March 1661. The Château de Vincennes, just outside Paris. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the most powerful man in France, is dying. He is 58 years old, and he knows it is over. Servants help him out of bed, drape a silk robe over his skeletal frame, and walk him slowly through the galleries of his palace one final time.
He stops before each painting. Each sculpture. Each tapestry. His collection is one of the finest in Europe, nearly 40,000 books, 18 legendary diamonds, and enough art to make kings jealous. He sighs, touches the frame of a canvas, and whispers the words that would follow him through history: “Must I leave all this?”
Six days later, he was dead. He left his diamonds to Louis XIV, his library to the people of France, and his name, almost accidentally, to a small almond tart that Swedes have been eating ever since.
This is the story of the mazarin, Sweden’s most underrated pastry, and the extraordinary man behind it.
The Italian Who Ran France
Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino was born in Pescina, a small town in central Italy, on July 14, 1602. His father was a chamberlain to a minor noble family. Nothing about his childhood suggested he would one day control an empire.
But Mazarin had a talent for spectacle. In October 1630, at the siege of Casale in northern Italy, the young diplomat did something that made him famous across Europe. He galloped his horse directly between two opposing armies about to open fire, screaming “Peace! Peace!” as if a treaty had been signed. It hadn’t. The bluff worked anyway.
By 1642, he had succeeded the legendary Cardinal Richelieu as France’s chief minister. He governed under two kings, survived two civil wars, was driven into exile twice, and came back both times. At his death, he was second only to Louis XIV in wealth. The 18 diamonds he bequeathed to the French Crown were valued at two million livres. One of them, Le Grand Mazarin, a 19.07-carat pink diamond originally from India’s Golconda mines, sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $14.4 million.
He also loved food. Passionately. Mazarin was one of the key figures who brought Italian gastronomy to France, promoting pasta, pastries, and the refined dining culture that would eventually define French cuisine.
How a Cardinal Became a Pastry
The mazarin is a small tart with a buttery shortbread shell, a dense almond cream filling, and a thin cap of white icing made from powdered sugar and lemon juice. It is simple, elegant, and roughly 400 years old.
How it got Mazarin’s name is a matter of polite scholarly disagreement. The leading theory is straightforward: the Cardinal promoted Italian almond pastries, likely variations of the crostata di mandorle, through his extensive diplomatic network. Sweden and France were close allies through the Treaty of Bärwalde (1631), and French-Italian culinary influence flowed north with the politics.
But Swedish food historian Jan-Öjvind Swahn, in his reference work Matkulturens ABC (1999), proposed an alternative. The name might come from the mazarine, a deep oval silver serving dish common in 18th-century Swedish aristocratic households. If a tart was baked and served in such a dish, it could have taken the dish’s name. Swedish estate inventories from the 1750s list “mazariner” as tableware, not pastries.
What is certain: by the time Cajsa Warg published Hjelpreda i Hushållningen in 1755, Sweden’s most influential cookbook, almond tart recipes recognisable as proto-mazariner were part of Swedish bourgeois cooking. And by 1879, when physician and culinary encyclopedist Charles Emil Hagdahl wrote his monumental Kok-Konsten som Vetenskap och Konst, the mazarin was treated as a standard, not a novelty. It had already become permanent.
Sweden’s Quiet Obsession with Almonds
Ask a foreigner to name a Swedish pastry and they will say kanelbulle. Maybe semla. Almost nobody says mazarin. This is a mistake.
Walk into any Swedish konditori, any cafe, any supermarket bakery, and you will find mazariner. They are always there, usually oval, sometimes round, their white icing caps gleaming under the glass. They are as permanent as the coffee machine itself. Stockholm baker Cecilia Tolone calls them “very common” but “slightly old-fashioned,” which in Sweden functions less as criticism and more as a mark of authenticity.
The mazarin even has its own day. Two of them, actually. January 10 and March 13 are both celebrated as Mazarinens dag, apparently declared independently by different bakery promoters who never coordinated. Neither has the institutional weight of Kanelbullens dag (October 4), which says everything about the mazarin’s place in the hierarchy: beloved but perpetually overlooked.
And yet almonds are everywhere in Swedish baking. The semla is filled with almond paste. Prinsesstarta is wrapped in green marzipan. Dammsugare, the beloved “vacuum cleaner” pastries, are coated in it. Sweden imported $46.8 million worth of almonds in 2019, with total consumption reaching 33,400 metric tonnes by 2022. At least five of Sweden’s ten most popular pastries contain almonds in some form.
The kanelbulle gets a national holiday. The semla gets a season. The mazarin gets two unofficial days that nobody can agree on. It just quietly shows up every single morning, in every single cafe, and asks for nothing in return.
The Almond That Connects Two Worlds
India knows almonds. India has known almonds for thousands of years.
The almond tree arrived through ancient trade routes from Iran and Afghanistan, and became one of the most treasured ingredients in Indian cuisine. Indians call it badam, a word borrowed unchanged from Persian, and it appears everywhere: badam halwa, badam burfi, badam milk, cooling sherbet drinks in summer. At weddings, small packets of almonds are given to guests as blessings for health and fertility. During Diwali, during Eid, almonds are woven into celebration itself. India imported $938 million worth of almonds in 2023, making it one of the world’s largest almond markets.
Sweden wraps its almonds in pastry dough and icing. India wraps them in silver leaf and rose water. Two cultures, separated by 7,000 kilometres, both decided independently that the almond was something worth building traditions around. And both arrived at nearly the same idea: grind almonds with sugar into a dense, sweet paste. In Sweden, they call it mandelmassa. In India, it is badam burfi. Same instinct, different language.
In Bangalore, those two traditions share a city.
A Pastry Worth Noticing
FIKA B’LORE exists at the intersection of Swedish and Indian food culture. The cardamom in our buns traces a line from Karnataka’s Western Ghats to Swedish kitchens. The fika tradition itself is built on the same impulse as an Indian chai break: stop what you are doing, share something with someone, and be present for a moment.
Our hand-rolled Swedish buns, kanelbullar, kardemummabullar, and chokladbullar, are cold-fermented overnight at our solar-powered Fika Farm and delivered fresh across Bangalore. A FIKA FIVE (Rs 950) or FIKA TEN (Rs 1,900) is a box of 90g buns with no preservatives, no stabilisers, and only the ingredients that belong there.
The mazarin may not be on our menu yet. But its spirit is. Every time you taste the almond in a Swedish bun, you are tasting a connection that stretches from a dying cardinal’s gallery in 1661 to a bakery in North Bangalore in 2026. From badam to mandel. From silver leaf to icing sugar.
Cardinal Mazarin asked, “Must I leave all this?” The answer, at least for the pastry, turned out to be no. Some things stay.
Fika Blore bakes Swedish pastries with the same care that made the mazarin a quiet classic for over three centuries.