chouquettes or petits choux, a small item of pâtisserie in France which resembles soft petits fours secs (dry as opposed to the other category of petits fours which are moist, e.g. miniature savarins) and whose name (in either version) has been adopted as a term of endearment. It has nothing to do with a cabbage, as the present author mistakenly supposed; he wondered in his youth why he should be addressed as a small cabbage and only discovered in the eighth decade of his life that this had not been the intention of female friends who in the distant past had applied the phrase to him.
