Transcript / LoLT: The Best Croissant in Paris and Two New Books — 21 February 2025

This is a transcription of LoLT: The Best Croissant in Paris and Two New Books — 21 February 2025

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a quirky love story that celebrates the world of books.

David: The story of the architect of modern comedy.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

Melissa: I haven’t read this novel yet, but it’s the very next book I’ll crack open before I start official reading for Season 7 of Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: It’s ‘The Watermark’ by Sam Mills. It’s a love story about characters — Rachel and Jaime — who become trapped in a novel-in-progress by a down-and-out author named Augustus Fate. He’s been on the shortlist for the Booker Prize seven times, but his novels are missing emotion and fully-rendered characters. So he does what any desperate author would: He serves our duo magic tea that sedates them, then plops them into his not-very-good work-in-progress. Now they’re puppets, and Fate — Augustus Fate — is pulling the strings.

Melissa: To return to their real life, Rachel and Jaime have to find their way through a maze of stories set in different times and places, including Victorian Oxford, modern Manchester, a winter in Russia, and a futuristic version of London. About halfway through, there are a few pages that take the form of a graphic novel. It seems very creative and maybe a little bananas, but in a way that enhances rather than detracts from the story.

Melissa: I was hooked by the premise. What reader hasn’t imagined what it would be like to be thrust into the pages of a book? I really enjoyed the novel The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde for that reason: The story takes place in an alternative 1985, where a literary detective named Thursday Next chases a master criminal through the novel Jane Eyre.

Melissa: So I was very attracted to this novel, and then I read a Guardian review that described it as a romp. I am always here for a romp. It also said, ‘If you love Doctor Who, you will love this book.’

Melissa: When I read the first lines to see what was what, I was hooked: ‘I left my flat at six that morning to catch a train to Wales to interview Augustus Fate. It was the first interview he’d given in nine years.’ I love a portentous beginning.

Melissa: It’s ‘The Watermark’ by Sam Mills, and it just came out in the US last week.

David: Unless you’ve been living under a rock—or, I don’t know, maybe just blissfully off the grid—you probably know that Saturday Night Live just celebrated its 50th anniversary. That’s 167 cast members, hundreds of fake newscasts, and 48 years of people insisting that it used to be better.

David: NBC marked the occasion with hours of tributes this past weekend. Celebrities flocked in from all over to pay homage to the show’s legacy—and, more specifically, to the man behind it all: Lorne Michaels.

David: Lorne is fascinating for a few reasons. First, he’s ridiculously powerful. Since 1975, he’s launched the careers of countless comedians, writers, and actors. Arguably, without Lorne, we wouldn’t have Ghostbusters, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Bridesmaids, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and every single Adam Sandler movie. Somehow, he’s kept SNL more-or-less relevant for five decades. He was even the inspiration for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. And with 21 Primetime Emmy wins from 106 nominations, he’s the most nominated person in Emmy history.

David: And yet, we don’t actually know that much about him. He doesn’t give a lot of interviews. He’s famously dry and enigmatic, even around the people he works with. He’s a bit of a mystery. Which brings us to the book.

David: ‘Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live’ is a new biography by Susan Morrison. She is not some tabloid biographer—her day job is as the articles editor for The New Yorker. So she knows how to put together a sentence and a story.

David: The book is 650+ pages of deep-dive reporting on what makes Lorne tick. Morrison had amazing access; she conducted hundreds of interviews—not just with Lorne himself, but with his friends, colleagues, and the many, many comedians who’ve worked for him. His staff. It’s strange calling them his ‘staff’when we’re talking about people like Will Ferrell, Dan Aykroyd, Tina Fey, and Colin Jost. But they’re all in here.

David: The book also has a strong sense of New York’s upper crust—where Lorne has spent most of his career—but more than that, it gives you a front-row seat to his life and the decisions he makes every week to keep SNL running.

David: If any of that interests you, it’s definitely worth checking out. The book just came out this week. It’s ‘Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live’ by Susan Morrison.

David: And now our Distraction of the Week.

Melissa: I want to talk about croissants. This story starts with a scandalous confession and becomes an international caper in Budapest, Madrid, and Paris.

Melissa: First, the scandalous confession. I’m not really a croissant person. I love a bagel that fights back or a baguette with a firm crust — but I never really got the croissant thing. Until 2017, when I ate a croissant from the Alma Nomad Baker in Budapest.

