Clearly, the bakers had been crucial in all this, so Austrian Archduke Leopold gave them the right to create little pastries in honour of their role. As the emblem on the Ottoman flag had been a crescent, the pastries were to be crescent-shaped – to truly stick one on the Turks. Austrians apparently took to saying: “To eat a croissant is to eat a Turk.” Maybe they still do.
Thus, anyway, the croissant evolved in Vienna. Then, the story goes, it was given a significant boost by Polish-Lithuanian nobleman Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki who, having helped the Viennese repulse the Turks, allegedly opened the first café in the Austrian capital with coffee beans that had been pinched from the departing Ottomans. Coffee was new to Austria so, to make the drink attractive, he bought in the new-fangled croissants as accompaniment. Bingo. Happiness all round – and a statue of Mr Kulczycki on the street of the same name.
Moving on again, the croissant finally travelled to France in 1770, brought by the entourage of the 14-year-old Marie-Antoinette when she left Austria to marry the future Louis XVI. At this point, the croissant was still a more solid, brioche-style pastry – what the Austrians call “kipferl” – rather than the present flaky article. It didn’t really catch on until decades later, when ex-Austrian army officer and entrepreneur, August Zang, opened a baker’s shop in Paris at 92 Rue de Richelieu, a couple of blocks from the Louvre.
The fact that Zang’s shop was unusually posh endeared it to the beau monde. The croissant made its way into Parisian society, to the extent that, 10 years on, Zang had earned enough to return to Vienna and found Die Presse, a newspaper still important in daily Austrian life. Other business ventures made him a fortune, although he apparently remained discreet about his former life as a baker. All these Viennese connections, of course, explain why the French call croissants and similar pastries “viennoiseries”.
By the early 20th-century, the croissant had democratised and was now being prepared with puff pastry, which made all the difference. Fluffiness has long appealed to the French. In cheaper croissants, the shipping quantities of butter required were now being replaced by margarine (itself invented in 1869 by a French chemist called Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, confirming the fact that that this field attracts some very strange names). The pastries also came in two shapes. Traditionally, the crescent-shaped croissants had the margarine while straight ones had the butter. Why something straight should still be called a “crescent” is a matter for mightier minds than mine.
Whatever shape it comes in, however, a croissant should be crisp and (not too) shinily golden outside, while soft and airy within. It should pull apart satisfactorily. Thus, to the vital initial question: how to eat it? Although it’s not always obvious, polite French society has its table rules. They include: break off a bit of baguette with your hand, not a knife; don’t cut lettuce – fold it over (and over again, if necessary) before forking it; don’t start eating until your host or hostess is seated and has said: “Bon appétit”; when clinking glasses in “cheers” (“santé”), look your fellow clinker in the eye; don’t spread cheese or pâté on bread – put them on in chunks, and peel your peach with a knife and fork.
Where does this leave the croissant? These days they might come filled with ham and cheese, mushrooms or frangipane, with slivers of almond on top. This is ok. It’s generally the baker’s way of giving new life to yesterday’s unsold croissants. Eat them as you would a sandwich. Incidentally, deep-fried with chocolate sauce, or curry sauce – as I’ve seen promoted on a couple of edgier websites – is possibly less ok.
