Aix-en-Provence

Even if you hat marzipan with a passion, if your liver twinges at the mention of almond paste and your heart burns, still you will have to eat calissons in Aix-en-Provence. As early as the 1500s the Provençal poet Claude Bruyes was extolling the virtues of Aix’s calissons, and by the end of the 1600s they were being distributed to the faithful every year on September 1st, to commemorate the end of the great plague of 1630. The whole Cours Mirabeau is devoted to this famous almond and melon paste sweetmeat. There are at least four confiseries that specialize in them. Even the bookshops on the Cours sell books cleverly designed to introduce a “History of the Calissons of Aix” into their plots. Nowhere can you be lured more easily into the purchase of your first calissons than at the lovely chocolate-box of a shop ‘A la Reine Jeanne’ at 36 Cours Mirabean. The mingled smells of newly-ground almonds and sugared fruits, and the charm of Monique and her sister (and brother Joseph in the Kitchens), fifth generation of the same family to make calissons, are irresistible.