It’s been quite the month for fans of flaky Frankensteins. First, Dominique Ansel, the French-born, New York-based baker most famous for the Cronut, the croissant-doughnut mashup that sparked a billion instagram posts, opened his first European outlet in London, making his trademarked creation available to the masses – or at least those of us with £4 to spend on a piece of pastry. Now, M&S have launched the croloaf, a hybrid of a croissant and – you guessed it – a loaf of bread, which is, according to them, the “perfect fusion of the French and British breakfast”.
The Brexit vote clearly hasn’t dimmed our appetite for greater European integration of baked goods, because the croloaf is harder to pin down than Boris Johnson’s principles. When I finally get my mitts on one, I am, inevitably, slightly disappointed by its appearance, which is of nothing more than a pack of squashy supermarket croissants that travelled home under a few tins of beans and a bottle of wine. But the proof is in the eating.
M&S recommends toasting it. This is presumably to highlight the one thing it definitely has over the original: as anyone who has ever tried to shove a croissant into a toaster slot can attest, it doesn’t work. However drunk you are. Cold, the soft, briochey bread is unremarkable, but heat proves a powerful catalyst. Almost too powerful at first – the first couple of slices burn to a cinder, thanks to my failure to appreciate just how delicate this Gallic wonder loaf is, spun as it is from pure French butter and all our postwar hopes and dreams. But once I crack it, I’m an addict. Crisp and golden on the outside, soft and buttery inside and light as Parisian air, like cheap European holidays, it’s ridiculously moreish.
The problem is that, while a croissant needs nothing more than a large cup of milky coffee as an accompaniment, toast and butter go together like, well, tea and biscuits – you can’t have one without the other, it’s a matter of national sovereignty. So, though a slice of the croloaf may contain a third of the calories of a croissant, once I’ve lovingly painted it with butter with all the care of Cezanne finishing off one of his still lifes, it probably doesn’t.
On the upside, however, it is easier to add Marmite to, which makes me think that if M&S had got its act in gear earlier, things might have gone differently on 23 June. Vive le croloaf! Vive la yeast-based spreads! Vive l’entente cordiale!
