Croissant Period AOrigin theory DVerified

The croissant is a butter-laminated bread that took its present shape in Paris. The pastry of dozens of thin layers that shatter when you bite it dates from the 1890s—more recent than most people assume.

Two things need to be kept apart: a crescent-shaped bread and today's croissant. The crescent bread, the kipferl, is genuinely old. A crescent loaf appears already in a 1227 poem celebrating an offering to Duke Leopold. But that was a soft, brioche-like roll, not a pastry built of layers.

The Parisian line is generally traced back to the Austrian August Zang (1807–1888), who in 1838–39 opened the Boulangerie Viennoise at 92 Rue de Richelieu and sold the kipferl and other Viennese breads. This, as Jim Chevallier documents from the sources in August Zang and the French Croissant (2009), is where the bread the French would call croissant enters the city. The word croissant reaches print soon after, in a list of fine breads in Anselme Payen's Des substances alimentaires (Paris, 1853), and Littré's dictionary gives it an entry in 1863. Through the second half of the century the Viennese crescent settled into the morning trade of Parisian cafés and bakeries—though the dough was still close to a brioche, not yet folded.

Wheat and butter had long been at hand in France, and butter fine enough for lamination was widely sold by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until the motions of folding butter into dough, rolling it thin and folding it again became part of a baker's daily work, those layers had no way of coming into being. That happened in the 1890s. A trade book printed in Paris in 1896, Antoine Scheibenbogen's Cuisine et pâtisserie austro-hongroises, sets out the working method: for good croissants you need 200 to 250 grams of butter; spread it over the dough comme pour feuilletage, as for puff pastry, smooth it as you would butter a slice of bread, fold the dough so the butter stays inside—and then fold it again. The passage announces nothing new; it reads as shop routine, and it even tells the baker that if you want croissants with fewer layers, work the dough more. How many layers a croissant carried was a matter for the baker to adjust. Three years later, on 4 June 1899, a bakery took out an advertisement in Le Petit Bastiais, a paper in Bastia on Corsica: "Croissants feuilletés tous les jours"—laminated croissants, baked every day. The professional baking manual Manuel du boulanger et de pâtisserie-boulangère (1904) likewise refers to croissant dough, as a matter of course, as the dough "before the butter is mixed in." Lamination had become standard work—and not only in Paris, but down to a bakery in a provincial island town.

Everyone has heard the croissant's origin story at least once: in 1683, to celebrate the lifting of the Ottoman siege of Vienna, a baker supposedly shaped a bread after the crescent on the Ottoman standard. It is a good story—and a late one. No record from the period carries it. The book that carried the tale around the world was the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938, in the entry by A. Gottschalk; but by then the story had been circulating in the trade for decades. Forty-two years earlier, Antoine Scheibenbogen's Cuisine et pâtisserie austro-hongroises (Paris, 1896)—a trade book for the Viennese bakers of the city—tells the whole of it at the head of its croissant chapter: the two sieges of Vienna, 1529 and 1683; the bakers at work through the night who "entendirent le bruit fait par leurs pioches et donnèrent l'alarme," heard the Turkish picks below and raised the alarm; the privileges the emperor granted them in return, down to "le droit de porter l'épée en souvenir du siège de Vienne," the right to bear a sword in memory of the siege; and finally "Les boulangers inventèrent en le fabriquant un petit pain en forme de croissant," the bakers invented a small bread in the shape of a crescent. Even so, 1896 stands 213 years after the event, and the seventeenth century has left nothing behind it. The tale remains an invented tradition; what has changed is where it lived—not in a twentieth-century food encyclopedia, but in the Viennese baking trade of late nineteenth-century Paris.

The tale comes apart from several directions at once. The crescent-shaped kipferl already appears in the 1227 poem of the offering to Duke Leopold—more than four centuries before the siege it is meant to honour. And the same "victory memorial" story is pinned on the bagel and the kugelhopf as well: a patriotic pattern stitched on after the fact and passed off as history. Jim Chevallier laid this out from the sources in August Zang and the French Croissant (2009), and Rachel Hopkin reached the same conclusion independently, by the methods of folklore, in The Way of the Croissant (Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture, 2016).

A second date has been repeated almost as often. The first recipe for a laminated croissant is usually given as the one in Colombié's Nouvelle encyclopédie culinaire (Paris, 1905/1906—the printing year varies), with Goy following in 1915; from which the pastry gets counted as a twentieth-century arrival. But the bakers were there before the cookbooks. The same trade book of 1896 already lays out the folding of butter into yeasted dough as ordinary shop practice, a decade ahead of Colombié and written for bakers rather than for kitchens. The Bastia advertisement of 4 June 1899 then sells croissants feuilletés in a provincial paper rather than a Parisian one, and not as news of an invention but as something baked every day. By 1904 the professional manual treats folding butter into croissant dough as routine. The cookbooks caught up afterwards.

When, then, did the wording for folded dough spread through the papers? One measure is Gallicagram, which counts phrases year by year in the presse corpus—a part of the newspaper holdings digitised in Gallica, the French national library's collection, rather than the whole of the nineteenth-century press. Searched there, croissants feuilletés returns no counts for the years 1800 to 1900, and then turns up every month from October 1901 onward. The reach of that figure is limited: the corpus holds only a portion of the digitised papers, and a page turned up individually by full-text search—the Bastia advertisement of 1899 among them—need not be in it. A count of zero is not evidence that the phrase was missing from every French newspaper of the century; what it marks is the moment the wording for laminated croissants spread through the press, at the turn of the century. The 1896 trade book, for its part, never uses the phrase at all: it describes the folding itself. The words followed the practice rather than announcing it, and how early the pastry can be documented rests on the trade book of 1896, the advertisement of 1899 and the baking manual of 1904.

Follow the same counts back through the century and croissants themselves are plainly present: croissants viennois in 1880, 1883, 1890 and 1892, croissants et brioches from 1890. The unlaminated croissant came first; the folding followed, and became daily work within the final decade of the nineteenth century.

The croissant therefore falls into three layers: the old crescent bread of 1227, the croissant that crossed from Vienna to Paris from 1838–39, and the laminated pastry of the 1890s. The 1683 victory tale has no place in any of them.