Can Treats Save Civilization?

Treats are costly and/or fattening and/or obtainable only in one tiny spot on Earth. Your treat and my treat might not be the same, yet the word "treat" triggers in both of us a throbbing thrill. And now...

Treats are under attack in other ways as well. Treats have lost meaning lately in a West bloated and spoiled by the easy ubiquity of what was once novel and special and reserved only for tender moments when we merited rewards.

Yes -- frappuccinos killed the treat.

Shorn of their scarcity, are treats still treats? I think not.

The morphing of treats from rare to everywhere reflects the bigger picture in which we are trained to love ourselves no matter who we are or what we do. When sky-high self-esteem is mandatory, the words "merit" and "reward" become anathema, because they imply judgment, as if some people and things are good but some are bad.

Suspending judgment, we need never reserve special treats for special times. Rather, we must demand whatever we want, whenever we want it. And we are beseeched to want it all the time. This is capitalism, after all. Companies do not want us to consume their rich, fattening, costly products only once a year. Treats make nearly no economic sense.

Thus we have reached a moment in history at which two forms of extinction are converging on the treat. This is dangerous. Is there still time for one form to obviate the other? Will poverty force us to save special things again for special times? But will it take another Great Depression to save treats, which will restore our sense of values, but then we'll be destitute?

Without treats, what do we become?

Angelique Fry doesn't want us to find out. In 1982, she cofounded Divine Delights, a California-based baking company that supplies petit fours glacé -- that is, minuscule iced cakes -- to Neiman Marcus, Balducci's, and other stores.

"We do more business on the East Coast than in our own backyard," says Fry, a California native. "Maybe that's because there's more of a tradition for European-style, highly decorated little things back East, while people out West tend to like their desserts plainer and not particularly decorative."

"Along with these very social teas comes a desire to return to the old-fashioned treats that Mom and Grandma served. In that sense, we're trending backwards" -- rebounding from 21st-century chipotle-flavored caramels to these unapologetically fussy 18th-century anachronisms, the French poodles of pastrydom.

Every batch begins with three thin layers of almond pound cake.

"It's a very traditional frangipane in that it doesn't have a lot of sugar, but lots of almond paste, whole eggs and butter -- which makes it expensive -- and just enough flour to hold it together."

Images Courtesy of Kristan Lawson and Divine Delights.