The biscuits and confectionery at Le Petit Duc are typical of those the French like to serve with dessert, afternoon tea or post-prandial coffee. They know that interesting accessories will always glamorise home-made ice cream, compote, fruit salads and mousses. In their crammed ‘laboratory’, Anne Daguin and her husband Hermann Van Beeck create the most intellectually satisfying traybakes you will ever taste. Each sablé, macaroon, nougat, calisson and croquant is first cooked in its own history. Many of the recipes have their roots in the experimental works with sugar by the sixteenth-century physician and astrologer, Nostradamus. Others come from the secret recipe book of Pol Adam, the early twentieth-century French pastry chef to Belgian king Albert I, pages of which Anne Daguin cajoled from his granddaughter. Perhaps the most touching archive she uses was found for her by a Saint-Rémy bookseller. It is a set of recipes compiled as a wedding present for his grandmother by Marie Gachet, daughter of Van Gogh’s friend and benefactor. Dr Gachet.