Stohrer, Nicolas (1706–ca. 1781), was born to a modest family in Wissembourg, Alsace. He became an apprentice in the kitchen of King Stanisław of Poland, who had been exiled in Wissembourg, sometime around 1720. Stohrer then followed Stanisław’s daughter Marie Leszcyńska to Versailles as her pâtissier in 1725, when she married King Louis XV. In 1730 he opened Pâtisserie Stohrer, now Paris’s oldest pastry shop, at 51 Rue Montorgueil (then called Rue du Mont Orgueilleux).
The shop has long been associated with the classic French baba, a sweet, yeasty cake similar to a Gugelhupf, with a colorful mythology linking it to King Stanisław and Stohrer. See baba au rhum and gugelhupf. Stohrer may have played some part in introducing the cake, common for centuries in the German-speaking world, to the French court of Louis XV. The baba is depicted in a wall mural of a sylphlike woman holding pastries, painted for the shop in 1864 by Paul Baudry.
