La Nantaise de Confiserie
La Nantaise de Confiserie is the small company that makes the Rigolettes Nantaises, the fruit-filled sugar candy created in Nantes in 1902 and still produced there, in an artisanal and traditional way, in five original flavors: lemon, raspberry, blackcurrant, mandarin and pineapple. Its shop and workshop are on the rue de Verdun in the center of Nantes.
The house
Nantes was once the sugar capital of France, and when the colonial sugar trade faded the city's confectioners took over, turning the port into a center for sweets and biscuits. The Rigolette belongs to that moment. In 1902 a confectioner named Charles Bohu perfected a new kind of candy: a thin shell of cooked sugar around a soft, flowing heart of fruit pulp. The technical feat won it a following among candy lovers, and it soon stood alongside the harder berlingot as one of the sweets that meant Nantes.
The name is a story of its own. Bohu was an opera lover and had named his cat Rigolette after Verdi's Rigoletto. The cat is said to have disappeared on the very day he finished the recipe, and the candy carried her name from then on. His original shop stood at 26 rue de la Marne, and in 1930 it was transformed into a luxurious confectionery with a blue and gold mosaic façade, in the manner of the great LU and BN biscuit brands of the city; the storefront can still be seen today.
The recipe has not changed in more than a century. The sugar shell is cooked with steam, then filled with a melting center of fruit pulp flavored with blackcurrant, lemon, mandarin, raspberry or pineapple, in the bright colors that make a bag of Rigolettes instantly recognizable. Today the house also makes seasonal and newer flavors, along with fruit pastes, berlingots, caramels, nougats and chocolates, but the five original Rigolettes remain its signature.
What they make
Clipperton carries the classic assortment of the five original flavors in two sizes. The small bag, 30 g, is the everyday treat, the pocket-sized version to keep in a coat or slip into a lunch box. The large bag, 230 g, is the one to share or to give.
- Rigolette Nantaise, small bag, 30 g
- Rigolette Nantaise, large bag, 230 g
Both are in the La Nantaise de Confiserie collection.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer, and part of our job is to bring over the small regional sweets that never travel on their own. Every French city has a candy it grew up with, and in Nantes that candy is the Rigolette, still made by one small house a few streets from where it was invented. We wanted the people who left Nantes for Canada or the United States to find it again, and everyone else to discover it. We import the Rigolettes directly from the house on the rue de Verdun.
