The History of Croissants — The Food That Was Never French

Every country in the world calls the croissant French. The French put it on their tourism posters. They sell it in every bakery from Paris to Provence. It shows up in films, in novels, and on breakfast tables as the single most recognizable piece of French cuisine on the planet. But the croissant was not invented in France. It was not created by a French baker. And the country that made it famous had absolutely nothing to do with its birth. The real story starts with an Austrian bread that most people have never heard of, a war legend that historians say is almost certainly fiction, and an artillery officer who quit the military to open a bakery. This is the history of the croissant, and almost none of it happened the way you think. The original ancestor of the croissant is a pastry called the Kipferl. If you have never heard that word before, you are not alone. The Kipferl is an Austrian bread roll shaped like a crescent moon, and it has been around for a very long time. Written records in Austria reference crescent-shaped breads and sweets as far back as the 1300s. Some food historians believe the Kipferl may be even older than that, possibly dating to the 1200s, though the documentation from that far back is thin. The Kipferl that Austrians were baking centuries ago looked nothing like what you would pick up at a Parisian bakery this morning. It was made from a dense, enriched dough, closer to brioche than anything else. Butter or lard got worked into the flour, along with yeast and sometimes sugar, and the result was a heavy, chewy roll with a tight crumb. There was no flakiness. There were no paper-thin layers that shatter when you bite into them. The Kipferl was a solid, simple bread, and it was eaten across Austria and parts of Central Europe as a regular breakfast item for centuries. It came in both sweet and savory versions, sometimes topped with almonds, sometimes plain, and it was common enough that nobody considered it special. And this is the thing that makes the croissant's origin story so strange. In Austria and across the German-speaking world, baking was serious business. By the 1500s, Vienna had privately owned confectionery shops that produced elaborate cakes, pastries, and sugar work for the nobility. Austrian royalty used desserts and confections as displays of wealth and political power. The courts of the Habsburg Empire were famous across Europe for the quality of their baked goods. The Kipferl existed inside this culture of excellence, but it was not a showpiece. It was the bread you ate with your coffee, not the cake you served to impress a duke. Nobody wrote poems about it. Nobody painted it. It was just there, every morning, in the bakeries of Vienna and Salzburg, doing its job. That last part matters, because the Kipferl was not a luxury. It was not a delicacy reserved for the wealthy. It was ordinary bread shaped like a half-moon, the kind of thing a baker in Vienna or Salzburg would have turned out by the dozen every morning without thinking twice about it. And it stayed that way, unremarkable and local, for hundreds of years. So, how did an ordinary Austrian bread roll end up becoming the world's most celebrated French pastry? That is where things get complicated. Because before we get to the real history, we have to deal with the legends. And the legends are far more famous than the truth. The most popular origin story goes like this. In 1683, the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the city of Vienna. Turkish forces surrounded the walled city and, according to the legend, began tunneling underneath the fortifications to break through. The bakers of Vienna, who worked through the night in underground cellars, heard the sound of digging beneath the streets. They raised the alarm. The Austrian defenders discovered the tunnels, and the siege was broken. To celebrate their role in saving the city, the Viennese bakers supposedly created the Kipferl in the shape of the crescent moon from the Ottoman flag, turning the enemy's own symbol into breakfast. It is, by any measure, a fantastic story. There is just one problem. Food historians are almost unanimous that it did not happen. The Kipferl already existed long before 1683. Those written records from the 1300s prove that crescent-shaped breads were being baked in Austria, centuries before the Ottomans showed up at the gates of Vienna. The legend of the heroic bakers does not appear in any source written at the time of the siege. In fact, the first known publication of this story came from food historian Alfred Gottschalk, who included it in the La Russe Gastronomique in 1938, more than 250 years after the battle itself. That is a long gap. And as several historians have pointed out, similar origin legends have been attached to the bagel and other round European breads, suggesting this is a folktale invented well after the fact and bolted onto a food that was already old. The second famous legend involves Marie Antoinette. According to this version, the Austrian-born queen brought the Kipferl with her when she married King Louis XVI of France in 1770. Homesick for the tastes of Vienna, she supposedly introduced the pastry to the French royal court and from there it spread across the country. It is a romantic story, and it makes for a nice scene in a period drama. But again, there is no historical evidence to support it. No court records, no letters, no accounts from the time mention Marie Antoinette importing Viennese pastries. And an aristocratic writer in 1799 compiled an extensive list of breakfast foods served at the French court without mentioning the Kipferl once. If the queen had made it fashionable, somebody would have written it down. So both of the stories people tell about the croissant's origin are, at best, charming fiction. The bakers of Vienna did not invent the Kipferl to mock the Ottomans. Marie Antoinette did not smuggle it into France in her luggage. But here