History is littered with food fads, from pineapples to ‘poultry mania’ – and now, anything involving croissant dough
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.
