When I was thinking about the French national dish, I immediately thought coq-au-vin. Typically French. Then I thought, ‘are frogs legs actually a thing?’ or just some racist trope we fall back on? Yes, it is to an extent, but they do eat them, or did eat them, and unsurprisingly they crop up in the deep south of America where the French first arrived to colonise.
I carried on looking for recipes and found that the French national dish is actually something called, ‘pot-au-feu’, roughly translating to ‘pot on the fire’. A beef joint boiled with vegetables, served as 2 courses, a consommé type soup, then the solid ingredients.
Honestly, it’s a no from me and you’ll have realised from the rest of the recipes, there’s a lot of meat and veg.

So, national dishes and stereotypes aside, what’s more French than croissants?

This was going to be tough, you only need to watch one series of bake off to know that laminating, (that’s getting the layers right), is really hard. You need to keep the butter basically frozen throughout, and it’s a really yeasty dough, that you treat like pastry, and it’s about 40% butter. For that alone, I’m committed.
As I write this, I’m about half way through the dough process, there’s more rolling and chilling to come, and then I leave it overnight.