You say Chocolatine, I say Pain au Chocolat…

Welcome to my very first Substack post! With the Olympic Games wrapping up in Paris, it seems as good a time as any to delve into a topic that’s both delicious, hotly debated and inimitably French—pâtisserie.

Wait, you might wonder. How can pâtisserie be controversial? Well, just ask Thomas, the young Frenchman who lived with our family for the better part of the past year.  A native of Merignac, just west of Bordeaux in southwestern France, Thomas spent the past school year helping to  teach French at our son’s high school. We’ve enjoyed getting to know him, and have also appreciated the ample opportunities he’s afforded us to practice our French.  (Eli has been on the French immersion track since first grade, so he doesn’t need the practice as much as Andy and I do.)

Since Thomas’ arrival, conversations in our home often ping-ponged wildly and unpredictably between French and English. Sometimes, especially when tired, my ability to find the right French word plummeted. Other times, I managed to think of the French word even before the English one (When I thought of coinçé before “stuck” recently, it felt like a small victory.)

But back to the urgent matter at hand: pâtisserie.  In France, debate has raged for years on social media, over dinner tables, even in the halls of the French Parliament, over the proper terminology for those flaky crescent rolls filled with two sticks of dark chocolate. Thomas, who hails from the food-loving Gascony region, feels very, very strongly that the proper moniker for this delicacy is chocolatine; for him, it’s a question of gastronomical politesse. As he and other Gascons argue, chocolatine is a truncated descendent of Schokoladencroissant, a chocolate-filled Viennese crescent roll introduced to Paris in the 1830 by an Austrian baker named August Zang.

I see their point, and I love the syrupy smoothness of chocolatine, the way it rolls effortlessly off the tongue. Alas, Thomas and other chocolatine fans are a tiny, if vocal, minority. Outside of Gascony, the sweet is designated as pain au chocolat (chocolate bread). Have I mentioned that they are EXACTLY THE SAME THING? But what you choose to call them says a lot about you.

In the States, we’ve given the flaky pastry our own, ho-hum spin: chocolate croissant. Although it’s hard to find one here for less than $4, the pastry typically sells for a fraction of that in most French bakeries. That said, some Gascon bakers will happily charge you a few cents more should you have the temerity to request pain au chocolat instead of chocolatine. It’s their quiet protest against the tyrannical majority.

And this, dear reader, is my point: Words really matter—in any language!  I plan to explore this further in my newly christened newsletter, Unpacking the Words.

For decades as a reporter and editor, I made my living stringing words together. But I also love the idea of stopping and really delving, albeit gently, into what words really mean—what they say about us, why sometimes it can be so hard to get them out. Like the buttery pastry, this is a rich and multilayered subject. It is also endlessly fascinating.

Call me a word geek. Call me flaky. Whatever you call me, I look forward to sharing more toothsome thoughts about words in coming months.

A bientôt, les amis!