Pierre Hermé, heir to three generations of bakers and pastry chefs in Colmar, has created a veritable empire with his famous signature cakes such as Ispahan, his macaroons, his Yule logs and his galettes des rois. The one who surrenders for the first time in All the flavors of life (Buchet-Chastel) today employs seven hundred people and has a turnover of 80 million euros. A company focused above all on a search for perfection of taste.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
If my father hadn’t seen an ad in the Latest news from Alsace, which offered pastry apprenticeships at the Lenôtre school in Paris. I was destined to do my apprenticeship with a pastry chef in a small village not far from Colmar, where we lived. This announcement was the trigger for everything. My grandmother helped me write a cover letter, my parents took me to Paris, I was 14, and there it all started.
Has baking always been obvious to you?
In my paternal family, we were bakers from father to son for three generations. The Hermé house was founded in 1870 in Colmar. But it was my father who really made me want to, because he did his job with passion. He spent his days and nights in his studio, he was really hooked. To see him, I had to go to the studio, and I watched him work.
When I was 9, I told my parents: “I want to be a pastry chef. I didn’t even think of going to school, even though I liked school, where I wasn’t bad. My mother tried to dissuade me, telling me that I would never find a wife! She knew what this job meant in terms of personal sacrifice. She herself got up at 4 a.m., opened the store at 5 a.m. and closed it at 7 p.m.
There was not much room for a family life…
When I was born, my paternal grandmother demanded that my mother separate from me and put me to nurse for eighteen months. My mother suffered a lot from being separated from me. She only saw me on Sundays, she was very angry with her mother-in-law.
My parents didn’t have time to take care of me. My father started at 2 am. In the evening, my parents made me dinner at 7 p.m. and they had dinner afterwards. They were quite cold, not very affectionate, the Alsatians are rather quiet. My mother had two questions: “Are you healthy? and “Have you gained weight?” It was not an education of discussions and tenderness. With my father, there were more exchanges around his job, which brought us together. The only time my parents had free was on Sundays from 11 a.m., when my father had finished his deliveries. We were then going to walk in the mountains.
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