1,536 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very emblematic products of the bakery.

Well, here is the beautiful story of the "invention" of croissants.

19 K 5/5 (19 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Bakery Bakers Mine Viennoiserie Vienne Croissant History Austrians Turks Marie-antoinette

Last modified on: October 10^th 2018

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

The beautiful story of the croissants

siège de Vienne

July 14, 1683, the Turks (at the time they were called "Ottomans") laid siege to Vienna for the second time. The city was, at the time, still fortified, and although it was the dawn of the Enlightenment, it was still a quasi-feudal attack that was being prepared: the Turks surrounded the city and cut off its supplies, thus hoping for a more or less rapid surrender of the Viennese.

It is a long siege war, but at the time already "mine" that is to say that the attackers not content with firing on the walls with cannons, dig galleries from their lines to the fortifications, and once arrived below fill with black powder and explode, hoping to create a breach in the walls and allow a rapid invasion.

The defenders are not idle, they dig galleries in the other direction, counter-mines, to try to eliminate the miners. To do this, they were listening, trying to detect the pickaxes of the Turkish miners' progression. Cleverly, the Turks decided to dig only at night, counting on the sleep of the Viennese to advance discreetly.

Bad luck for them, at night the bakers were at work, and in their bakeries they heard the miners digging, warned the authorities, who reacted to thwart the attack. The Viennese bakers saved the city from the Turk! (At least, that's the legend).

To celebrate this event, the bakers threw a small loaf of bread (probably brioche) in the shape of the crescent found on the Ottoman flag, this cake is called "hörnchen" ("little horn").

drapeau ottoman

This same bun was brought to France with the arrival of the Arch-Duchess Marie-Antoinette, future wife of Louis XVI and Queen of France. Over time, and especially at the beginning of the 20th century, the original bun, under the influence of the French bakers, Parisian in particular, became something more sophisticated, both leavened and flaky, it is the croissant that we know today, of which only the original shape remains.

Nice story, isn't it?

That's also why we talk about viennoiseries, in France only, to group together everything that concerns leavened dough(brioche dough, bread pudding, brioche bread, etc.) and leavened leafy dough (croissant, pain au chocolat, raisin bread, etc.).

Note: You will often read or hear "The world, or the future, belongs to those who get up early", this is completely false, because if it were true the bakers would have been the masters of the world for a long time!

Lasts posts

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20255625

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20259115

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025815

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,4035

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,3103

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

A few tips for effective kneading at home

When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.
June 23^th 2021283 K 23.8

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201882 K 24.3

For well opened (puffed) cakes

It's always nice to have a well puffed up cake after baking, not only will it taste good but it looks great too. Let's see how to get this beautiful shape almost every time.
January 23^th 201935 K4.2

Drawing a pattern in pastry

Often in the kitchen, in pastry-making, or in baking, we need to trace a pattern on a pastry. It's just a question of aesthetics but it has its effect after baking on a galette, pithiviers, pâté en croute (terrine in a pie crust), etc.
May 23^th 201935 K4.1

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202312 K5