Le Petit Écolier

When I was a boy in school, I studied photography. The photography department at my college put a lot of emphasis on conceptual rigor, much more so than on the technical side of things; it didn’t matter that much if your photos weren’t perfectly made, if you had a compelling reason for why they shouldn’t be.

The way you had to present your work and the ideas behind it was in bi-weekly critiques (or “crits” for short) where you pinned your photos to the wall, talked about what you were trying to achieve, and then fielded questions from the professor, the TA, and your fellow students. I loved crits. Sometimes college felt abstract, or distant, or theoretical, but crits felt like a concentrated pellet of education. I had to learn how to think about my own work, and how to talk about it, at the same time as I was watching my peers figure out how to do the same with their work. It was an exercise in expressing your own artistic intention, and years later, that became the basis for my podcast Song Exploder.

The other reason I loved crits is because usually the professor, the TA, and sometimes us students would all bring in snacks. There was a Dunkin Donuts around the corner from the art building, so I’d usually bring Munchkins. It made the crits feel communal and fun, and combined the highbrow art talk with the feeling of a sixth-grade birthday party.

One day, on the long metal folding table at the front of the class where we’d gather our snacks, I saw this box of cookies. I grew up eating Chips Ahoy! and Keebler Fudge Stripes; cookies that you could find at any grocery store; cookies with an elf in a funny hat on the front, or with an exclamation point in the name. Cookies came in a plastic sleeve, not a box. But this was a box, and the dimensions of this box were…elegant. It was a long rectangle, black, with a red stripe just on the left side, like the cardboard spine on a Japanese import CD. (I had also just recently learned about Japanese import CDs, and how they often had extra tracks and rare B-sides that weren’t on standard-issue American CDs. So cool.)

On the front of the box, in understated letters, it said, “Le Petit Écolier.” There was an image of the cookie itself: a rectangular butter cookie with a slab of chocolate on it, with a picture of the titular little French schoolboy embossed on the chocolate. It looked like a decadent and delicious playing card.

Things were just as fancy inside the box. The contents were divided into two neat silver foil packets. The foil split easily with a slight tug, revealing six cookies inside.

I examined one. The butter cookie on the bottom was really a biscuit. Not too sweet, with a tight texture that held its shape and had a little snap. And on top of that — my god, it was just a solid piece of dark chocolate. Forget chocolate “chips” or “chunks” or anything that coy. It was like a small, expensive candy bar that had its own biscuit to carry it around. I bit into it.

It was perfect.

There’s that saying (maybe it’s from Voltaire?) — “perfect is the enemy of good.” I had a hard time coming to terms with that idea. Growing up, I liked school, and I thought I was good at it, because I would sometimes get 100s on my tests – a perfect score. Perfect was good. If I got an A- on something, that evil little hyphen proclaiming that I got less than a perfect score, my parents would encourage me to study harder, do better. Perfection was easy to recognize. It was quantifiable. There were rules, which meant you could learn the rules, which meant you could find your way to a perfect destination.

College blew up that idea. It blew up so many of my long-held ideas. Standing in front of my photographs in my first crits, as I failed to articulate why my correctly exposed and well-composed photos were interesting in any particular way, I slowly realized what I was being asked: what did this work have to do with me? What was it about the way that I saw the world that these images captured? Perfection wasn’t just beside the point, it wasn’t a part of the vocabulary. I was supposed to be reaching for something that was true about me, and expressing that in a photograph.

I don’t know what the creative intentions were with the Petit Écolier. It was invented in the 19th century by the Lefevre-Utile company. But over a century after that, and years after my first bite in the basement of the Art + Architecture building, I still stand by my first impression of that cookie. Maybe the debate here is if cookies are an art form or not, but what’s not debatable for me is the perfection of these cookies in particular. I don’t always or exclusively want to eat Petit Écoliers, but that doesn’t change the fact that each bite of one is a perfect bite — a balance of two different sweetnesses and richnesses, a balance of the gentle snap of the biscuit and the soft yield of the dark chocolate. (And to be specific and ultra-clear, I’m talking about the Dark Chocolate Petit Écolier, the 45% Cacao version. The Extra Dark, 70% Cacao version is still good, but the chocolate is a little too firm, so the difference between it and the biscuit is not as distinct, and therefore the mouth feel is not as revelatory. The Milk Chocolate version is fine, too, but much sweeter and simpler – at that point, you’re basically eating Keebler Fudge Stripes again. Pretentious Keebler Fudge Stripes.)

I asked my TA, the person who had brought those cookies into class, where she had found them. She said the name of a store that I vaguely recognized as a fancy little market down the street from the art building. I’d never paid attention to it, let alone gone inside, because it was so fancy that my small town suburban brain didn’t even register it. But one week, before a crit, I forwent the munchkins and made my way inside the bougie bodega. It wasn’t organized like the big grocery stores I knew. I couldn’t figure out how to find anything. Even though it was small, eventually I had to give up, and try to explain to the cashier what I was looking for. He gave me the directions, and I found my way to the shelf, and there they were.

The little schoolboy. Dark chocolate. Perfect. Exclamation point.

— Hrishikesh

ps:

I’m teaching a 3-part seminar over 3 weekends in December, over Zoom, on how to interview people, and turn those interviews into podcast episodes. The class can be viewed on-demand, so even if you can’t attend the classes live, you can still sign up and watch and do the homework assignments. You can sign up for the class here: “Podcasting & the Art of the Interview With Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder.”

If you read my last newsletter about my new song, “Between There and Here (feat. Yo-Yo Ma),” you might like this new behind-the-scenes video about the making of the animated music video. The folks at Dropbox have posted the video on their blog.

The wonderful and talented Jonny Sun also has a newsletter. In each one, he writes an essay about an object of personal significance and does a drawing of it. His most recent essay and drawing are about a stainless steel cup that I grew up with. He writes and draws beautifully, and you should subscribe to his newsletter here: “A small list of knowable things.”

Here are links to the other things I've been working on.