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Île-de-France
A small sausage-meat puff pastry parcel, domed like an attic lock: in Deuil-la-Barre, this is what people come to eat in mid-September, and the festival bears its name.
Pastry or bakery speciality from Île-de-France.
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The serrure is a culinary speciality unique to Deuil-la-Barre, whose origins the municipal booklet notes 'are lost in the mists of time'; over the ages, it has become a symbol associated solely with the La Barre district, neighbouring the Domaine de La Chevrette. Originally, these were small pastries, 'a kind of puff pastry parcel', but oven-baked rather than fried, roughly square, filled with sausage meat and shaped like those domed locks known as 'à bosse' that can still be seen, ever more rarely, on attic doors in the region, and which have become flea-market items.
The shape evolved over time: by the end of the 19th century, it had become that of a traditional keyhole. 'While the shape seemed to have generated the name originally, the name has now generated the shape', writes Michel Bourlet, the author of the booklet.
Local elders offered another, more 'digestive' explanation for the name: after eating one of these pastries, one had no appetite left at all, the stomach finding itself closed, as though locked with a key. Michel Bourlet takes the explanation for what it is worth, but finds it 'most pleasant' and wonders whether the locksmithing term was not a journalist's invention.
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In the 18th century, the La Barre festival was held on the feast day of the local lord, on 15 September in the days of Monsieur and Madame d'Épinay. Large canvas awnings were erected beneath the foliage; merchants, strolling players and musicians set up their stalls, people danced to the sound of violins, played games, and ate fruit from Deuil, gingerbread and the famous serrures, which did not yet bear that name. The châtelains came to mingle with the popular festivities, and on the Sunday evening the lord of La Chevrette put on a firework display.
The festival was held in the Place de La Barre and along the immense and majestic avenue lined with four rows of elms, which led from the crossroads to the entrance of the grand Château de La Chevrette. Two illustrious guests of the château left descriptions of it, two years apart: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, present in September 1758, and Denis Diderot, in a letter to Sophie Volland dated 15 September 1760 ('Yesterday was the festival at La Chevrette'). The excerpts reproduced in the municipal booklet speak of violins, dancing, games and gingerbread; they say nothing of the serrures.
Under the First Empire, the La Barre festival was very much in vogue: serrures were built into pyramids as tall as a man which, according to the local elders, 'did not last long'. Around 1878, an elder wrote that the wine merchant on the corner of Rue du Château sold between 2,000 and 2,200 serrures over the course of the festival; an article in the local newspaper from 1880 confirms this, with more than 2,200 serrures devoured that year, in a commune of barely 2,000 inhabitants.
At the end of the 19th century, many serrures were also made in Montmorency by the pastry cook Charpentier, who ran the 'Veau qui Tette' inn: he made 1,200 of them, sold for forty centimes at the time. Before the Great War, consumption had dropped to around 400, even as the population was expanding rapidly.
A witness wrote in 1910 that of all the festivals in the vicinity of Paris, that of La Barre, in mid-September, was certainly 'the most curious, indeed the most original': 'People go there exclusively to eat serrures à bosse.' In the mid-20th century, it was still held on the Place de La Barre, with its fairground stallholders, wooden carousel horses and a stall set aside for the sale of serrures; on the neighbouring little square, a charcuterie prepared its own serrures, facing a greasy pole laden with hams and sausages.
Then the festival ceased for half a century. Throughout that time, according to the municipal booklet, successive bakers in La Barre passed down the recipe and continued to make and sell serrures every September. The festival resumed in September 2006 in the Parc de La Chevrette, on a biennial cycle.
Today, it is held every other year, in September, at the same time as the European Heritage Days.
The local press presents the festival as an unmissable event since the Middle Ages.
Michel Bourlet, the author of the booklet, is more cautious, but puts forward a lead. He recalls that a 1461 manuscript sets out the terms of the curious and modest dues that the Benedictine priory of Saint-Eugène, in Deuil, owed to its benefactors, the Montmorencys, lords of the manor: on the four solemn feasts of the year, an offering named 'roissolles', rissoles accompanied by 'gastiaux d'épices'. Baron Guillaume de Montmorency (1461–1531), successor to Jean II, received the same tribute.
These rissoles and gingerbreads were surely not prepared solely for the lord, he considers: the local inhabitants certainly wished to taste them. It is 'perhaps' there, he writes, that the origin of the festival and the tradition of the serrures lies, though nothing indicates that it does not predate 1461. A lead, then, rather than an established lineage.
Appearance
small, roughly square pastries, oven-baked rather than fried, shaped like a domed lock 'à bosse', then, from the late 19th century onwards, like a keyhole; in 2006, Michel Bourlet noted that those which bakers in La Barre had attempted to revive had changed in taste, texture and even shape, to the point of becoming triangular. In Monsieur Vandandaële's recipe, the casing is an all-butter puff pastry, glazed with egg yolk.
Taste
a sausage meat stuffing, lightened with minced beef, seasoned with shallot, parsley, nutmeg and pepper, and splashed with Calvados.
shallot, parsley, nutmeg and pepper; above all, no salt, as the meat is already salted.
the ingredients are worked together, then the resulting mince is splashed with Calvados.
in the oven, keeping a close eye on the baking.
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The serrures can be tasted at the Fête des Serrures, which is held every other year, in September, in the Parc de La Chevrette. For the edition of 19 September 2026, the programme announced their sale by the bakery 'La Maison du Pâtissier'.
In 2020, the festival programme announced the sale of the serrures, 'delicious little puff pastry parcels filled with sausage meat', by the town's bakers.
In bygone days, to 'unlock' it all, one had only to wash these pastries down with a good jug of local wine, such as Clos Diva, which was considered the finest vintage from Deuil, or another 'Picolo de Deuil'.
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