The classic biscuit cookie

I guess it is stating the obvious to say that if one likes good food, then France is a pretty good country to end up in.

Now to be sure, there are the dizzying heights of Haute Cuisine, say in a two-star Michelin restaurant, which if you ever experience it, you are likely to find yourself levitating above the table, looking down upon the array of dishes, your dining companions, and yourself for that matter, because such meals are scented, dazzlingly complex occurences that wrest you up and out of your own mind/body reference, whether you like it or not, and chances are you like it.

But there is another segment of French food which is perhaps less known. And it is just as special. Not as sophisticated, not as complex, not as layered, but as special just the same.

It is the utterly simple.

Madeleines (as Proust wrote about).

A baguette - perfectly baked to a deep golden crispy-crunch on the outside, and an airy lightness on the inside.

and...the butter biscuit cookie.

Not the ones you get in the store, in the cookie department. Like the brand "Lu". They are okay. But, as with all such things, they taste like a factory, however distantly. They have too many preservatives in them, have to jump through too many hoops of red tape to make it into the supermarket, so that their shelf-life will hold through to some distant date, half a year away.

It is this forcing of shelf-life -- the artificial ingredients required to prop up the guarantee of a suspended state of animation -- that makes it taste (and act on the tongue) like "factory".

But the classic biscuit cookie can be acquired from outside the confines of a supermarket. You can go around those guys. The biscuit cookie, "pur beurre" (pure butter) is made artisanal, and comes in little, discreet, unmarked packages. Now those are the things you need to get your mitts on.

They crunch differently. Not the grudging, limpid "crunch" of supermarket biscuits. But a real crunch. An event for the "bouche". It is a tight crunch. A happy crunch.

And the taste! How does one convey it? It is pure; it is real. You understand that this is the source of the idea, and everything you had before was a derivative. That's the best I can do. You'd have to have the two side-by-side someday, to see for yourself.

Gabriel agrees. He knows a good thing when he sees it.

We don't get them often, so that it remains special.

That's the thing about the artisanal, simple things in France. You protect them, treasure them. You enjoy it sparingly, as a mark of honor. Which may seem silly -- to honor food in this way.

But, then again, it is not likely you have yet had one of these artisanal biscuit cookies from Normandy.

:-)