Burnt Pleasures
If you study French cookbooks—even modern ones—you will see that crème brûlée rarely appears. And in French restaurants, too, you will not see it on the menu as often you would think based on its worldwide popularity.
Crème brûlée is actually not even as French as mousse au chocolat. Rather, it is an adaptation of the caramel cream called “crema catalona,” which existed in Spain by the eighteenth century. The crispy top, however, is claimed by the British, who say that “burnt creams” were enjoyed by Cambridge students in the seventeenth century.
But crème brûlée doesn’t owe its status as a fashionable dessert of our time to Spain, England, or France. It conquered the hearts of the globalized dessert world first in 1982, when the fancy New York restaurant Le Cirque called for a “crème brûlée revival.”