Pain d'épices

Pain d'épices or pain d'épice (French for "spice bread", sometimes incorrectly translated as gingerbread) is a French cake or quick bread. Its ingredients, according to Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694), were "rye flour, honey and spices". In Alsace, a considerable tradition incorporates a pinch of cinnamon.

According to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, the commercial production of pain d'épices was a specialty of Reims, based on a recipe of a pastry cook from Bourges and made popular when Charles VII and his mistress Agnes Sorel expressed their liking for it. The honey used was the dark buckwheat honey of Brittany. In 1571, the Corporation of Spice Bread Makers of Reims were chartered separately from the pastry cooks; in 1596 the Parisian makers of pain d'épices were given their own charter. The Reims pain d'épices industry was decimated by World War I. The pain d'épices of Dijon outpaced its older competitors in the Napoleonic era, and the bread is now considered one of the specialties of that city.