Croissant

The croissant descends from the Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped morning pastry made from a dense, brioche-like dough baked in Austria and Central Europe since at least the 13th century. Its transformation into the French pastry known today is credited to the Viennese bakery August Zang opened in Paris in 1839, which introduced Parisians to Austrian breads and pastries, kipferl among them. French bakers went on to remake the kipferl using puff pastry, a French technique of alternating layers of dough and butter, giving the croissant its flaky, laminated texture; the word croissant only entered French culinary records in the middle of the 19th century, and the first published French recipe for it dates to 1915. Two popular stories claim older origins: that Viennese bakers shaped the pastry into a crescent in 1683 to celebrate a victory over an Ottoman army besieging the city, and that Marie Antoinette brought it to France from Austria. Both are widely repeated and both are considered legend by food historians; the siege story appears nowhere in writing until it was printed in Larousse Gastronomique in 1938, more than two and a half centuries after the event it claims to describe, and the Marie Antoinette story is undercut by the pastry's documented absence from France until decades after her death.