Viennoiserie Origins

By Jimmy Griffin

When you have mastered puff pastry, you will find it such a satisfying and splendid accomplishment that you will bless yourself for every moment you spent learning the techniques (Labensky, Sarah. R.; Martel, Priscella and Van Damme, Eddy, 2009).

The history of the croissant’s origins is traceable to Austria in the mid-1400s, in the form of the Kipferl, an Austrian morning pastry that was crescent-shaped. The Kipferl was a sweet, fermented pastry made with a dough like today’s brioche. Its crumb structure was much denser, and it lacked the flakiness of the croissant of today (Starbuck, 2016). In France, flaky pastry or pâte feuilletée, was first documented in a 1653 recipe book by Francoise, Pierre De La Varenne titled “Patissier Français” (De la Varenne, 1653:5). A marriage between both types of pastry would later give rise to the birth of the croissant as it is known today. The precise past of the Kipferl is somewhat vague. However, there are references to the use of the word Kipferl in Austrian cuisine dating back to the 13^th Century (Sahar, 2012). Kipferl were initially described as crescent-shaped sweets at the time (Chevallier, 2009:4); they were small, pointed loaves of white bread that contained enrichments of lard and milk and bore a resemblance to pointed cattle horns, and were made in Austria (Curtius, 1886:146). The Viennese breakfast pastry form of the Kipferl went undocumented until the 15^th century. Chevalier (2009:77) adds that a dessert called Gateaux en croissants was documented at a Parisian banquet for Catherine de’ Medici in 1549 and would have referred to cakes that were crescent-shaped, but they were not croissants, as presently known. In Austria, cakes, pastry and confections were the ultimate display of wealth and prosperity among the nobility (Goldstein and Mintz, 2015:24).

The improved availability of sugar was still confined to the most affluent sectors of society, and in 1566, a Dutch national named Matthias de Voss became the first royally appointed confectioner for the Viennese Court, according to Patrouch (2010:354). This act indicated the official support and recognition by the Austrian royalty of the importance of the Viennese innovation in baking and confectionary evolving during this period. Two years later, in 1568, Vienna had some privately owned confectioners’ shops, thanks to the influence and support of the royal courts. These shops both nurtured and affected the dominance of high-quality Viennese baking and pastry culture, which would, in time, foster the inspiration for Auguste Zang to introduce the croissant and Viennese-style bread to Paris in later years (Goldstein and Mintz, 2015). The French and Italian bakers soon followed after their Viennese counterparts and included this breakfast pastry as part of their daily routine. The croissant in its initial form was very different from today’s creation, as it was made using puff pastry with lard and milk, a laminated dough devoid of yeast. Falling sugar prices toward the end of the 17^th century enabled the rising wealthy merchant dynasties in the affluent cities of Vienna and Paris to trade in sugar, which was once available exclusively to the royalty. Café culture, as we know it, developed during this time, and, in Paris, this café culture involved meeting over tea, coffee and cake to discuss revolutionary ideas opposed to King Louis XIV (Willan, 2016).

Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century

The marriage of the French king, Louis XIV, to Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, was regularly associated with the creation of the croissant in France. As Queen of France, she was expected to end all ties with her homeland and family; she was also compelled to embrace her husband’s customs and country (Man, 2016). Many believe that Marie Antoinette, herself, christened the Kipferl “the croissant,” thereby popularising it in France. The story is dubious, however, as a yeasted, flaky puff pastry of that name did not exist until well into the 19^th century. In the 15^th century, it is believed, puff pastry was perfected by the Duke of Tuscany’s court pastry chefs. From the Tuscan royal court, it was thought to have been brought by Marie de’ Medici and introduced to the French royal court (Hess, 1996:186). Despite the uncertainty of its origin, the account is an indication of a reality about pastry during this era: pastry was still the reserve of the noble and the elite.

The availability of cake and pastry to the ordinary classes would not occur until well after the French Revolution (Man, 2016). Rising wealth during the era of the Habsburgs Empire in Austria, and in Vienna, between 1815 and 1848, and between 1815 and 1861 in Paris, ensured that baking and pastry culture was available to an ever-growing part of both cities’ residents (Good, 1984). The main baking ingredients used in pastry and cakes, such as sugar, were still expensive, but became more affordable. There was a history of café culture in Paris for approximately 100 years at this time, and pastry shops were coming into fashion among these wealthy classes (Chevallier, 2003).

