National Pastry Day 🍩

Try as we might, we just couldn’t find the original of National Pastry Day, so we thought that we’d research the origins of pastries themselves. This sweet dessert can be traced back to Ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. These early pastries weren’t sweet, however, they were more of a savory treat that was made using a dough made from flour and water, and then wrapped around some type of meat. The Phoenicians, Romans, and Greeks spread these early pastries all across the Mediterranean, and as they traveled, they began to evolve somewhat. Although these pastries were still used to cover meats and sometimes fruit, they were lighter than the Egyptian pastries thanks to the addition of olive oil to the recipe. During the Middle Ages, shortening and butter were added to the recipe and the resulting dough was used to make stiff pastries that were covered in butter to make them more palatable. Over the next few centuries, Medieval cooks continued to refine the pastry making process until 16th-century chefs created the first modern pastry analogs. As these pastries spread across Europe, regional varieties of these pastries developed. Over time, these would become a seemingly endless variety of different pastry types.