In the sixteenth century, the custom of the baissemain\u2014that is, greeting a superior by kissing her hand\u2014was still common in French aristocratic circles. For Muzio Frangipani, an Italian marquis living in Paris, the one drawback of this quaint custom was that the fingers of his French acquaintances did not smell as sweetly as they might. To solve this embarrassing problem, Frangipani invented an almond-scented perfume for gloves, one that was soon odoriferizing the dainty digits of French aristocrats everywhere. So popular was this new almond-based glove-perfume that Parisian chefs borrowed its name, frangipani, and bestowed it on an almond-flavoured cream used in making pastries and desserts. Later on, in the mid nineteenth century, the name of this almond-flavoured cream eventually made its way into English, where it is now sometimes loosely used as a name for any pastry made with ground almonds. Incidentally, the Italian surname Frangipani appears to mean broken bread: the\/rang: half of the surname may derive, like the English frangible, from the Latin frangere, meaning to break; likewise, the pani part of the surname may derive, like the English pantry, from the Latin panis, meaning bread.<\/p>\n
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In the sixteenth century, the custom of the baissemain\u2014that is, greeting a superior by kissing her hand\u2014was still common in French aristocratic circles. For Muzio Frangipani, an Italian marquis living in Paris, the one drawback of this quaint custom was that the fingers of his French acquaintances did not smell as sweetly as they might. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-f"],"yoast_head":"\n