But it would not be going too far to say that the coexistence of the pretzel croissant and the Cronut is worth thinking of as a form of competition, if only on purely Darwinian terms, in which all coexistence is competition held briefly in equilibrium, particularly because their coexistence is representative of something new, pervasive, and quite possibly perverse: the hybridized and fetishized schnecken. Oblivious of the peril, we wake and find ourselves in an age of mutated pastry, cross-bread, trying to be two things at once.
Doughnuts cross with croissants, croissants cross with pretzels; Montreal bagels are made puffier for New York tastes, and New York bagels are made as thin and sweet as the ones in Montreal. Let us look, then, at these case studies of how stale bread becomes fresh and familiar sweets take mutant forms, and ask why people line up at an ungodly hour to eat sweets that taste odd and look new.
Is the pretzel croissant the forerunner of the Cronut or merely its parallel creature? Is the Cronut a craze that, like the designer cupcake, is doomed to walk the avenues briefly and then die in shame and embarrassment, or is it a true contribution—as the croissant and the doughnut and the pretzel all were in their day—and likely to become part of the common cupboard?
This ascent toward architecture guaranteed the seriousness of cooking, and helped move it from peasant lore to contagious classifications—toward fixed recipes. There is another reason for the priority of pastry: pastry chefs are the only ones in the kitchen who are alchemists by necessity.
It is de rigueur for the fish chef to say that he wants his fish to shine through, but the cakemaker does not want his cake to taste anything like the flour that constitutes it. Baking is always making new. But there is perhaps a deeper hidden pressure. Among those who bake, three separate activities are gathered under one head. A fourth kind of sweetmaker is the confiseur , who makes candies. This subtler, less visible competition among the kinds, as much as the alchemical possibilities of the craft, may be the real fire of innovation.
