LIFE LESSONS
Robert Reynolds, former child
Imagine a French mother holding the hand of her small child in front a pastry shop window. They share a feeling about pastry education that is difficult to translate. While indulging in the pleasures brought on by a window filled with pastries, sometimes sculpted like works of art, other times appearing gnarly, irregular, and browned with butter, mother and child are enticed by aromas that probably caused them to stop in front of the window in the first place. I’ve witnessed moments which only happen as part of the package of being French. The mother slips money into the child’s hand, opens the door, and gently nudges the youngster to go inside where children learn to make their choices on their own.
But it all appearances, as the child’s right of passage, appearing to step alone into this world of wonder is well rehearsed. Outside, Maman relishes the awakening independence she instigates. Behind the counter, Monsieur or Madame, the chef or the wife, recognize the moment and receive the child with special attentiveness. Of the million riffs on rites of passage, discovering the anatomy of the croissant has to be one of the most charming of life’s lessons at whatever age it happens.
Imagine the morning table set for breakfast. Cups and saucers are staged for coffee or tea, and juice glasses stand tall beside a pitcher. Plates mark everyone’s place. There are small pots of yogurt or fromage blanc. While girls who will grow up to look like Parisian models who prefer to finish breakfast by eating fromage blanc, boys gravitate to the more pudding-like sweetened yogurt. Both scrape every gram from the containers, and share the same level of appreciation for what they eat. The ritual of breakfast in any case prepares them for the posturing any good day requires.
Yellow butter sits in a domed dish and a jar of really good jam is ready to embellish bread. A yard of crisp crusted baguette, portioned in slices as wide as a hand, normally sit on a cutting board. The casually poised bread knife is never far away. A basket heaped with fresh croissants only appears because someone had the good sense to make a quick run to the baker and transport their warm aroma, capable of reaching into the corners of the house, and coax everyone to the table.
Papa takes tea perhaps, doesn’t like butter on his bread, and prefers English marmalade. He breaks his bread into bite-sized pieces two fingers wide. He splits these open and eats them one at a time. Maman does like butter on her bread, and is judicious with jam. She’s a little more voluptuous, so may add just another mite of butter if it’s from a particularly good source. Or, she may dip the tip of the spoon into the jam pot and allow herself another tiny taste before washing it down with the last sip of tea.
Our boy, let’s call him Guillaume, drifts to the morning table slowly waking. I think of those giant cranes resembling creatures that lift and remove containers from ships in our ports as Guillaume’s hand traces an arc of movement to the plate of croissants. The hand hovers, dips lazily and with precise movement pinches - without crushing - the delicate croissant. His hand retraces the path back to his plate and he waits, He Ha as if exhausted from the effort. Or perhaps someone has asked a question and his sleepy mind, slow to get into gear, mumbles a response. He rests his cheek on his hand. It’s not boredom he exhibits, rather as with any well practiced discipline, he prepares himself for the croissant.
A croissant is made to be contained by a small hand, so Guillaume holds the body of it with a precious and limp delicateness, the way he might hold a bird. The tips of the crescent overlap his gently closed hand. With the same two fingers used to extricate the croissant from the center of the table, our boy gently pinches one of the tips, and holding firmly enough pulls at it until it unravels the dough inside. When successful, he removes one ‘wing’ of the croissant. When the center of the croissant comes out in one wedge-shaped piece it leaves a hollow in the shell where it hibernated. Guillaume holds the body of the croissant in one hand, and the tip of the wedge now is secure between thumb and finger of the other hand.
The tip of this wedge tends to go limp toward the soft end which was once inside at the center. It has an appealing and moist droop and texture as light as air. It gives off warm yeasty aromas. Guillaume’s first taste won’t require butter, because the croissant is made with it. It also won’t need jam at this point. With his head still lazily propped by an arm on the table, he lifts the croissant and allows it to descend into his mouth. I’m reminded of Bacchus eating from a cluster of grapes held over his head and register that there is something decadent about a croissant.
There are three parts to a croissant, two side ‘wings’ which when removed leave the third part, a hollow center. When each tip is tugged, a wing can be extracted if the croissant doesn’t have a flawed construction. Or if Guillaume doesn’t pull with the right amount of torque, the second wedge might fail to emerge whole from the center. It could unravel, or tear. Therefore when he takes this first bite, somewhere in the back of his mind he is hoping that if the second extraction follows as successfully as the first he’ll get the chance to repeat the experience of the first taste. But you never can be certain. He just gives into the moment placing the soft croissant on the tongue, then as the piece settles, his mouth closes, and I assume the aromas of butter and bread fill his head while he gives himself over to chewing slowly. He doesn’t really want to be spoken to now.
With the soft tip thus disposed of, Guillaume sometimes takes the spoon and places a small amount of jam to put on the central part of what’s left of the piece he’s still holding. If he positions the piece so that the side he took a bite from now faces up, he can usually see the swirl of dough that forms the croissant. Inside a little vortex patterned by rolling flour and butter, he finds the perfect spot to nest a dot of jam. Guillaume often does this, and the relish of the second bite is qualitatively different from the first. He manages to repeat this nesting/tasting depending on the size of his bites, his hand, or the croissant.
He’s still holding the very tip of the croissant he tugged to remove the wing. By now his fingers are covered with crusty, butter-baked flecks. The last little nubbin of croissant wing is poised, all that remains of an end that took a lot of heat. Sometimes it is crisp all the way through and shatters in a million pieces like puff pastry. Like puff pastry, the croissant is composed of butter, flour, and water. Unlike puff pastry, the croissant is yeasted. However, when the tip cooks to the core it leaves behind all soft textured traces. It’s a jewel of a morsel on which Guillaume normally wouldn’t add jam. Its buttery qualities have maximized a natural sweetness and there appears to be no noise inside Guillaume’s head like the pleasure-laden soft crunch of buttered pastry.
Sometimes Guillaume holds the center piece of the croissant the entire time he eats the wing, the way small children hold onto a stuffed animal. Other times, once the wing has been removed, he puts the center piece back onto his plate and devotes his full focus to the ritual of eating.
If you hold the body of the croissant precisely, and extract the second wing/wedge with surgical precision, you end up with an entirely hollow, crisp shell. While he repeats the ritual of eating the other wing, it’s a delicate job to hold the hollow core in his palm. With the slightest pressure, the shell will crumble.
When he’s ready for the hollow shell, he understands he has some choices. He seems to exercise them according some internal governance related to physics or esthetics. He may break the shell in half, following a seam created when the raw dough was folded to shape the croissant. By simply tugging, the shell separates along this soft line. With two pieces in front of him, Guillaume decides whether to eat the extra crispy and flat piece on the bottom, or the domed and extra flaky top half.
The top piece easily folds over itself, since it’s molded to form a nice arch. Guillaume has been known to slip some jam inside this piece and eat it like any stuffed food, an éclair, or a sandwich. If he chooses to do that, he leaves the flattened bottom piece of the croissant for the finale. He tends to break this into smaller bites as though the croissant must be slowly finessed. No jam in the end, just the finishing touches of eating a croissant flake by flake with great pleasure.
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