Just one more... French Pâtisserie

There are few cake-related lies told with greater sincerity than “No thanks, I couldn't possibly...." Particularly when the last chocolate éclair on the plate is in play.

The French pâtisserie counter is one of those rare places where adulthood briefly, but totally, fails me. We may have a mortgage, a pension and strongly held opinions about climate change, but put me - a grown-ass man - in front of twelve pretty cakes behind a pane of cough-proof glass, and I become eight years old again. Instantly.

Vanessa has noticed that I just start pointing and saying "Look...that one. Wow... and that one..."

I find this rather reassuring. It is good to know there are still things capable of reducing us back to short pants and a high voice. I am just mesmerised by the visuals. But there is another thing here, and something I have come to love about the pâtisserie window: it is remarkably, almost heroically, resistant to change.

We have spent decades being sold reinvention. Cupcakes. Brookies. Cronuts. Muffins the size of next-door's cat. Dual-flavours like salmon and marmalade - swanky combos that would never be friends in the playground. Everything is smashed, deconstructed, reconstructed, elevated and reimagined.

Meanwhile, a Frenchman, an Englishman and whoever else they can grab, walk into a pâtisserie on a Sunday morning. Not to tell the joke, but to buy a box of what is essentially the same tantalising pieces of fruity, custardy excess, that their Grandads would have bought 60 years before.

Nobody enters a French pâtisserie and asks what they've got that's trending. Or different. Or the "gâteau du jour"... Because France does something with food that Britain and America, for all their restless-leg energy, often don't.

It allows certain things to become...Canonical.

What a great word... It refers to something that is - "Universally agreed to be the correct version" - that arguing about it marks you out as a dangerous sweet-toothed radical and a threat to National Bakery Security.

The classics of the French pâtisserie are done how they have always been done, and we will not be taking questions.

Take an éclair au chocolat;  - thank you, I shall... It is not merely a long glazed cake that happens to contain a monstrous serving of perfect chocolate cream. There exists a concept. An agreed essence of what an éclair is, and should always be. "Éclair Zero", if you will, the prototype against which every other example is quietly measured.

Likewise the Mille-Feuille. Same with the Tartes - aux Fraises, or framboises or myrtilles. Equally, the Madeleines and the Financiers - sponges of beurre noisette and all the lightness of a bank holiday in heaven.

Innovation happens, of course it does. But it happens on top of an enormous, agreed grammar of recognised forms, and everyone - baker and buyer alike - knows it by heart.

The Paris-Brest is a lovely cake in point. A wheel of featherweight choux pastry filled with praline cream, shaped like a wheel entirely on purpose: it was created to honour the bicycle race from Paris to Brest - begun in 1891 and still going strong. A cake built in the image of the very thing it celebrates.

More than a century later, no Pátissier worth his salted caramel, has felt the slightest urge to remove the gluten, make it square, or add chives.

The rest of the windowed pâtisserie cabinet is hardly less eccentric.

There is the religieuse - two choux buns balanced one atop the other, joined with piped buttercream and dressed, apparently, to resemble a somewhat Rubenesque nun.

There is the Saint-Honoré, named for the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, which seems only reasonable given the amount of divine intervention required to make one. A base of puff pastry, ringed with tiny choux buns (we call them profiteroles) that are dipped in, and glued down with, crackly caramel - the whole caboose is filled with a crème Chiboust...a delicate mix of crème pâtissière and meringue. It is less a cake than a small edible cathedral.

OK enough cake talk, as I am salivating like a bull-mastiff. Let's just agree to state that the heart of the matter is all about the ritual.

For the French, the pâtisserie proper is a rung above normal "bakery business". These delicacies are not "fetched" from the boulangerie and never travel - not ever - in a paper bag. It's a Sunday thing. It involves white boxes and ribbons. For birthdays, celebrations and those people-are-a-coming-round occasions. Small indulgences - most definitely. But indulgences with rules. It's more French than a standard poodle.

So if you are sitting around France waiting for éclair 2.0, you have a long wait ahead of you.

The French have never once felt the need to improve their classic cakes by breaking them down and rebuilding them with pineapple and walnut dust. And I am glad. These lovingly curated little godsends exist in a culture that still gets the whole message of "If it ain't broke..."

enshrined in their more wordy version "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" - The better is the enemy of the good.

Some things survive because nobody has yet come up with anything better - and some survive because nobody sensible has tried.

Anyway, I'll have the Paris-Brest...And perhaps - just one more.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.