The trick for making croissants — good croissants, the kind that flake in your fingers and melt butter onto your tongue — is not in the quality of the ingredients or the price of your oven or your years of experience: it’s in the temperature. 

You cannot make croissants in the summer — at least, not in the Northeast, where the humidity seeps into kitchens through the cracks of screen doors and the heavy weight of early morning fog and dew climbs in through the floorboards. I have lived in New Jersey for exactly nine years and it still surprises me when I wake in August, the way the heavy air clings to your skin and fills your lungs like cigarette smoke. The humidity, I have learned, bloats the yeast, weakens the structure of the dough, and kills any pitiful attempt at the crucial rise — the croissants end up flat and chewy and inedible, and you end up thinking all kinds of hateful things about the dough, about yourself — how terrible you looked in your bathing suit at the beach yesterday, how the straps dug like restraints into your skin, how you hid under the shade of your umbrella and your crossed arms over your stomach as you watched your younger brother play in the water, carefree, uninhibited. Do not attempt. 

You cannot make croissants in the dead of winter either — the heat in the house and the flames that lick out of the nearby fireplace melt the butter before your fingertips can fold it into the dough, and the result is a sloppy mess of fat and gluten. The butter melts and weeps, and you melt and weep, as it drips over the countertop and ruins the lamination of your dough. The croissants end up dry and flavorless, and you end up thinking all kinds of hateful things about the dough, about yourself — how the waistline of your old jeans slices into your ribcage, how your stomach felt after Christmas dinner, how the bile tastes in your throat a few hours later. Do not attempt. 

I have found, in my months of trial and error since I began teaching myself how to make croissants, that there are two perfect times of year for the production of such a glorious pastry: the very end of March and the very beginning of October. The leaves are either growing or dying and the air is cool and dry, the kitchen countertop remains clean and you can disguise the shape of your figure with a loose shirt and pants that hang off of your hips. The temperature is a near perfect 55 degrees in New Jersey, and there are no holidays with the pressure of your grandmother in your ear, questioning in a loud voice, asking “Why is your plate so empty?” as you sweat and hope no one notices that your collarbone is jutting out from the neckline of your shirt. I adore the irony in the fact that the perfect temperature for making pastry coincides with the perfect temperature for the other fickle, disastrous obsession of my life: my body. 

There is a theory I have been developing for some time now, something I started thinking about when  my first batch of pastries failed, and when my second batch failed, and when I was sitting in doctor’s office on the crinkled paper of the patient bed, too ashamed to look up from the tiled floor as terms like “BMI'' spun around the room and in my brain. My theory is this: that the life and perspective of most young women can be split into two pieces, a “before” and an “after”  — the before being when a body is just a concept, a thing that carries you to dance classes and dresses up in Disney Princess costumes and through soccer games, and the after, when the body becomes what it inevitably is: an obsession. 

There is as much irony in my “before” and “after” as there is in the invisible string between croissants and weather and draperies of clothing that turn your shape into an amorphous blob of denim and cotton. My “before” and “after” began on the evening of another fateful day: the day I began learning how to cook. 

The first thing I ever made is the same as the first thing that most other bakers make: chocolate chip cookies, the recipe taken off of the back of the Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chips bag. I swatted my mother’s hands away as they reached over my shoulders to offer help, determined to do it on my own, and when the failed splotchy circles of dough came out of the oven, half baked and melted, I didn’t feel ashamed — I felt changed. This, I thought. This is something I work on.  

I began spending weekends at home, sweating from the heat of the oven, burning through the crumbling pages of my mother’s hand-me-down cookbooks as I whisked oil and sugar and milk into a mind-bending number of creations. Our grocery bills skyrocketed. Our kitchen was constantly covered in a thin film of flour. None of it mattered — my waning friendships, my crumbling grades, the fact that I still felt alienated in my new town and home and school — my reign over the small inches of our granite-countertop persisted. In that space, all of the brittle pieces of my life, all of the anxieties, disappeared within the clouds of powdered sugar. Worry was an illusion. Cooking was real. 

