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Traditional French cookies are time-consuming to make but absolutely delicious to eat. Below is a short summary of the best-known traditional French cookies.

Petit fours
Includes little clairs, tartlets, and small squares of elaborately iced cake. Cookies specifically, are properly called "petit four sec", which also includes French macaroons. The term "mignardise" is used when a selection of different kinds of petit fours is assembled on a platter. They were traditionally served at High Tea.

Tuiles
Tuiles are a specific kind of petit four sec, where the cookies are bent so that when they are lined up in a row, they look like roof tiles. They are so delicate as to be quite fragile, and should be eaten freshly made. They are particularly good with ice cream.

Sabl
A fairly common butter cookie, often served with tea or coffee. The name refers to the crumbly (sandy) texture and it originated in Normandie (Normandy). Traditionally they are round with fluted edges. An unusual ingredient is hardboiled egg yolk - some recipes cheat a little by adding the yolks raw.

Galettes
Galettes are also butter cookies, but baked in an iron pan known as a galette. The first galettes were made with butter preserved with sea salt and were quite large - 7 cm in diameter. They are a speciality of the Bretagne (Brittany) region, comparable to shortbread but thinner and crisper. Different Galettes are named for the town where it is made (e.g. Galette St Sauveur, Galettes St Michel).

Palets de dames
Also of Breton origin, Corinth raisins were soaked in rum and baked into this cookie. Some recipes turn it into a rather delicate almond and currant cookie. Traditionally served with tea, and a favourite at Christmas. Palets are like galettes, but thicker and more crumbly, because it contains more butter.

Gaufrettes
The original wafer cookie, dating from 1894. The thin wafers are baked in a gaufrette pan similar to a waffle iron, that makes the surface design. Keep in mind that Belgian waffles and French fried potatoes are also called gaufrettes.

Palmier
This is the French word for "palm" - made by rolling puff pastry sheets from both sides towards the middle, then cutting the roll into slices, dusting with sugar and baking until the sugar caramelises. The result is said to look like a palm leaf. It is also known as Elephant's ears and isn't quite the type of hardish, dry biscuit more commonly recognised as a cookie, but more of a pastry. Especially the good ones that can consist of up to 300 layers of pastry

Madeleines
Made with the ubiquitously copious amounts of butter, these cookies are more like sponge cake, but are eaten as cookies. They are baked in a Madeleine pan that looks like a muffin pan, but the shapes are of an elongated clam shell. Everybody who knows them seem to know the glowing reference made by Marcel Proust in his novel "Remembrance of Things Past", but Madeleines are also traditionally associated with the town Commercy, in the Lorraine region, where it is thought the bakers bought the recipe from nuns. Madeleine history seems a bit vague, but one version says the name was given to the cookies by Louis XV in honour of his father in-law's cook Madeleine Paulmier. Louis first tasted them at the Chateau Commercy in Lorraine in 1755. Louis' wife, Marie (not Antoinette) introduced them to the court at Versailles, where they soon became all the rage. Another version has it that they were named after a serving girl in said Chateau.

Whatever style you prefer, butter is the main ingredient of many traditional French cookies, so definitely not for those on a diet!

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