Maduro has sent inspectors and soldiers into more than 700 bakeries around the capital this week to enforce a rule that 90 percent of wheat must be destined to loaves rather than more expensive pastries and cakes.[reuters]

Venezuela is in crisis for a variety of reasons, but the US’ fondness for “regime change” certainly hasn’t helped. The Guardian describes Venezuela’s current condition:[guard]  food riots and currency that is practically worthless. President Obama declared Venezuela to be a “Dagger aimed at the heart of the United States” [nation]  Oh, wait, no, sorry, that was Hitler talking about the Sudentenland. Obama declared Venezuela to be “an Extraordinary Threat to the United States.” And so, dutifully, that’s how the media reported it.

The Wikipedia article attributes the “brioche” as being reported in Rousseau’s Confessions and – rather coyly – observes that Rousseau was probably not a very reliable source. That’s sort of an understatement – Rousseau was terribly dishonest about a great number of things and was an early proponent of the school of punditry that favored making stuff up and asserting it as fact. That’s how philosophy (especially political philosophy) was done in those days, but it was a bit egregious that Rousseau wrote advice on child-rearing after he fathered four children and abandoned them to an orphanage; for someone who wrote about the social contract and debt to one’s fellow man, he appears to have been mostly a theoretician of society and not very well-socialized himself. There is a pretty interesting book, Rousseau’s Dog [amazon] about Rousseau and Hume, when Rousseau fled to live with Hume for a while. Rousseau sounds like a troubled individual, indeed. I was a Rousseau fan going in, but by the time I finished the book I was reassessing whether to take him seriously at all. Hume (at least) comes out looking affable but very confused and betrayed.

Brioche is delicious, by the way! It’s pretty easy to make; I usually make popovers, instead, because they’re even more decadent and a whole lot easier to make. Popovers are the original “cup cake”. “Cake” is a vague concept but usually the difference between “bread” and “cake” is that cake has butter/eggs/sugar in it – but it’s a matter of degree.

What we interpret as “cake” in the US is a style of highly sugary spongy cakes that came in the 1930s. Chiffon cakes (cakes made with vegetable oil instead of butter) became very popular when baking mixes hit the market in the 50’s, but sugary cakes were popularized to use lots of molasses instead of processed sugar. Sugar, in pre-revolutionary France, was terribly expensive and would hardly be expended on the body of a cake. I remember, as a kid, hearing “Let them eat cake” and immediately pictured a bunch of sans culottes attacking a great big frosted angel’s food cake – Wrong! Bon Appetit has a good article [bon] on the history of American cakes.