Eclair

The eclair will try to seduce you. At first glance, we want to say, "Of course it's a pastry!" It's sometimes flaky, always sweet, and involves crisscrossed melted chocolate. Further, it has a cream filling, and fillings--whether they be sweet or savory--are often characteristic of pastries. Indeed, it is almost as if the eclair has transcended its own pastry status, anthropomorphized, and consumed a cream puff. It thus has risen above the level of mere pastry, taking on super-pastry status.

However, we should not be so quick to submit to the eclair's wiles. For after all, is not approving the eclair as pastry also tacitly approving the doughnut? It would be hypocritical to reject a Boston Creme, for example, when we have so instantly affirmed the eclair. And then what about the Boston Creme Pie?? Are we so willing to say pies are pastries just because we have warmed to the eclair?

It is a slippery slope. See figure 3a.


Are you still so sure about the eclair?

Muffin

The muffin is an interesting specimen. Its ambiguity has long confounded researchers in the pastry community and, indeed, it is often the lynchpin upon which people's pastry biases lie. Those who say muffins are pastries have essentially abandoned the so-called "flakiness index" through which pastries are analyzed based on their relative flakiness, one of the first known measures of the quality of pastry. Are we, as a society, ready to make that jump? See Figure 2 for a complex analysis of available data.


In defense of the muffin-as-pastry, it is certainly a breakfast food and usually--though not always--sweet. Personally, I am much more inclined to bestow the pastry title on a blueberry muffin with a sugary crust on top than a bran muffin, but for the sake of argument, we will take "muffin" as an indivisible Platonic category unto itself.

Muffins are eaten with coffee and they can be purchased at sidewalk carts. Sometimes they are frosted, though whether this adds or subtracts from their pastriness is a matter of much debate. Can this enigma ever be resolved?!?!

A Poem for the Muffin

There once was a muffin made of bran
Of which no one was much of a fan
"Oh Heavens to Pete!
"Muffins should be sweet!"
Said a very disgruntled young man.

Readers, let this be a lesson for you.

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.