Parisians can be unforgivingly critical of each other where food fads are concerned. “It is a fashion, a madness,” said one Françoise d’Aubigné, when her social circle became dribblingly obsessed with the Next Big Thing. “The anxiety to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them and the desire to eat them again” were all that anybody was talking about, she said. She clearly found it extremely annoying. Perhaps Françoise was laying into the recent craze for the crookie, a hybrid of the croissant filled with cookie dough and re-baked, which launched in October 2022 at Boulangerie Louvard on Rue de Châteaudun. It recently became a viral sensation after being amplified on TikTok. Suddenly Parisians were queueing down the street for them. From selling about 150 a day, the bakery now shifts 1,500.
Except our critic wasn’t talking about crookies. Françoise d’Aubigné, also known as Madame de Maintenon, was the mistress of Louis XIV and she was exasperated by a craze in the very last years of the 17th century for fresh garden peas, a then-novel alternative to dried. “There are ladies who, after having dined, and dined well, eat garden peas in their quarters before going to bed,” she raged. Annoying bloody hipsters with their stupid fresh peas.
The excitement around the crookie, which follows the cronut and the cruffin, is proof of two things: firstly, that croissant dough is endlessly adaptable, and secondly that ’twas ever thus. According to the food historian Dr Annie Gray, my guide when I need the long view, history is littered with stories like these. In the 18th century pineapples became a thing. In the early 19th century there was “poultry mania”, as landowners competed to see who could raise the biggest chicken. Before the whole garden pea thing there was a craze among 17th-century English gentlemen for human breast milk. They claimed it had restorative properties. Well, of course they did.
By the 20th century we had developed an obsession with obtaining the very first bottle of beaujolais nouveau, or eating the first game bird suspiciously close to the opening of the shooting season. It’s easy to roll your eyes at this stuff, and it’s really satisfying to do so. I’ve rolled mine so hard at times you could hear the friction of ball on socket. But we shouldn’t be surprised it happens. Food and drink are perfectly placed to become a mark of status, and you no longer need to be a French aristocrat to get involved. All you need is an Instagram account and insane reserves of patience. Then you too can find yourself standing in a long queue outside, say, Supernova in London’s Soho, desperate to get your hands on one of those crispy-edged smash burgers you’ve been drooling over for weeks.
But is it fair to be so dismissive? Arguably, no. Because, while the cult of novelty may be silly, new things often aren’t. Fresh peas really were a brilliant innovation. The first pineapples must have been a revelation. Human breast milk consumed by grown men, not so much, but you get the point. As a species we bore easily and everything we take for granted now was once new. Which is my introduction to a confession: in 2013 I queued for 45 minutes in a freezing New York to buy one of Dominique Ansel’s new-fangled, vanilla cream-filled Cronuts. And delightful it was too. What’s more I’m off to Paris soon. If you want me, I’ll probably be in a lengthy queue on Rue de Châteaudun, on the quest for a crookie. I’d like to think I’m better than that, but we all know I’m not.