is why these myths have stuck around for so long. People want food to have a story. A croissant that was just a bread roll some Austrian bakers made for a few hundred years before a businessman brought it to Paris is not a very exciting origin. A croissant that was forged in war, shaped to mock a defeated enemy, and carried to France by a doomed queen is a much better tale. And once a food myth gets popular, it is nearly impossible to kill. You can find the Battle of Vienna story repeated as fact in travel guides, cooking shows, and food blogs that were published this year. The fiction has become so embedded in popular culture that correcting it feels almost rude. But something did bring this pastry from Vienna to Paris, and that something was not a legend. It was a person, and his name was August Zang. Zang was born in Vienna in 1807, and he trained as an artillery officer in the Austrian military. By his late 20s, he had given up on the army and was looking for a business opportunity. Sometime around 1837, Zang traveled to Paris, and according to one account, he found French bread bland and unimpressive compared to what he had grown up eating in Vienna. He was not a trained baker himself, so he went back to Austria, studied baking techniques, and returned to Paris with a partner named Ernest Schwazer and a group of Viennese bakers. In 1838, Zang and Schwarzer opened the Boulangerie Viennois at 92 Rue de Richelieu in Paris, right in the heart of the city. The bakery sold kipferls, pain viennois, and other Austrian specialties that Parisians had never tasted before. And Zang was not just a baker, he was a marketer. He installed a steam oven, a piece of technology from Vienna that used steam generated from moist hay to give his breads a distinctive glossy sheen and lighter texture than anything the local bakeries could produce. He took out newspaper advertisements. He built elaborate window displays to draw in foot traffic from the busy street outside. It worked. Within months, the Boulangerie Viennoise was the most talked about bakery in Paris. At first, the shop survived mainly by serving homesick Austrian and German expats. But by 1839, the business was booming with French customers too. Parisians went wild for these Viennese pastries, and within a couple of years, other French bakers started paying attention. By 1845, the demand for Viennese-style bread had grown so large that roughly 250 specialist workers were operating across the wealthier neighborhoods of Paris, all of them making versions of the breads and pastries that Zang had introduced. These workers even formed their own professional association and met twice a week at a café in the Passage des Panoramas to discuss business strategy and expand their trade. An Austrian artillery officer had, almost by accident, started a bread revolution in the culinary capital of the world, and consider how unusual that was. Paris, in the 1830s, considered itself the center of global cuisine. French chefs looked down on nearly every other country's food, and yet here was an Austrian outsider, not even a trained baker, walking into the most competitive food market in Europe and beating the locals at their own trade. The French bakers were not happy about it, but they were smart enough to recognize a winner when they saw one. And instead of fighting Zang's popularity, they studied what he was doing and started copying it. French journalist Hervé de Kerouhant noted that by 1840, there were already at least a dozen makers of Viennese bread in Paris, employing a hundred workers between them. Zang had been open for barely two years, and the imitation industry he created was already larger than his own bakery. But Zang did not stay in Paris long enough to see what his kipferl would become. Political unrest was building in France throughout the 1840s, and many of Zang's bakery workers held revolutionary sympathies. When the revolution of 1848 toppled King Louis-Philippe, Zang's workers reportedly cheered for the new republic. Zang, who had spent a decade building a business under the old regime, read the room and decided it was time to leave. He sold the bakery to a man named Philibert Jacquet and returned to Vienna for good. Back home, he pivoted completely. He founded Die Presse, Austria's first major daily newspaper, and went on to build a fortune in banking and mining. He became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Austria, and his later career had nothing at all to do with pastry. His ornate tomb in Vienna's central cemetery makes no mention of baking whatsoever. The man who introduced the croissant to France was buried as a newspaper publisher and industrialist. If you visited his grave today, you would have no idea he had ever touched flour, and that is maybe the strangest part of this whole story. Zang spent roughly 10 years running the bakery that changed French breakfast forever, and then he walked away and never looked back. The kipferls he sold at 92 Rue de Richelieu kept evolving in his absence, getting lighter, flakier, and more French with every passing decade. But their creator was back in Vienna, running a newspaper and lending money, completely uninterested in what Paris was doing with his bread. And here is the part that makes this story genuinely interesting. What Zang brought to Paris was still the kipferl, dense, heavy, made with enriched dough. The flaky, buttery, layered pastry that the world now calls a croissant did not exist yet. That required a second act of invention, and this one actually did come from France. French bakers had already developed a technique called lamination, the process of folding butter into dough in multiple layers, rolling it out, and folding it again to create dozens of paper-thin sheets of dough, separated by paper-thin sheets of fat. The method had been documented in French cooking as far back as 1653, when François-Pierre de La Varenne published the first known recipe for pâte feuillée, or puff pastry. But nobody had thought