Croissant

The croissant is perhaps the quintessential pastry... or is it?? Pastry is a category notoriously difficult to define. What qualities exude 'pastriness'? What disqualifies a bready product from achieving pastry status? In other words, what is the Platonic ideal of pastry and where does the croissant appear on the spectrum of pastry?

For, indeed, like gender, pastry perhaps is better seen as a continuum, not simple black and white categories. See figure 1A.

Clearly, however, the pastry-continuum theory can really never be proven or rejected, and it is the goal of this blog to establish clear pastry categories: pastry, OR NOT.

Back to the croissant: its flakiness indicates that is is a pastry, for flakiness is indisputably one of the foremost pastry-like characteristics. However, does that mean that if you eat a hard, old croissant it is less of a pastry? Further, croissants lack a certain sweetness inherent in most pastries (though here advocates of spanikopita will surely protest). Is the honey-coated croissant somehow "more pastry" than the plain croissant? Or does the hegemony of sugary breakfast food blind us to the true nature of the pastry? These are not questions that we should take lightly.

Indeed, the croissant seems, on one level, like one of the easiest pastries to affirmatively categorize. You eat it with coffee. It goes well with butter or jam (but then again, so does toast, and are you so sure about toast???). You can buy it from a sidewalk cart. And finally, it is a breakfast food, and studies have shown that pastries are most often consumed at breakfast.

On the other hand, what if it were a melted ham and cheese sandwich inside a croissant? We will leave that for another day.