The canelé comes from Bordeaux, and its history is tangled up with the city’s wine trade. The most widely accepted origin story connects it to the Annonciades, a convent of nuns who are said to have developed the recipe sometime in the 18th century using surplus egg yolks — the whites having been donated to local wine producers, who used them to clarify and fine their wines. Whether this is strictly true or a well-worn piece of culinary mythology is debatable, but the logic holds: Bordeaux had egg yolks to spare, and someone figured out what to do with them.

The traditional copper mold is essential to the result and also responsible for the canelé’s relative scarcity outside of serious pastry shops. Copper conducts heat in a way that produces the characteristic crust — other materials don’t behave the same way, and silicone molds, while convenient, produce something noticeably softer and less dramatic. A properly made canelé requires the molds to be seasoned with beeswax before each bake, a step that most home bakers quietly skip and then wonder why the exterior doesn’t quite come together.

For a long time, canelés were a Bordelais specialty that barely traveled. They’ve since become a fixture of serious pastry counters worldwide, helped along by the global croissant-and-viennoiserie obsession of the 2010s — but they remain one of those things where geography and technique still noticeably determine quality.

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Regional Roots

• France