipes, some by Jewish physicians like Nostradamus, who came from a long line of men skilled in mathematics and medicine. As a healer, he often used foods and herbs as treatments for various illnesses, such as this praline with pine nuts.

　　

Ingredients

about 40 pine-nut pralines

　　2 cups pine nuts

　　2 cups sugar

　　2 tablespoons rose water

　　2 tablespoons crushed fennel seeds*

　　

Step 1

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

　　

Step 2

Toast the pine nuts in the oven or in a sauté pan until they are dry and fragrant and lightly browned.

　　

Step 3

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat 1/2 cup water with the sugar and the rose water. Stir until the sugar is just dissolved, and let cook over medium heat without stirring for 20 minutes, or until the syrup reaches 250 degrees. Add the pine nuts and the crushed fennel seeds, and mix quickly with a wooden spoon until the sugar becomes white. Remove from the heat.

　　

Step 4

Using two teaspoons and working quickly, make small disks by dropping heaping teaspoons of the pine-nut mixture on the lined baking sheets. They will flatten themselves. Allow them to dry for a few hours before peeling them off of the paper and serving. The pralines can be decorated, as Nostradamus explains, with little pieces of gold leaf.

　　Cooks' Note

　　*If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, the easiest way to crush the fennel seeds is to put them in a zip-top bag and bang them with the bottom of a measuring cup or a rolling pin.

　　Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous