HOW TO EAT A CROISSANT

If you’re of French extraction, you might not like what I’m about to tell you. I know, you’re still mad at me for eating Tuna Nicoise with my fingers the other day, and true, I would still struggle to pinpoint Bordeaux or La Rochelle on a map, but hear me out: I like France. I like the language and the fiddly food. I like the curious mix of attention to detail and the laissez-faire attitude to specifics. I like the romance, the delicate wine and the exquisite culture. And I love the French sense of style and effortless creative flair that swept the world like a master stroke of an impressionist’s paintbrush.

What’s extraordinary then is that it’s taken me twenty years to figure out how to eat a croissant.

I know. I started by ripping the ends off. That was my original mode d’emploi: tear off a piece like you would decapitate a baguette, then spread butter and jam over it and pop it in. Sure, you end up with a plateful of flakes and a mouth that’s dripping with buttery jam, and certainly you run out of butter at the continental breakfast bar, but it’s delicate. And it’s more refined than biting into it like it was a pain au chocolat.

That was my next guess. Pick it up and munch it from one crescenty end to the other. The only trouble is that you end up with a puzzle about what to do with the jam and butter - do you spread it... on the top? And then if you try to cut it lengthways with the butter knife provided, you quickly realise that the consistency of an oven-baked croissant depends exclusively on its shape, and any attempt to slice through it results in the whole thing collapsing... into a plateful of flakes.

It is possible that my family origin is French. One branch of us derives its name from Richard de Stybbe, a Norman nobleman who followed William the Conqueror with a wry quip and a love of punctuation and quizzes. I don’t know what Monsieur Richard de Stybbe would make of me massacring a croissant. The Bayeux Tapestry also doesn’t really cover the subject.

Anyway, for years now I’ve been using a knife and a fork (sometimes a spoon) to cut up my croissant as though it were a tiny, curved loaf of bread. Each segment gets dipped in or smattered with butter/jam/marmalade and is then slipped delicately into the mouth with the fork, leaving behind a rather smaller plateful... of flakes. For the record, I eat towering burgers in the same way, much to the hilarity of certain quarters, with a knife and a fork. Don’t get me started on massive burgers. If it’s too big to go in your mouth and requires a wooden tent peg to stop it falling apart, then it’s a good assumption that you’re not supposed to pick it up with your fingers and shove it in, and the use of implements like cutlery, whose actual job it is to make food the right shape for eating, is fair game. Leave me alone.

I digress. Apologies, Great Uncle Richard. For today I did something revolutionary. I took two croissants out of the packet, used a bread knife to cleanly cut them into long halves (which is much easier before they’re cooked) and put them in the oven at 200 degrees for two minutes. 

Before there was time to raise the tricolour or sing the Marseillleise, four halves came out. I laid on the slices of butter and the marmalade and reassembled the croissants. Perfect melty, bready, freshly baked, buttery, marmaladey, croissanty goodness - which I sliced vertically into two and then ate in front of a YouTube video about the planets.

Yum. Though, I did still end up with a plateful of flakes.