A Stack of Macarons, Paris · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Those perfect pastel domes stacked in a Paris shop window are a much newer invention than they look. The plain almond biscuit itself is centuries old, likely carried into Europe through Arab traders and Italian courts long before it ever reached France. But the sandwich version everyone means when they say macaron, two shells and a filling of ganache or buttercream, wasn't invented until the 1920s, credited to Pierre Desfontaines at the Paris patisserie Ladurée. The plain biscuit's best documented earlier chapter has nothing to do with royalty at all. During the French Revolution, two Carmelite nuns turned out of their convent in Nancy baked and sold plain macarons just to survive, and are still remembered there as Les Sœurs Macarons, the Macaron Sisters.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.