The croissant, breakfast of rebels

By Tim Martin

Everyone knows the croissant story, don’t they? Viennese bakers, under siege by the Ottomans in 1683, are slaving over their ovens in the small hours when they hear scrapings and rumblings underground. They raise the alarm, the guards apprehend a gang of stealthily tunnelling Turks, and the bakers are rewarded with the right to bake pastries in the shape of Islam’s crescent moon flag. And if it wasn’t the Viennese bakers in 1683, it was the Hungarian bakers of Budapest when their city was besieged by Muslim armies three years later. And if it wasn’t them it was some other plucky gang of Christian bakers, dedicatedly turning out patriotic pastries and victory viennoiseries. And if it wasn’t them…

And here the story breaks down, because the croissant isn’t an old survival strategy at all: it’s an industrial-age walk-in, with a triumphalist cover story that streaked around the world long before the murky truth could get its boots on. Really and truly, crescent pastries are ancient (humans seem to have been making moon-shaped cakes for nearly as long as we’ve had flour and a moon), and the ancestor of the croissant is probably a curvy Mitteleuropean yeast roll called a Kipferl. The croissant itself became a part of French life no earlier than the 19th century, when August Zang, a Viennese baker and press baron, opened a pastry shop in Paris, introducing the country not only to the steam oven but also to the pastry that would one day be its most defining export. No one seems to know where that old burrowing-Turks story came from, although the diligent food historian Alan Davidson suggested that it crept into orthodoxy with the first edition of “Larousse Gastronomique” in 1938. Even in the broadly innocuous world of pastry, I suppose, trolls gonna troll.