What do a fancy crocheted border, a cake, and gentleness have in common? They’ve all been known as the same thing: “mignardise.” Pronounced “min-yar-dize”, it’s a word that dates back to the 1600s, and as the spelling suggests, it was borrowed directly from French.
The original meaning of “mignardise” was gentle behavior — particularly in an exaggerated, affected way. Lord Montaigne used it in 1603: “The disdainfull churlishnesse wherewith they beate them, are but mignardizes and affectations of a motherly favour.” Used with this meaning, the word hasn’t quite disappeared, but it’s gotten vanishingly rare since at least the late 1800s.
It was in the late 1800s, though, that “mignardise” was used in a completely different way, to mean a fancy hem or border. A set of tatting instructions from 1868 specified: “Make 28 patterns of the Mignardise edging, page 14, working the Beading the same.” How a word occasionally used to mean gentleness came to mean a cloth decoration, though, nobody seems to have any idea.
Making your own lace or even fancy hems — at least without a handy sewing machine — declined quite a lot by the time the 20th century came along, and the second meaning of “mignardise” faded at the same rate. Once again, you can still occasionally find it — now usually in the phrase “mignardise braid” — but it’s quite unusual.
But never fear, sometime around the 1930s, particularly in the US, “mignardise” started to mean cake. As in dessert. One of the earliest mentions was in 1931: “Elderly women full of Mignardises…” While all three versions of “mignardise” are technically still in use — sort of — this most recent one is the most common now. “Freshly baked scones, mignardises and teacakes..are sensational” appeared in New York Magazine just a few years ago. Once again, nobody kept notes about why and how the word became associated with cakes — and it’s not any specific sort of cake; just a sweet dessert that resembles cake in some way. In fact, since nobody is going to know what you’re talking about anyway, you could probably get away with calling any dessert a “mignardise.” And a mignardise might be iced in the pattern of a mignardise braid. Then you could even serve it to your guests with the mignardises and affectations of motherly favor! That would be mignardising a mignardised mignardise.
