The origin of this cookie-slash-pastry may have been in Italy, but was consecrated in 16th-century Paris. That\u2019s when that one-woman arbiter of taste, Queen Catherine de Medici (an Italian queen of France), instructed her French pastry chefs on the finer points of sweets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s one version of the story. Another traces the birth of the macaron to a French Carmelite convent in the late 18th century where the nuns dreamed them up for an early version of the bake sale to raise money for the sisters’ upkeep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the popular pastry floats at least two other origin stories, what seems certain is that Ladur\u00e9e, Paris’s first combined tearoom and pastry shop, was also the first to mass-produce the pastry in several flavors and colors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n