A letter from Bon Bon Bon
I’ll let you in on the most important lesson I ever learned in pastry school: One morning Chef walked in and asked with big city bravado, “Who wants a croissant?”. The sun wasn’t up yet. I think a few people almost audibly murmured, but that was about it. It felt like he was more-so just making it clear that we were making croissants that day. He unwrapped butter. As he slowly and intentionally demonstrated each motion, he also began this wild tale. It boiled down to this: Vienna, under siege, was completely surrounded by the Turks when the bakers who were up at the wee hours of the morning heard what could only be the digging of tunnels into the city by the enemy. To warn the whole city of impending invasion they made their dough into the shape of a crescent and threw them into the streets! Having sounded the alarm they thwarted the siege and continued to make these simple, unleavened crescent shaped pastries to mark the occasion. When he finished the story, he looked up, same bravado new sparkle, and asked the class, “Now who wants a croissant?”. I think every hand in the room reached for the sky.
That story, as you might have suspected, is not entirely logical nor historically accurate. Still, it’s a legend that has been told in bake shops for a long time. What really has lived on is the sentiment - the pride that bakers have for their early hour mornings and the service they provide beyond just making bread. Standing guard over ovens and cities so that everyone else can wake up with the sun, and a croissant.
If a picture really is worth a thousand words, imagine the volumes that we are sharing when we prepare food! Chocolate is a medium that allows one to express themselves in a sort of sensory surround sound. Telling someone to come visit Michigan and having them fly to visit will never have the same capacity to transport them to the last bite of the once-frozen bumpy cake that your grandma bought for your fifth birthday. But, chocolate can do that. I can tell you the story about how I learned to love whisky and I am sure you could imagine it! But, I’d rather show you by layering the contrasting experiences of that story inside of a chocolate shell. Sure, we are “hand making chocolate” that’s how we do what we do but what we are actually doing is sharing. Telling stories by sharing micro experiences that we package up into tiny boxes. We invite people into our lives using memories of treats and recipes that fed us and the people who made them and have loved us.
It’s easy to take food preparation for granted, but it is truly quite intimate in both directions. While we’re pouring our hearts out into caramels, confitures, ganaches and giandujas, we’re making art that people don’t just look at, they put it in their body. Not everyone who creates has that profound responsibility for their consumer. Whether the story is ours or one that we have been inspired by, it’s humbling.
The real lesson I learned from that morning in pastry school was not how to make a croissant or even how to make a buck selling croissants (the same instructor actually also taught us that the best recipe for a really good croissant is to go to your favorite bakery and buy a croissant, but that is another story!), it was the value of offering a piece of yourself and your perspective to someone else. It was teaching us to go first - sharing and entertaining and adding value before anyone ever took a bite of what it was that we were more literally offering. In taking that class I found permission that I didn’t even know that I needed to share little pieces of who I am and how I feel and what I love so when I found my medium (sweet, sweet chocolate), I could hit the ground running with this concept in the language that felt native to me.
Although in retrospect, the connection between what we do and poetry should have been clearer sooner, it was really beautiful to discover the same reliance on memory, craftsmanship and sensation as we approached this collaboration. We’ve never collaborated with an artist who worked with the written word before and yet it came together so naturally. Perhaps we are both trying to capture a moment that held something and share it the best way that we know how? Can we amplify the impact of our work if we do so simultaneously through our own mediums? That’s really where the excitement of this project has been for us and we are so looking forward to hearing about how exactly you experience the result. Try our Summer Lovin’ Collection with Atticus Poetry, available for pre-order now.
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