Melissa: We stayed at this sweet hotel called the Gerloczy in a historic building from 1881 — very fin de siecle style. It sits on a little cobblestone square, and in the corner of the square was a tiny bakery called Alma Nomad. We wandered there one morning while the sleep was still kind of clinging to us — Dave got a croissant, I just had coffee. We sat on benches in the square, and when Dave offered a bit of his croissant, I took it. And in that moment, I got it. I finally got the croissant thing! It was buttery and somehow substantial and light at the same time. Each bite made a shower of gold confetti crumbs. It was a perfect experience, and I said, ‘The next time we’re here, I’m getting my own.’

Melissa: But when we went to Budapest again in 2019, the Alma Nomad Bakery was gone. I’m not even exaggerating; I felt tears in my eyes when I saw their empty bakery shop. I did a bunch of Googling to find out what happened. They’d moved to Madrid, Spain! Turns out, they’re originally from Spain, so they returned home to be close to family and open a slightly bigger bakery there. We immediately planned a trip to Madrid to eat their delicious croissants again.

Melissa: This is a good news-bad news scenario. Good news: I found a croissant I love. I get it now! Bad news: That is the standard against which I measure all croissants.

Melissa: Now, we need to talk about the criteria for croissants and how they’re made.

Melissa: A croissant should look shiny on the outside, like maybe it’s got a little bit of shellac on there. It should be crisp but tender, with lots of layers inside. The taste must be very butter-forward, without being greasy, and not too sweet.

Melissa: An expertly made croissant has only eight ingredients: butter, flour, water, milk, yeast, sugar, salt, and egg — and the process takes three days. On day 1, you make the dough and chill it overnight. On day 2, you shape the dough, and day 3, is for proofing and baking the croissants.

Melissa: The most important step is on day 2. Because before the dough is twisted into the iconic crescent shape, it’s laminated. Laminating is what gives croissants their crispy, airy, buttery layers.

Melissa: Basically, you roll out the dough, then fold it, turn it, and re-roll, over and over. That creates super-thin layers of butter nestled in between paper-thin layers of dough. If a baker folds the dough 3 times each for 3 turns, it makes 27 layers — and if they go the extra step of 4 turns, there are 81 layers.

Melissa: So, that’s the ideal process. Sadly, in France, about 50% of bakeries cut corners by using frozen dough that’s trucked in and baked in their shop. You can get a hot from the oven croissant that way, but will it have the magical 81 layers?

Melissa: We went to Paris a few weeks ago with plans to eat croissants every morning. I don’t know about you, but I was expecting Alma Nomad-level croissants everywhere. But on our first morning, we made a trek to a recommended bakery, picked out some beautiful looking croissants, walked out to the street where we could see the tower of the Gare de Lyon, took a bite, and… eh. It was fine. Not crispy enough, not airy enough, not buttery enough. Give it a solid B.

Melissa: And that’s how it went for a few days. We had some that were better — B+ — but we never got one that I finished. I was feeling very shoulder shrug about the whole situation.

Melissa: Until our last night in Paris. I was tired. It was very cold. We’d planned to visit an art store where I could buy a particular journal, but my enthusiasm for the quest was quite low. But Dave was committed, so out we trudged.

Melissa: On our way, we passed a closet-sized shop with the words ‘We dough better’ painted in white on the window. Under that, in French, it said, ‘Our croissants are prepared for 3 days,’ and then it listed where they get their butter, salt, and sugar. And at the bottom were the magic words: 300 pieces only. They opened at 8 the next morning, and we decided we needed to be there. This was our final attempt to eat a magical Parisian croissant.

Melissa: So the next morning, around 9:00 a.m., we walked in the door. The first thing I noticed was the smell: pure butter. The second was the row of trays arranged in the front window: gorgeous, golden pastries.

Melissa: Quel dommage! They were sold out of plain croissants, but we consoled ourselves with a twice-baked almond and a pain au chocolat. Then we walked to Place des Vosges, aka, Dave’s second favorite park in the world to take our first bite.

Melissa: I might have cried a little bit. That croissant was perfect. The thin outer layer shattered when I took my first bite, and it was just the right amount of buttery. The little nibs on the ends were super crispy. The middle was tender. Iconic, from the first bite to the last.

Melissa: The story of Moon Croissant is really fun and inspiring. The current shop makes just 300 croissants per day with 4 employees. The bakery has been there for a year as a sort of proof-of-concept to demonstrate they could produce carefully crafted croissants the old way. And they were successful! They’re moving to a much larger bakery, increasing their staff to 15, and making 3000 croissants per day. He was very excited, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Based on their website, it looks like you can still get on board as an investor if you want to be a Parisian croissant mogul.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on the books we talked about today and all the links you need to get your hands on delicious croissants in multiple places.

David: Thanks for joining us on the library of last time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Melissa Joulwan.