Pain aux raisins and me - it's back on

Today I did something that I haven't done since 1996. I ate a pain aux raisins. The reason for this 10-year drought is nothing to do with excessive willpower or lack of opportunity. It's because for the past decade, just looking at a pain aux raisins has made me feel queasy.

I spent 1996 studying at Toulouse Le Mirail University. Our student house was fiendishly situated - opposite a boulangerie. I started off on fresh, warm baguette (a whole one for breakfast became the norm). I held off the pastries for a while, remembering my experiences on holiday the previous year in Aix-en-Provence. Finding myself overwhelmed by the delicacies on offer in the patisseries, I got organised and decided to work my way across the cake display from left to right, buying one cake per day. Towards the end of my stay, I realised that there were more cakes than days (so many cakes, so little time), so I upped the tempo. It took me six months to reclaim my wardrobe.

Back in Toulouse; as the term wore on, my habit grew to two pain aux raisins per day, on average. The combination of the crispy pastry, the sweet glaze, the juiciness of the raisins set off by the crème patissière was quite simply a work of genius. It did get a little obsessive after a while. I would take detours in order to compare pain aux raisins from different outlets, with my mother's dinner-time refrain: 'Francesca, that's pure greed,' ringing in my ears.

Then came the day when biting into one, I caught a whiff of that lovely custardy pollyfilla that joins the pastry whorls together. And it made me feel sick.

When I first visited France I was sceptical of the French habit of walking past patisseries without looking at the cakes in the window, or even licking the glass. I saw it as another proof of their cold, aloof approach to life. How could one walk past rows of religieueses without having a religious experience? Remain unmoved before millefeuilles? Such people were cold fish, they had no hearts, no guts! And their women had no bottoms. Not in the anglo-saxon sense of the word.

You will never find me complaining about French food. I can even forgive the continuing arrogance of the French on the subject (like much else in the country, this attitude is straight out of the 1970s). But, as Chirac proved recently with his inventive jibe about English food, it's about the only thing they have left to boast about at the moment. So let them. Plus, I can't understand why the Brits, who must by now be the fattest nation on earth bar one, have chosen to get fat on disgusting dry buns with squirty cream and a miserable snail's trail of jam on them from the Baker's Oven.

So today, while standing in line at the patisserie, I happened to notice that the pain aux raisins had an icing sugar glaze on them. An unusual variation, I decided, and worth investigating. Or it could be because my croissant aux amandes habit has been spiralling recently.