This is a pain au chocolat, or rather it should be. One of my favorite pastries, a good pain au chocolat. This is not a good one. I don't bake, so no, I don't know how to make one, but I understand how they are made. (I know how babies are made, doesn't mean I've ever felt the slightest urge to make one.) In America, we call these "chocolate croissants." We call a number of things that that aren't really a pain au chocolat. Add one more.
This one was made with rye-flour. That was a terrible idea. Unlike refined wheat flour, rye isn't sweet but slightly sour. A great rye bread is delicious; earthier than white bread, denser, more toothsome, slightly acid. None of those things are meant to be in a croissant. By definition the modern croissant is light, flaky, buttery, melting, and rich in the eating. In the right hands, add dark chocolate, change the traditional crescent shape to a square -- the better to contain the chocolate -- and you've got something akin to heaven. This pastry, purchased this morning from a local coffee shop, was not right but wrong. The dough was bitter, the chocolate overwhelmed by the rye, the pastry too dense. It was not good.
Nearly every morning when I go to work, I get my breakfast at the cafe nearest to hand. For a long time now the cafe has not offered a pain au chocolat. They used to. It was delicious. I ate entirely too many. I felt myself quite grown-up and health-conscious when instead I ordered, say, a a little asparagus-quiche or the like. Vegetables. Vegetables are good, and good for us, no? But then my favorite went away. Vendors change, bakeries close, and so for the last couple of years my cafe has sold croissants that aren't really. What they call croissants in the cafe are instead a sort of huge, clumsy loaf of a thing, twice the size of a traditional croissant and nowhere near as good as they should be. (Very American, that. Picture how a eight-year-old child -- in Texas -- might imagine a croissant if all they'd ever seen was a picture. Like that.) What the cafe calls a "chocolate croissant" is actually just that same thick, over-sized object with burnt chocolate buttons on top. Terrible. It's kept me from eating chocolate for breakfast I guess. As I said, the cafe has other, better things to eat. I'm sure I'm all the better for it.
Now and again though, all I really want is a pain au chocolat.
The story is that Marie-Antoinette brought croissant to France when she arrived from Vienna. May not be true, but it's a good story. Nice to think that that wretched, tragic lady contributed something to the French. The pain au chocolat is thought to be an invention of an Austrian baker in the nineteenth century, so a relatively modern innovation. Still, that's long enough ago to allow for the word "traditional" to be applied. That's what I wanted this morning, a traditional pain au chocolat. Not what I got. I went to three other coffee shops in pursuit of same. Evidently the vendor for all three is now whoever the fool is who decided to make these with rye-flour. C'est tragique!
An exaggeration, I know. Laughable. A fat man's lament. Things change. There are always new ideas. New is not always better. New isn't good of itself.
And that is an old man's complaint, isn't it?
I'm not old. Older I am, but what does that mean without context? We're all getting older until we stop, aren't we? Adult then. I'm what my beloved husband A. -- himself even further from young than I -- invariably calls, "a grown-ass man." That's what I am, a grown-ass man. This grown-ass man then doesn't want some hipster putting rye-flour where it doesn't belong just because he or she can. What the Hell is wrong with people, messing with a nearly perfect thing?!
Happens all the time, of course. Pineapple pizza. Avocado ice-cream. Hamlet in prose. Psycho gets remade, shot by shot, in color -- with Vince Vaughn. Someone draws "Happy Faces" on a rare set of Goya etchings.
It's harder now, my job. Being a bookseller is a lot harder now than it used to be when I started, thirty odd years ago. Fewer bookstores, obviously, fewer opportunities. All the obvious things. The part that's always been best about a bookstore job, the part of the work I've always most enjoyed, has been the conversation. Harder to have now. Not because the questions change. They don't. People don't really change all that much in thirty years either. And there are just as many good, new books as ever, maybe more. More voices. More places and people heard from. More opportunity to make yourself heard. All good.
But I can't get to the things I always could before; there are fewer places to start. Woodworking? Crafts? Transportation? Engineering? All those practical things that made for the easiest conversations, for the base retail interaction: "Do you have --?" "Where are the books about --?" No. That's over. For the most part now, I don't. Those books aren't here. Those books simply may not be, not much, not anymore. Change. Can't be helped. Goodbye to the standard Atlas. Farewell to Uniform Plumbing Code. Worrisome, as a practical matter, supply and demand. Embarrassing, but nothing to be done.
The conversation I'm regretting, deeply, has to do with books that aren't on the shelf, it's true, but not because the information is now elsewhere. The books I'm missing are the books I would recommend. Nothing so simple as information. Art.
What was the last book you enjoyed? What do you read?
If you like X, I'm confident you would enjoy Y. But -- we don't have Y. It may be out of print. It may be the author's only available title is their latest. It may be economically impossible to keep that title, and all the books like it, on the shelf just so I might recommend it to someone who liked another books like it, or only like it so far as one made me think of the other. The one you read might be new, or out just last year. That's likely now. The one of which I was reminded might be ten years old. Gone. It might be 200 years old. Gone. It might be considered a classic in it's author's country of origin, but not here, or that country may not exist anymore. Gone. So many books. So much that is gone. And some of it is no more likely to come back than The Manual of Steel Construction or the full Loeb Library or Macauley's Essays.
That's a problem. The best of what I do, have done, is all to do with the connections I can make between my customers and books, and between books for my customers. How do I do that when the books I would recommend are gone?
Put rye in your croissants then. If you want, go on. Me? If I'm being honest, I think it's shit, but someone must like it, or at least know no better. But when I want a nearly perfect thing of it's kind, a pain au chocolat say, or Humphry Clinker, or mid-career novel by Muriel Spark, or a book by Margaret Walker, is it too much to hope that it might still be?
I'm not a fool. I don't look to make a living from just the books I like. I don't expect to always find the food I like. I shouldn't like to think of a world bereft of Tobias Smollett or exclusively populated by inferior pastries. If it's to be such a desert of good things, I might as well have never left the place I came from. What's the point of city without expensive coffee? Without pho and fried plantains and Korean bbq? Without bookshops and booksellers and backlist titles and staff that reads poetry and keeps Auden in stock?
What's the world without an authentic pain au chocolat?
Less.
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