A croissant teaches me about labour
Appreciation for everyone who makes things, some spooky season reading ideas, and a call to action!
foodstuff is a free reader-supported publication that releases new material twice monthly. To receive one essay and one veggie-centred recipe right to your inbox, consider becoming a subscriber. If you’re already a supporter, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here with me!!
I’m about to hit a little subscriber milestone! If you’ve been considering becoming a subscriber, come join. If you’ve been subscribed, and enjoy what I do, I’d love if you could share this post, or a past post you’ve enjoyed.
Vegan butter was on sale. I had flour and yeast to play with. The weather was cool and mercury retrograde was over. More importantly, I was avoiding a deadline. Enter, the croissant.
Deciding to make vegan croissants wouldn’t really be noteworthy apart from the fact that I’m not a baker and that I’ve never made plain butter croissants let alone vegan ones.
The croissant is known to be fickle. In her food memoir The Measure of My Powers Jackie Kai Ellis writes:
After procrastinating with every other recipe, it was finally time to tackle the one recipe that gave me shivers at the thought of inevitable failure: pâte à croissants.
It was said that a “true” French croissant was impossible to create outside of France. Magnified with time like a myth, this hazy mystique of butter, water, flour, air, and je ne sais quois made the croissant seem illusive and unattainable. How could one make a French croissant without French ingredients? I wasn’t convinced either, and certainly didn’t assume I had a better chance than anyone else. ( Ellis 212)
I read this book years ago and this is the part that stuck with me: the volatility of croissants as well as the labour and negotiations it takes to coax them to the plate.
Eventually, Jackie, who is a trained pastry chef, perfects her version of the French croissant in her Vancouver home thanks to intense environmental management, ingredient research, and persistence. These are quiet labours that are not always evident from looking at a pastry, unless you know how to locate evidence of lamination and proofing.
My first batch of croissants was fine. In the grand scheme of vegan croissants I think mine would have received a passing grade, though no one would ever be as excited about them as I was. I was positively squealing in the kitchen as soon as I realized I’d end up with something edible. (Bless Claire Saffitz, the patron saint of home bakers, for her croissant video, which I watched over and over again, trying to memorize her technique). Despite my jubilation, these croissants were nowhere near perfect. I don’t have a stand mixer so had to mix by hand, which was a horror. The butter was folded clumsily into the détrempe. I was impatient with letting the dough rest, getting up every 20 minutes to touch. I fumbled along from memory. There was no ease, only rigid movements and sharp pauses.
The first time I made pasta from hand I kept having to stop kneading the dough to reference an image on screen of some Nonna’s specimen. I was squinting right up close to see if the dough was really as smooth as it appeared on my very old and cracked iPhone screen. It was. Mine was not. But why did this 87 year old look so much less exhausted than I felt? How was she kneading with such ease?
Like my croissants, the pasta turned out fine the first time. It’s actually quite difficult to really fuck up pasta. But the process was long, tenuous and exhausting because I had to teach my body how to move in this new way. Now I can churn out two servings of fresh pasta in no time. My movements are more practiced, natural, and relaxed—nothing like Nonna’s, of course, not yet. I know where to bristle against catastrophe and where I can soften. I try to remind myself of this form of embodied knowledge when I set out to make something new, but it’s easy to forget.
If anyone watched me making my croissants and pasta for the first time they would not have any trouble identifying the process as laborious… even if I’d had a stand mixer for the détrempe. Next to Claire or Nonna I would have looked like I was working: pausing here and there to rest my arms and to stare off into the void, quickly losing steam and getting sloppy with my kneading, swearing. You can really tell someone knows what they’re doing when they are doing none of these things, when they move with a gracefulness and ease coaxed from an embodied understanding of texture, pressure, softness, colour, and the limits of their own body. This is what I mean by embodied knowledge.
But from the pretty vantage point of an observer—like so many of us in the era of TikTok—it’s easy to forget that this grace is still labour (indeed, that entertainment is labour) informed by varying degrees of privilege. As soon as I start to knead, what becomes most apparent are the many motions and repetitions that enable the gracefulness I lack. Suddenly, the reality of repetitive motion injuries like carpel tunnel (injuries that are rarely accounted for in a baker or maker’s wage/ pricing) come into sharp focus. This is to say that doing has always offered a quick remedy to my tendency to romance the kitchen. It’s offered a quick reminder that making is always a labour.
Don’t get me wrong, though. The kitchen remains a beautiful place to be, or it can remain that way to those of us who relish in the sorts of transformations it’s home to. But it’s also a place where the challenges and possibilities of disentangling labour from capitalist production and histories of violence are an ongoing negotiation, particularly considering that domestic and commercial kitchens have been places of coercion, enslavement, indentured servitude, unpaid and underpaid labour for Black people, people of colour, and women, especially.
These forms of labour extraction are tenants of capitalism’s growth and survival. So while cooking may be a joy for some of us, it is also always a necessary labour for someone to undertake. Whether you’re the one cooking or not, someone is making your food—paid or unpaid, someone is making your food. And even for those of us who generally love to cook, because it’s something we must do always, multiple times a day, we don’t always love it. Today I don’t feel like cooking. I don’t want to. I’ll boil water and pour it into a paper cup filled with squiggly noodles and that will be fine.
But something I’m learning more and more from making croissants, pasta, spoons and spatulas is that labour isn’t itself bad. It’s the conditions under which we work and live and eat that are the problem. I catch this clarity when I’m watching someone light up about food, speaking quickly in a language I don’t know; when I’m kneading dough on a Sunday afternoon; when I’m letting a pot of sauce organize my whole day; when I’m baking a cake for a friend’s birthday (Happy Birthday Marika), and when I’m wishing so hard that I could cook and share a meal with my mum.
In these moments, I wonder if maybe I do dream of labour but labour in an economy of potlucks and picnics and full, happy bellies.
Reading+Watching on Food + Labour to offer some historical context for my essay
High on the Hog by Jessica B. Harris or, the docuseries on Netflix by the same name, particularly Episode 3: Our Founding Chefs
Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen
Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada by Lily Cho
Call to action: National School Food Program!
Relevant to those residing in Canada: The Coalition for Healthy School Food has initiated a House of Commons Petition asking the federal government to implement and fund a National School Food Program. Learn more and sign the petition here.
Books!
It’s been a big cookbook month. I’ve been borrowing so many library cookbooks including:
Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison
Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein by Joe Yonan
Cucina Povera: The Italian Way of Transforming Humble Ingredients into Unforgettable Meals by Giulia Scarpaleggia
I also purchased a beloved new e-book from Fraser Fitzgerald (frasercooks on Instagram) called DOUGH BOY: Your Guide to the Pizza Galaxy. I’m really looking forward to trying the Sausage Fennel and Apple Pizza, the Smack Daddy, the Marinated Feta and Rosemary, and the Pickle Rick, as well as the sauce and vegan cheese recipes included!
Spooky Season Reading Recommendations!
Remember, before buying a book you can always check your local library!
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
gothic
I mean, Dr. Frankenstein creates a vegetarian monster
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)
gothic reimagined- specifically, a reimagining of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” but with lots of fungi and queer characters
The Pump by Sydney Hegele
gothic vibes with major themes related to environmental destruction + municipal apathy
a bunch of separate but related stories gathered together in a slim little book
set in a small town in Southern Ontario
Woman Eating by Claire Kohda
modern vampire story
vampire is an artist
set in London
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers
food critic who cannibalizes her ex lovers
portion of the novel is set in Italy
Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn
gay ghost story meets 90s fever dream
set in Crystal Beach, Ontario.