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Why yule log has become a Christmas favourite
12.12.2023 - 17:41 / nationalgeographic.com / Christmas Eve
Christmas pudding may be Britain’s best-known festive dessert, but in France, the bûche de Noël — or yule log — reigns supreme, with skilled pâtissiers and home bakers creating an array of different versions, from the classic to the outré.
“It’s a very traditional French thing,” says baker Frank Barron (known as @cakeboyparis on Instagram), who moved from California to the French capital in 2012. “There seems to be no question that there will be some type of bûche on the table as part of dessert, after the main festive feast is over.”
As a dessert, the bûche de Noël has a relatively short history, but its namesake dates back much further. The original yule log was just that — a large, heavy piece of wood that was burned during the festive season. It was lit on Christmas Eve and rekindled each day until Twelfth Night was reached. This custom was common across much of Europe for hundreds of years — a throwback to the pre-Christian fire festivals celebrating the winter solstice — and much superstition was attached to the practice. In some parts of Britain, for example, it was said to be bad luck if a squinting person or flat-footed woman entered the room in which it was burning. The most widely held belief, however, was that if a portion of the charred yule log was kept in the house during the coming year it would protect the property against lightning strikes.
In Scotland, meanwhile, it was considered good luck to carve the face of the Cailleach (the Gaelic goddess of the winter months) onto a log before setting fire to it on Christmas Eve, with the whole family gathered around to watch it burn. “This ritual held the significance of bidding farewell to the cold, dark and hardships of the past year, while welcoming new beginnings,” says Coinneach MacLeod, who includes a recipe for yule log in his new book, The Hebridean Baker at Home.
By the 18th century, the popularity of burning a log at Christmas had dwindled — perhaps because of the impracticality of dragging a colossal piece of wood into your home — but Parisian pastry chefs ensured the tradition was not entirely forgotten by reimagining the log in cake form. Pierre Lacam is widely credited with publishing the first recipe for the bûche de Noël, in Le Mémorial Historique et Géographique de la Pâtisserie, a weighty tome published in 1890, containing snippets of history, along with 1,600 recipes for regional cakes and pastries. Lacam includes nothing on the origins of the edible log, but his recipe is essentially rounds of génoise — a rich, airy sponge cake — sandwiched together with coffee- or chocolate-flavoured buttercream to create a log shape. Small ‘branches’ were cut from additional pieces of génoise and attached using buttercream. The ensemble
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