to combine that technique with the kipferl. Various recipes referencing croissant-shaped pastries appeared in French cookbooks throughout the second half of the 1800s, but they were still using the old-style dough. The pastries were The leap to the modern croissant did not happen until the early 1900s. In 1915, a French baker named Sylvain Claudius Goy published a recipe in his book La Cuisine Anglo-Americane that changed everything. Goy's recipe specifically called for a laminated yeast dough, meaning he took the and applied the lamination technique of puff pastry to it. Roll the dough out flat, spread cold butter across the center, fold it over, turn it 90 degrees, roll it out again, fold it again, and repeat. Each fold doubles the number of layers. By the time you finish three or four rounds of folding, you have created dozens of alternating layers of dough and butter, so thin you can almost see through them. When that dough goes into a hot oven, the moisture in the butter turns to steam and pushes the layers apart. The fat essentially fries each layer individually from the inside out, and the result is a pastry that shatters when you touch it, with a golden, crispy exterior and a soft, airy interior held together by nothing but steam and structure. A well-made croissant can contain more than 80 individual layers. The butter has to be cold enough to stay solid during folding, but warm enough not to crack the dough. The temperature of the butter and the dough have to be nearly identical, and there is almost no room for error, get it wrong, and the butter melts into the dough instead of staying in separate sheets, and you end up with a greasy bread instead of a flaky pastry. This is the part of the croissant's story that actually belongs to France. The Austrians gave the world the shape and the idea, but the French bakers, who took Goy's recipe and perfected it over the following decades, turned the kipferl into something fundamentally new. They did not just adapt a foreign recipe, they rebuilt it from the inside using a technique that was uniquely their own. And that transformation is what makes the croissant such an unusual case in food history, because the country that gets all the credit did not invent the thing, but they did invent the version of the thing that everyone actually wants to eat. By 1920, the French government formally recognized the croissant as a national product. Think about that for a second. A bread that started as an Austrian kipferl was imported by an Austrian military officer, and was only transformed into its current form in the early 20th century, became an official symbol of France less than five years after Goy published his recipe. The French did not just adopt the croissant, they claimed it entirely and the Austrian origins were quietly forgotten, and the adoption worked. By the late 1800s, before Goy's recipe even existed, croissants of the older, denser variety had already become a breakfast staple across France. Charles Dickens, who was not even French, mentioned the pastry in print in 1872, referring to a dainty croissant on a Parisian table in his publication All the Year Round. If a visiting English novelist was writing about the croissant casually enough to assume his readers knew what it was, then the pastry had clearly arrived. It had crossed over from specialty Viennese import to everyday Parisian food within a single generation of Zang's bakery opening. That is astonishingly fast for a foreign food to become naturalized. Throughout the 20th century, the croissant spread beyond France and became one of the most recognized foods on the planet. But the way it spread might surprise you, because the croissant's global conquest had less to do with French culinary tradition and more to do with American industrial food production. In 1981, the Sara Lee Corporation, the company best known for its pound cakes, developed a method to freeze croissant dough and ship it to bakeries and restaurants across the country. The frozen dough could be stored for weeks, then thawed, proofed, and baked on demand, giving any kitchen with an oven the ability to serve fresh croissants without a trained pastry chef on staff. The product was an instant hit. Sara Lee's frozen croissants outsold their famous pound cakes almost immediately, which is saying something for a company that had built its entire reputation on cake. The fast food industry was paying attention. Burger King, Arby's, and other chains launched croissant breakfast sandwiches, stuffing the delicate French pastry with eggs, bacon, and processed cheese. A 1984 New York Times article declared that the Americanization of the croissant had begun, and the description was accurate. What had been a handmade luxury in Parisian bakeries was now rolling off assembly lines in factories across the United States, shipped frozen in bulk, and served through drive-thru windows. Meanwhile, back in France, the same industrialization was happening, just more quietly. Frozen dough factories began supplying bakeries across the country, and over the following decades, the artisanal croissant became harder and harder to find. Estimates today suggest that roughly 85% of the croissants sold in French bakeries are industrially manufactured. They arrive at the shop frozen, get baked on site, and are sold as fresh. Most customers have no idea. The bakery smells like fresh pastry because the croissants were baked there. They just were not made there. A baker from Nice made headlines in 2018 when he publicly stated that 80% of pastries on the French market are industrial and called it shameful for the country that invented fine dining. He launched a campaign to create an official label for handmade croissants, trying to give customers a way to tell the difference between a croissant that a trained baker shaped by hand at four in the morning and one that rolled off a conveyor belt in a factory outside Lyon. A coalition of artisanal bakers later launched a campaign called ICI, c'est