I’ve always been on the lookout for the perfect pain au chocolat. Always.
It all started when Marks and Spencer brought out a perfectly respectable version, maybe 20 years ago now, which was quite nice once you’d heated it up in the oven. And it progressed from there.
Of course, breakfast is a funny kind of meal. Worthy. Functional.
And for the longest time, the option of trying to make this meal even slightly more glamorous by eating it out in a cafe or restaurant didn’t exist in this country.
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Then again, for the longest time, the very notion of eating out anywhere for any reason was considered an extravagance, to be indulged in only on special occasions. Towns didn’t have restaurants, as we know them now. They had hotels, well maybe one hotel, and if the blood had somehow gone to your head and you’d decided to mark an anniversary or birthday or something equally significant, that was where you might head.
But not for breakfast. Never for breakfast. That was something only Americans did on American TV programmes where they might meet up with business associates or friends and drink American coffee from American coffee pots in American diners.
It was, of course, the French who came up with the notion of a breakfast dessert or indeed, abandoning all pretence at anything else, simply designating breakfast, the very meal itself, as a form of dessert.
This is a very tempting way to look at the world and for the most part I try, I really try, not to go along with it. Instead, I try, I really try, to stick to sensible things like porridge and fruit.
Except at the weekend, when the porridge stays in the press. That’s when I break out and fry mushrooms and tomatoes and an egg and maybe boil some potatoes before chopping them up and tossing them on the pan as well - fried potatoes, as we all know, being the yummiest part of any fry.
But, and here’s where all that trying comes to naught, I will always have my keep cup to hand for a cappuccino on the walk to work if the mood strikes and that’s when I’m not stopping off in a café close to my school for a post-breakfast coffee and pain au chocolat.
And once that hard knob of chocolate in the centre succumbs to a blast of radiation from the microwave, this pain au chocolat is fine, absolutely fine.
And I’ve had other iterations in other venues around the country. And they’ve been all fine too. Absolutely fine.
But croissants and especially pains au chocolat contain a lot of butter and a lot of sugar and inevitably a lot of calories. So, they should be more than fine. They should be a lot more than fine.
And then I found one that was. In the most obvious of places. France.
Last summer, I was lucky enough to spend a week at the Olympics in Paris. I got to see Adeleke on the track and Wiffen (and Marchand) in the pool, O’Donovan and McCarthy powering over the line for a rowing gold and McIlroy and Lowry negotiating the greens. It was the best of times.
But the highlight came on the very last day. On the train on the way to the ferry.
It was then that I dug into a pain au chocolat, purchased at a bakery close to where we were staying. I’d made a point of going to as many of the local bakeries as I could and had counted five with a short walk of our house-swap, each producing in-house delights of scrumptiousness. In a hurry that morning, my buddy and I had grabbed a bunch of pastries from maybe the scruffiest of them all. But that pain au chocolate was a revelation. It veritably melted in my mouth and the rich and warm chocolate within connected with the very essence of my being.
No microwave. No heating up. No nothing. Still vaguely warm and fresh and flakey from bursting into existence an hour or so previously, it transcended the very concept of taste.
And so, my odyssey is over. I just have to accept the conclusion. There is a perfect pain au chocolate out there. It just happens to be located in another country.
So for now, breakfast will continue to be worthy and functional. And even if and when I break out for a coffee and croissant, the enjoyment dial will clunk its way up to a ‘fine’ but no further. And it will do so as my thoughts bring me back to the paper bag I opened on that train on that day and the unexpected wonders that lay within.
