You may have noticed that several of my posts mention our favourite breakfast of coffee and croissants. The croissant, as we know it today, originates in France but has made a place for itself in many other countries. The most common form is the so called butter croissant (croissant au beurre), though there are other variants, including almond and chocolate croissants. The common or classic croissant is made of flaky pastry (you will find plenty of recipes online), a triangle of which is rolled, leaving the triangle’s apex in the centre on the outside to form a shape that is thicker in the middle with tapering ends. The croissant is then bent to give it the crescent shape from which it takes its name.

Croissants are best eaten while still warm from the oven and accompanied by a cup of good coffee. We have eaten croissants in the UK, in France and in Belgium. The Belgian variety is distinguished by a fine sugar glaze that I have not seen applied elsewhere.

I became curious to know the origin of this delicious pastry: who invented it, when and why did they choose its characteristic shape?

When you research a topic like this online, caution is necessary, especially where something as popular as the croissant is concerned. Why? Well, because legends and urban myths, when not deliberate fabrications, abound and make it difficult to find the truth. One needs to set aside the facile explanations and seek out sources with some claim to serious scholarship.

When you start to search for the history of the croissant, you will quickly come across the story of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 when the city was besieged by the Turks. This popular anecdote claims that the Turks, in order to break into the city, began to mine under the walls at night. They might have succeeded but for the fact that the city’s bakers, who work in the silent hours of the night, heard the sounds of digging and alerted the authorities. The Turkish plot was foiled and the city saved. To celebrate this event, so the story goes, the bakers invented a special cake, giving it the shape of the Muslim crescent on the Turkish flag. This confection was given the name kipferl, “crescent” or, as modern dictionaries tend to translate it, “croissant”.

We now turn the clock forward to the last third of the 18th century when the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette came to France from her native Vienna to marry the equally misfortunate King Louis XVI. In her honour, and because she missed her Austrian home cooking, the palace chefs made croissants to cheer her up. The croissant had finally made it to the big time and has remained famous ever since. Or at least, so runs the legend.

As far as I can tell, this story of the croissant, and its various elaborations, derive from a single source. A man called Alfred Gottschalk wrote about the croissant in the first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique in 1938. There he tells the story of how the kipferl emerged in 1686 from the siege of… Budapest! Yes, Budapest, not Vienna. The story is the same with burrowing Turks and bakers working the night shift and the celebratory invention of the crescent-shaped pastry. It was later, in a different work on food, his Histoire de l’Alimentation et de la Gastronomie (1948), that Gottschalk changed the scene of the siege and the invention of the croissant to Vienna in 1683.

So was it Budapest or Vienna? It probably doesn’t matter, because it seems that neither city was the birthplace of the croissant. You can dismiss his story and all its modern variants as Scotch mist.

The crescent-shaped pastry has been found to have already existed no later than the 5th century. Called in Latin panis lunatus (“moon- or crescent-shaped bread”), it had a role to play in religion and was probably eaten in convents during Lent. Later, in a document of 1549, referring to a banquet given by the Bishop of Paris for the Queen of France, mention is made of “quarante gasteaux en croissans” (“forty cakes in crescents”).

What were these early croissants made of and what were they like to eat? The mists of time (Scotch or otherwise) make it difficult to know. The crescent-shaped cake or pastry certainly continued to exist but little is said of how it was made, except for a reference in a later edition of the Larousse Gastronomique to beaten eggs, which certainly do not figure in the modern version.

The first definite description of the croissant as we know it appears in the Nouvelle Encyclopédie Culinaire by Auguste Colombié in 1906. Here at last, we find the recipe known and enjoyed by all lovers of croissants. Whether it has much in common with the croissants of the past, apart from its shape, is difficult to say but it seems unlikely. We can be sure, however, that the croissant is not Viennese or Hungarian, that no Turks were harmed in its making, and that it is inescapably and essentially français. And delicious, to boot.