The Croissant's Austrian Grandmother

Feed the Reader

10 hours ago

4 min read

Picture a Paris café on a weekday morning. A small coffee, a newspaper and a croissant: golden, curved and shedding flakes all over the saucer. Few foods seem more French.

But the croissant's shape, and the meaning of its name, point somewhere else. "Croissant" simply means crescent. And the crescent came to Paris from Vienna.

The grandmother

The croissant's ancestor is the kipferl, a crescent-shaped bread or pastry from Austria. Kipferl come in many forms, sweet and savoury, made from all sorts of doughs. Order one in Austria today and you might get a soft bread roll, or a crumbly Christmas biscuit.

What matters here is how old they are. Kipferl have been made in Austria since at least the thirteenth century. One early record, cited by the Austrian government's register of traditional foods, describes Viennese bakers presenting crescent-shaped pastries to Duke Leopold at Christmas in 1227.

So crescent pastries were part of Vienna's food long before anyone in Paris was dipping one in coffee.

The legend

Ask how the crescent came about, though, and you'll often hear a much more dramatic story.

In 1683, an Ottoman army laid siege to Vienna. According to the legend, bakers working through the night heard faint scraping sounds beneath the city walls: the besiegers were digging tunnels to lay explosives. The bakers raised the alarm, the tunnels were found and the city held. To mark the moment, the story says, the bakers made a pastry in the shape of the crescent on the besieging army's flags.

It's a terrific story. It has danger, heroes, a clever twist and a delicious ending. That's part of the problem.

Older than its own legend

There's no contemporary evidence for any of it. No record from the time of the siege connects bakers, tunnels and crescent-shaped pastries.

The tale shows up only much later. Accounts linking the kipferl to the siege don't appear in print until the nineteenth century, well over a century and a half after the events they describe. One version even credits a particular Viennese baker who, according to Austrian records, had died a few years before the siege took place.

In the twentieth century the story got its biggest boost. The food writer Alfred Gottschalk told it in the first edition of the reference book Larousse Gastronomique in 1938, setting it at the siege of Budapest in 1686. In a later book, in 1948, he moved it to Vienna in 1683. The legend has been repeated in cafés and cookbooks ever since.

Which leaves a neat irony. The kipferl's documented history reaches back to 1227. The story of how it was supposedly invented reached print about six centuries later.

The road to Paris

If a siege didn't bring the crescent to France, what did? The best-documented answer is a bakery.

In 1838 or 1839, a former Austrian artillery officer named August Zang opened the Boulangerie Viennoise, a Viennese bakery, on the rue de Richelieu in Paris. It sold Viennese specialities, kipferl among them, and it was a hit. French bakers began copying its products, and the crescent-shaped roll took on a French name.

By the 1860s and 1870s, croissants were being mentioned as an established part of breakfast in France, and All the Year Round, the weekly magazine Charles Dickens had founded, mentioned them in 1872.

But those early croissants weren't quite the ones on today's café table. The kipferl Zang sold were made from a soft, bread-like dough, closer to brioche.

The flaky part is French

What makes a modern croissant a croissant is its dough. It's laminated: yeast dough is spread with butter, then folded and rolled out again and again, building up many thin layers. In the oven, steam puffs those layers apart, giving that shattering, flaky crust. Baked goods in this family are known in French as viennoiserie, literally "Viennese things", a quiet nod to where the idea came from.

That laminated croissant is a French development, and a fairly recent one. Recipes for it appear only in the early twentieth century.

Another famous name

There's a second popular origin story worth clearing away. It says the croissant came to France with Marie Antoinette, the Austrian-born princess who married the future King Louis XVI in 1770 and missed the pastries of home.

It's another charming idea, and there's no historical evidence for it either. Famous people attract food stories the way a croissant attracts crumbs.

What we don't know

To be fair to the record, some details remain fuzzy. Sources disagree about the first printed recipe for the modern, laminated croissant. Some point to a French culinary encyclopedia from 1906; others credit a 1915 book by the chef Sylvain Claudius Goy. Even Zang's opening date is given as 1838 by some sources and 1839 by others.

So we know the croissant's family tree better than its exact birthday. The line runs from medieval Vienna, through a Paris bakery in the 1830s, to French bakers who reinvented the dough in the early 1900s.

Back to the café

Look again at the croissant on the saucer. Its name is French. Its buttery layers are French, and fairly young. But its shape is a family resemblance, inherited from a Viennese pastry that was being presented to a duke nearly eight hundred years ago.

The croissant is French by adoption and Viennese by descent. And the dramatic story about bakers and a siege? That's the part of the story that was cooked up later.