When I was in France last summer, a baker friend told me that very high end all-butter frozen croissants were entering the market, and displacing hand-made croissants even in boulangeries (traditional bakeries). As a legal matter, the genesis of this is obvious - to be named a boulangerie artisanale, a baker need not make his own croissant, but must make his own bread according to certain prescribed processes. It makes sense to concentrate on the latter and outsource the former, which is a difficult, time consuming exercise, and requires a deft hand that doesn't necessarily have much to do with the skills needed for a good baguette. Indeed, I spoke to another Parisian baker who still handmakes his croissants. For him and his large specialized croissant/brioche team, croissant baking takes many hours three times a week, and even he uses frozen leftovers on every second day (Sunday morning is a fresh croissant day, however).

The point of all this is that a couple of weeks ago I was in my local "Food Emporium" (a wretched, highly overpriced manhattan chain) very early in the morning only to see a woman putting small, frozen, pain au chocolats into a new-looking, cylindrical oven up near the cash registers. I had seen those croissants before - they were the same that my French baker friend was using, emerging from the same box (whether they were the same line or not, I'm not sure - these may have been the mid-range ones, rather than the super-premium French bakers use) .

I went back to the supermarket a couple of days later to try the croissants. I should say that they were not as good as the ones in France, almost certainly because the supermarket was not taking the time to let them defrost and rise overnight, and then brushing them with egg as they were supposed to. Also, because the premium was on letting them defrost and rise quickly, the butter croissants (i.e, the ones actually in the shape of a crescent) unravelled somewhat, a common problem for the aspiring croissant baker (I've had it happen several times). But putting all that aside, I'll be damned if they weren't pretty good - rich, buttery, and crackly. They are unequivocally better than the vast majority of croissants available in New York.

The real story, here, of course, is that frozen croissants represent one of the emerging cracks in the French culinary edifice. French people haven't even noticed that their croissants are now frozen rather than fresh - haven't noticed the disturbing sameness of one croissant when compared to the next (hand made croissants differ perceptibly - the scrunchy one, the fat one, the long and thin one, all make appearances each morning. Frozen croissants emerge from the oven in near-identical ranks). They haven't noticed in part because French people are losing their underlying knowledge about food, and because the food technologists have gotten very skilled of late. So while I appreciated crunching into a still warm, fairly authentic rendition of a Pain au chocolat the other day from my supermarket, I wondered whether I wasn't just betraying the cause. "Eh", I concluded. In the end, it tasted good.