There are tricky ways in which eating disorders come about — they are not one-size-fits-all, the product of the same formula in which a seismic event occurs and they are the debris that lands and sticks. It is because of this truth, I think, that would make it a lie to say that I can pinpoint an exact moment where cooking transformed from an outlet out of the worries of my life to a manifestation of those worries. All that I can honestly tell you is that somewhere between my third and seventh batch of failed macarons, I became aware of the fact that doctor’s visits had begun to make me anxious — the scale, the flashing digital numbers, the weight percentiles. I became aware that meals no longer had an illustrious quality to them — that they had become a chore, something dreaded and mundane. I became aware of other things as well — that all of my problems, the ones that had existed before the batches of cookies and bread and cake, still existed, however deep they were buried under flour and sugar. And I noticed something else in-between those batches, too — by the time they were finished, I didn’t have the courage to taste them myself. 

It’s interesting: most think that people with eating disorders are afraid of food —  that we are afraid of what it does, that we are afraid of what it might cause. I am here to tell you that this is wrong. I never feared food. I was obsessed with it. 

Food became the first thing I would think about when I woke, and the last thing I would think about before I closed my eyes at night. It seemed that I could not surround myself with enough of its presence — I would watch celebrity chefs make dinners on television and would watch ditzy influencers make gourmet oatmeal on the internet, and dreamt of technicolor images of Victoria sponge cake and mint chocolate ice cream and lemon scones, all out of my reach, both in the dream world and reality. And when I would wake again, I would carve out free minutes and hours and stumble back into the kitchen, blind and drunk with fear, desperate for a chance to place my hands on the mixer, on the wooden spoon, just to feel the way the milk mixed with the honey, to feel the way the butter melted onto the pan. 

There is a show I used to watch, right around the time when I started to take cooking seriously. It’s a baking show, hosted, in part, by an older woman with eccentric glasses and a posh accent. She judges the baker’s creations by their appearance and taste, and by her special rule: whether or not their creations are “worth the calories.” 

There are phrases that you hear once and there are phrases that you only need to hear once.

I would go to the grocery store to buy ingredients and the signs hanging suspended above the aisles no longer list items — they are prints of the same, and they ask if the contents of their aisles are “worth the calories.” I would have the contents of the aisles memorized; I’d keep my eyes on the ground, away from the fluorescent glare bouncing off of their inquiry — flour in three, sugar and yeast in four, butter and milk in ten. In and out in twelve minutes, back in the kitchen in twenty. I would ignore the gnaw of my stomach, and if it was fall or spring I would begin the laborious task of smashing the butter into a square. 

I am better about this now — I listen to the words of those wiser than me. I keep my eyes level. My parents divvy out a nominal chunk of their salary, that chunk which was once spent in aisles three, four, and ten, for me to sit in a room with a pretty woman twice my age, who tells me all of the things about myself that I pretend aren’t real. I am trying to fix them — it is hard to do without a set of rules, without a cookbook telling me how to remedy my errors. 

I have stepped back from the kitchen for some time now, not by choice but by circumstance and situation. My small dorm is made for one person, but stuffed with two — we do not have the room for all of our clothing, let alone enough space to cook. My therapist tells me that this is good — that we need distance from the pieces of our lives that are hurting us, even if we love them, even if we crave them. I want to ask her if she knows how to reconcile the two — an obsession rooted in love and an obsession rooted in fear. I want to ask her if you can love something that has ruined your life. 

We have just passed the edge of what I have coined “croissant season”: into the dreaded wetness of April, into the pollinated bliss of May, the suffocating heat of June. I am entering another season myself — about to go home again, two weeks from now, when I’ll shut doors for a final time, lock keys for a final time, glance out of 8th story windows for a final time. I will be carrying the knowledge that these pastries I crave are beyond the realm of my control — that no amount of effort or crying or bitching on my part will make them rise in my oven or turn out the way I want them to. Summer brings many things — endings, beginnings, ripe strawberries and swaying green grass and a breeze that smells like spring onions — but it does not bring control. I tell myself that control is not something worth always having. This is something I am still trying to believe.  

There are other things you can make in the summer, by the way. My favorite choice is shortbread bars with key lime curd: the shortbread comes together with just three ingredients — which can be pressed directly into the pan after mixing to avoid melting on the countertop — and the curd, which is cooked on the stovetop, sets up lovely in the fridge in a few hours, just in time for you to eat on the back porch with your mother (who complains about the bugs) and your father (who complains about the chipping paint) after a home-cooked dinner. And, when the scent of citrus and caramelized sugar spreads through the suffocating air, you typically end up thinking all kinds of things about the bars, about yourself — the way your hair curls at the ends, the way your pen flows when you write in cursive, the way you have made it through another brush of the seasons. The way your body has carried the weight of it all.  

I suggest you attempt.