As butter was both expensive and scarce before the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III held a competition to craft a replacement for butter. The importance of this competition at the time gave an indication of pastry’s importance to the French diet. The outcome of this contest was a primitive form of margarine, invented by Mége-Mouriez, using chopped beef lard, water and sheep’s stomach (Pollard, 2010). The significance of the margarine, while inferior to butter, later led to butter croissants being referred to as “croissant au beurre” to distinguish them from those made with margarine, which were called “croissant ordinaire.” The other distinguishing feature was that the croissant au beurre was fashioned in a straight form, with the tips of the pastry pointing outwards, while the croissants made with margarine were, and are to this day, fashioned into a crescent shape (Applefield, 2008:317).

The Croissant in French Literature

The croissant has a vague yet documented history in French literature. François Anselme Payen first mentioned the term “croissant” in print in his book Precis théorique et pratique des substances alimentaires et des moyens de les améliorer, de les conserver et d’en reconnaître les altérations (Payen, 1853). Ten years later, Maximilien Paul Emile Littré provided in his book Dictionnaire de la langue Française Littré a definition for the word “croissant” – “Petit Pain ou petit gâteau qui a la forme d’un croissant” – which translates into English as “Small bread or little cake which is shaped into a crescent” (Littré and Paul, 1863).

n his 1867 book Le Livre de Cuisine, Jules Gouffé included a recipe for crescent-shaped almond paste biscuits (Gouffé, 1869:548). Meanwhile, in their book Oxford Companion to Food, historians Alan Davidson and Tom Jaine (1999) could not find any printed recipes for croissants as we know them before the 1900s (Davidson and Jaine, 1999:232). In support of Davidson and Jaine, McGee (1984) cites Calvel in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984:567), recounting that the croissant appeared on the international stage as “Wiener Brot” or Vienna Bread at the 1900 World Fair in Paris. By the 1870s, the croissant had inspired Charles Dickens so much that in 1872 he referenced it in his weekly periodical, titled All the Year Round (Bucataru, 2009):

The workman’s pain de ménage and the soldier’s pain de munition, to the dainty croissant on the boudoir table (Dickens, 1872).

Twentieth Century to Present Day

Some recipes for French pastry products named as croissant- or Kipferl-type pastry appeared in the years following the opening of Zang’s bakery (Chevallier, 2009:6). However, it was not until the beginning of the 1900s that the first documented puff pastry, or pâte feuilletée, recipe was made using yeast as an additional leavening agent. In 1915, a French baker named Sylvain Claudius Goy referred to the combined laminated and yeasted pastry as a croissant. In relation to his recipe and methods, Goy described the use of a yeasted dough in conjunction with the lamination techniques employed for the production of pâte feuilletée. This procedure is the basis by which all of the modern croissants are made today (Goy, 1915).

The significance of skilled labour, combined with quality ingredients to produce a superior croissant, became evident in the early 1900s. However, sugar rationing was common during World War I, and the sale of non-essential food items such as pastries was provisionally forbidden (Transchel and Osokina, 2015). Following World War II, as countries rebuilt their cities and economies, the increasing trend of industrialisation and mass-production of goods meant that many foodstuffs, including croissants, were more plentiful than before the war, when livestock and crops had been in very short supply (Murray and Millett, 2009:561). As European Community trading gathered momentum in the 1970s (Pal, 2012), many French bakeries were already purchasing mass-produced croissant dough and frozen croissants as the technologies used in their manufacture improved (Man, 2016). This trend has increased to this day. The realization that the traditional model of Artisan pastry manufacture was becoming increasingly more expensive convinced many bakeries to embrace the frozen pastry model and shun the labour-intensive artisan approach (Gomez, 2014).

The mass production and modernization of the croissant have sadly gone to the extreme opposites of Zang’s ideals, with mass-produced croissants ranging from those produced for Starbucks (Kummer, 2013) to those made in Poland by SPS HANDEL SA. The latter, with a six-month shelf life, contain an exceedingly large quantity of additives (Rose, 2015). In 2015, the Elvan Group in Eskisehir near Istanbul, Turkey recognized the continuing rise in European sales of the croissant and has recently built the world’s largest croissant-producing plant. According to the plant’s manager, Celik (2015), the factory will have an output of 220 million pieces per annum and will target the European croissant market when operational. That modest Austrian treat is more popular than ever.

(This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)