The confection’s temporary exile, and recent South Shore comeback, illustrate the unpredictability felt by countless cruller lovers everywhere. Although it was among the first doughnuts produced by the 60-year-old Canton company, its presence at Dunkin’s 7,000 stores today depends on the whim of franchisees.
So it is that you can find a Dunkin’ French Cruller in Hyannis but not in Gloucester; that a reliable indulgence in Weymouth or Plymouth melts into a doughy memory in Randolph.
For the doughnut’s most impassioned followers, that means an endless hunt for an elusive prey, interrupted only now and then by sugary success.
“I look wherever I go - it’s just a habit - and I always get it if they have it,’’ said Gaudette, 41, of Framingham, who recalls periods of French Cruller plenitude and scarcity stretching back almost two decades. “I usually say I’m going to be healthy and get an egg white flatbread, but if I see the cruller, that changes everything.’’
The stories of frustrated French Cruller fanatics hark back to a time before chain stores and their carbon-copied products were ubiquitous. Yet even in a highly homogenized restaurant landscape, quirks and inconsistencies still lurk behind the identical logos and menu boards.
In Westminster, Md., 30 miles west of Baltimore, C.S. Splitter used to get French Crullers at the local Dunkin’ Donuts - until the day, more than two years ago, when they weren’t there anymore. When the 42-year-old writer and self-proclaimed “pastry guy’’ asked a Dunkin’ worker what had happened, he said he got “pretty much a blank look.’’
When the French Cruller disappeared from Bronwen Price’s Dunkin’ Donuts in Oneonta, N.Y., in 2008, she inquired and was told “it didn’t exist anymore.’’ The 33-year-old mother of three believed the explanation, and mourned the loss for months, until she found a French Cruller at a Dunkin’ Donuts in a roadside rest stop in New Jersey.
