From Viennese kipferl to Parisian pastry
The croissant’s ancestry is better understood as a gradual change than as a recipe carried intact from one city to another. Austria’s kipferl was a crescent-shaped baked good, but it was not necessarily the light, flaky pastry now associated with the French croissant. Shape and name traveled more readily than a single fixed recipe.
In the nineteenth century, Austrian artillery officer August Zang opened a bakery in Paris specializing in Viennese-style baking. Its breads and pastries introduced Parisian customers to techniques and flavors that local bakers could adapt. The bakery helped make Viennese baking fashionable in the French capital, giving the crescent pastry a route into the city’s food culture.
How the pastry changed
The signature flakiness comes from lamination: folding butter into dough in repeated layers. In the oven, water in the butter turns to steam and lifts those layers apart, creating a crisp exterior and airy interior. French bakers developed and refined the croissant in this richer, layered direction, transforming the kipferl’s broader crescent-pastry tradition into something recognizably French.
That distinction explains why the croissant can be both Austrian in ancestry and French in its familiar form. A bakery opened by an Austrian officer helped bring Viennese baking into Paris; the city’s bakers then shaped the pastry into a new local staple. The croissant’s history is, quite literally, folded into its dough: each layer reflects a technique that traveled and was changed along the way.
