Small, dense, and extremely Swedish

A mazarin is a small oval tart: a mördeg shell, a filling built on mandelmassa (almond paste), and a flat lid of white glasyr (icing) across the top. It is dense, it is sweet, it keeps for days, and it is one of the few Swedish bakes that is better on the second day than the first.

It is not a frangipane tart

People reach for frangipane because it is the nearest French thing, and the comparison misleads in a specific way.

French almond cream is ground almonds, sugar, butter and egg. Frangipane proper is that lightened with about a third pastry cream, which makes it softer and more custardy, though in practice French recipes use the two words interchangeably.

A mazarin starts from mandelmassa, which is almond paste — almonds and sugar milled together into a block — rather than from ground almonds weighed against sugar. Beginning with a paste rather than a powder gives you a tighter, denser, chewier filling. That is why a mazarin has body and a frangipane tart has crumb.

So does the flat icing lid. It is not decoration. It seals the top, and it is why the thing survives in a tin.

The name is not settled

It is said to be named after Cardinal Jules Mazarin, who ran France in the middle of the sixteen hundreds and is credited with bringing Italian cooking north. It gets repeated as fact.

Swedish dictionaries do not support that comfortably. The word is first attested in Swedish in the eighteen sixties or eighties depending on which dictionary you read, which is two hundred years after the cardinal. A competing derivation traces it to an older French word for a type of dish or plate that the tart's tin resembles.

Both explanations are live. The honest form is traditionally said to be named after Cardinal Mazarin, and the cardinal keeps the credit without the sentence claiming to know.

Its day is weaker still. Mazarinens dag is usually given as 10 January, though a second date in March circulates with equal confidence and no more evidence, and neither has a traceable founder. The baking year uses 10 January because it is the more widely observed, not because anyone can show where it came from.

Variants worth knowing

Cubamazarin, with chocolate and hazelnut. Katalan, with raspberry jam under the almond. Both are standard in Swedish bakeries and neither is a modern invention.

Getting one right

Do not substitute marzipan for mandelmassa. Marzipan has far more sugar and much less almond, and it will bake out greasy and cloying. Mandelmassa is roughly half almonds; marzipan can be a fifth.

Line the tins with the shortcrust cold, and rest them cold again before filling, or the sides slump.

Fill less than you want to. The filling rises, and a mazarin that has domed cannot take a flat lid of icing, which means it is no longer a mazarin. It is a very nice almond tart with something spilled on it.