humain, meaning here, it is human, encouraging bakeries and food shops to display the slogan as proof that actual people made the food on their shelves. In the country that officially claims the croissant as its own, four out of five of them were made in a factory, and the bakers fighting to change that are fighting an uphill battle. Because handmade croissants are expensive to produce. You need skilled workers who know how to laminate dough properly, and butter that contains at least 80% fat and hours of labor for every batch. A frozen croissant from a factory costs a fraction of the price and looks almost identical once it comes out of the oven. The French, to their credit, do still take the croissant seriously in some ways that nobody else does. There is a long-standing convention, widely described as law, though the exact legal status is debated, that governs the shape of croissants sold in France. If a croissant is straight, it was made with 100% butter. If it is curved into the traditional crescent shape, it may contain margarine or other fats. The irony is almost too perfect. The original Kipferl was always crescent-shaped. That is literally what the word croissant means in French, crescent. But in France, the crescent shape now signals the cheaper version, while the premium, all-butter croissant, deliberately abandons the shape that gave the pastry its name. French bakers even have opinions about how you should eat a croissant. You do not split it in half and spread butter on both sides. If it is an all-butter croissant, adding more butter is considered excessive. Jam is acceptable. But the proper method, according to tradition, is to butter the torn end, take a bite, then butter it again and take another bite. Butter, bite, butter, bite. It sounds absurdly specific, but these are the rules in a country that has an entire government body, the Académie Française, dedicated to protecting the French language from foreign influence. Protecting their pastry from foreign eating habits is just an extension of the same philosophy. And yet the deepest irony of all is that this pastry they protect so fiercely was foreign to begin with. The Kipferl came from Austria. The man who brought it to Paris was Austrian. The legends that tried to give it a dramatic origin story were fiction. The only truly French contribution was the technique of lamination, which transformed a heavy bread into a flaky, layered work of art. But that single contribution was enough to erase seven centuries of Austrian history and replace it with a new identity. Today, the croissant belongs to everyone and nowhere at the same time. You can buy one in Every version is a little different. In Spain, bakers created the Zouillot, a deep-fried croissant filled with custard cream that has become its own regional specialty. In Italy, the Cornetto looks almost identical to a French croissant but uses a slightly sweeter dough and is typically eaten with a morning espresso. In the United States, Burger King turned it into the Kroissanwich, which is exactly what it sounds like, a breakfast sandwich that uses a croissant as the bread. Some are stuffed with chocolate or ham and cheese. Some are twice the size of the original. Some are made with almond cream or matcha or salted caramel. In South Korea and Japan, croissant culture has exploded into its own category, with elaborate bakeries dedicated entirely to reinventing the form. The Cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid created by pastry chef Dominique Ancel in New York in 2013, generated lines around the block and spawned imitators in dozens of countries within weeks. The croissant has become less of a specific food and more of a format, a buttery, layered vehicle for whatever flavors a local market wants to put inside it. The original Kipferl, meanwhile, still exists in Austria and Germany, but it has mostly evolved into a small, crescent-shaped cookie called the Vanille Kipferl, made with ground nuts and dusted in powdered sugar. If you put a Vanille Kipferl next to a modern croissant, you would never guess they were related. August Zang is largely forgotten. His bakery at 92 Rue de Richelieu has been gone for over 170 years. His name does not appear on any plaque in Paris. But the chain of events he set in motion, by quitting the Austrian military and opening a bread shop in a city that thought its bread was already the best in the world, created one of the most successful pieces of culinary identity theft in history. The French took an Austrian bread, applied a French technique, gave it a French name, and made it so thoroughly theirs that suggesting otherwise sounds like a conspiracy theory. Jim Chevalier, an independent scholar who wrote an entire book about August Zang and the French croissant, put it best when he said the croissant began as the Austrian Kipferl but became French the moment people started making it with puff pastry, which was a French technique. It has fully taken root in its adopted land, and that might be the most honest assessment of the croissant's history. It was not invented in France, but it was reinvented there. And reinvention, it turns out, is worth more than invention when it comes to building a legend. The next time you pick up a croissant, take a second to look at it before you bite in. That crescent shape has survived since the 1200s. It crossed borders, survived wars, outlasted empires, and got remade from the inside out by bakers who turned a dense roll into something that practically floats off the plate. The Austrians made it. The French perfected it. The Americans industrialized it. And now the rest of the world is reinventing it all over again. A thousand years of history. Sitting in your hand. Wrapped in butter. And not a bit of it happened the way anyone told you. If you found this one interesting, subscribe to the channel and drop a like so more people can find it. And if you have a food origin story you want us to cover next, leave it in the comments.