Satisfyingly crisp, lightly sweet, friable and headily scented with sweet butter, the sablé, or “sand cookie,” is one of France’s best-kept culinary secrets.
    There are two types of sablés, which hold a place of honor on pâtisserie and boulangerie shelves. One is pale, round and flat, about one and a half inches in diameter with a fluted edge. The other is a striated, deep golden brown color and is much larger. The smaller ones are generally more crisp, while the larger ones are more soft. Both are the perfect accompaniment to a morning or afternoon cup of coffee.
    The sablé has a history, but like so many food histories in France, there are many different versions. Suffice it to say that the cookie originated somewhere in Normandy and has existed there for as long as bakers’ ovens have sent smoke into the sky. The basic recipe calls for a profligate amount of sweet butter from the Norman cow, tenderly blended with sugar, fresh eggs and flour. Traditionally baked in the residual heat after the loaves had been pulled from the oven, the cookies kept well for weeks and were often served as an after-school snack.
    Naturally, something as delicious as the sablé was bound for more than local fame, and today it is sold everywhere in France, especially in Paris. The ones from the Poilâne bakery are legendary. Made and shaped entirely by hand, they taste so intensely of butter that you almost want to spread them on your morning toast.
    The Poilâne family, originally from Normandy, acknowledges the fame of its sablés—200 pounds of them come out of its wood-burning bread ovens each day—but is careful to point out that they call them “punitions,” or punishments. The term comes from a great-great-grandmother who, legend has it, took care of the children and would ask them when they returned home from school if they’d worked hard. When they answered yes, the grandmother would say “Well, since you’ve been good, come get your punishment,” and would offer them a plate piled high with sablés.
    The Poilâne bakery on the chic rue du Cherche-Midi maintains the flour-dusted atmosphere of a typical village bakery. “Norman bakeries always carried sablés,” says Geneviève Bruyère, a spokesperson for Poilâne. “People would buy and keep them for that moment when they needed a little bite of something, usually in the afternoon.” As in a village bakery, Poilâne sells its sablés by weight; they also offer them to customers from a linen-lined basket near the cash register.
    While the small Poilâne version is the most traditional, the larger ones have become more widespread. Hervé Guillot, pastry chef at Boulangerie Julien on rue Saint-Dominique, adds ground almonds to his large, tender sablés. “In our neighborhood, no one wants small sablés,” he says with a wink. “Everyone wants the large ones; they are more convenient for an after-lunch dessert at the office.” After all, he implied, eating one cookie needs no particular justification whereas eating half a dozen may appear a bit excessive.
    Ladurée, a pastry mecca in Paris, offers yet a third version, which they refer to as a petit four sec. Theirs are small, round, thick disks studded with hazelnuts and dusted on the edges with sugar. Priced by the piece, they make a delicate accompaniment to Ladurée’s café crème.
    There are other delicious sablés to be had throughout Paris, notably at Pâtisserie Millet, Boulangerie Poujauran and La Grande Epicerie at Le Bon Marché. And there is one more sablé of note, although it is from neither Paris nor Normandy: the marvelous “galette Cancalaise,” a Breton cousin of the sablé made by restaurateur Olivier Roellinger in Cancale. Available in a handsome metal tin at some specialty shops in Paris, this wonderfully thin and crisp confection is made with only the best salted Breton butter.