National Croissant Day takes the pastry you usually eat in a hurry and slows it down for a morning. Order one fresh from the oven and pull it apart in layers rather than cutting it.
No founder, sponsor or establishing record has been located for National Croissant Day. It is absent from the Federal Register and from HathiTrust's digitised run of Chase's Calendar of Events, whose volumes there span 1961 to 2007.
In French, the word croissant named the symbol of the Turkish empire long before it named anything you could eat. The Trésor de la langue française dates that sense to 1674 and the pastry sense to 1863. National Croissant Day belongs to a thing whose name arrived nearly two centuries late.
The word itself is older than either. French had already attached it to crescent-shaped objects by about 1260, centuries before a dictionary recorded anyone eating one.
That gap is the pattern, not the exception. The croissant keeps turning out to be later, and more borrowed, than its reputation suggests.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Croissant Day ran on January 30. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
In 1838 or 1839, depending on the account, an Austrian named August Zang opened a Viennese bakery at 92 rue de Richelieu in Paris. He sold Vienna bread and the kipfel, the Austrian crescent roll the croissant descends from. It was the first Viennese bakery in the city.
For a long while the pastry stayed foreign. Smithsonian writes that as recently as the 19th century the French treated the croissant as a foreign novelty, sold only in special Viennese bakeries in the pricier parts of the city. Imitators moved faster than the reputation did: at least a dozen makers of Viennese bread were working in Paris by 1840, according to the journalist Hervé de Kerohant.
The shape crossed the border intact. The dough did not. Jim Chevallier, an independent scholar and the author of a book on croissant history, puts the change in one line: the croissant "began as the Austrian kipfel but became French the moment people began to make it with puffed pastry, which is a French innovation."
That change was slow to reach print. The Institute of Culinary Education dates the first French croissant recipe to 1915, when Sylvain Claudius Goy folded butter into a yeast dough instead of the brioche-style dough Zang's shop had used.
America met the croissant frozen. Sara Lee brought a frozen croissant to the United States in 1981, and it soon outsold the company's pound cakes.
The chains were not far behind. By 1984 a New York Times article could announce that the Americanization of the croissant had begun, and Burger King's Croissan'wich was already turning up in California newspaper advertising, in a Press Democrat notice that offered flame-broiled burgers, a salad bar and a drive-through in the same breath.
The holiday came along without a signature. Its earliest mention anywhere in HathiTrust's collection sits in a 2008 volume of a Colorado Springs monthly for activity professionals in retirement communities.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
1.8 billion croissants through French bakeries and baking terminals, 2021.
Trade research reported by L'Hôtellerie Restauration put French croissant consumption at 1.8 billion in 2021, sold through bakery-pâtisseries and baking terminals. The day is American, but the appetite it points at is not.
A croissant is a yeast dough with butter folded into it over and over, a process the Institute of Culinary Education describes as creating thin layers. The folding is what makes the pastry, and the crescent is only its outline.
Smithsonian reports that as many as half the croissants and other pastries sold in France's 30,000 boulangeries are industrially produced. So the croissant in front of you is not automatically the work of the shop selling it.
TIMELINE
MYTH VS FACT
The croissant was created in Vienna in 1683 to mark the defeat of the Ottoman siege, its shape copied from the crescent on the Ottoman flag.
Smithsonian reports that the kipfel, the Austrian crescent roll the croissant descends from, existed long before that siege. Chef Jürgen David, an Austrian native and the Institute of Culinary Education's director of pastry research and development, says of the siege stories: "These stories are almost certainly untrue."
Marie Antoinette brought the croissant to France from Vienna.
The Institute of Culinary Education says the story is widely repeated but that historians have found little evidence to support it, and Smithsonian reports that the food historian Jim Chevallier sees no evidence for it either.
A French shop with boulangerie over the door makes everything in the window on the premises.
Article L122-17 of the Code de la consommation reserves boulanger and boulangerie for shops that knead, ferment, shape and bake their bread at the point of sale, and bars the dough and the breads from being frozen at any stage of production or sale. The article is written about bread: the words croissant, viennoiserie and pâtisserie do not appear in it.
GOOD TO KNOW
Order a kipfel in Austria or Germany today and you will likely be handed a crescent-shaped cookie rather than a laminated pastry.
Poland's rogal świętomarciński has held EU protected geographical indication status since Commission Regulation (EC) No 1070/2008, filed under the register's class for bread, pastry and other baker's wares.
Tesco dropped the crescent shape in 2016, its croissant buyer Harry Jones saying that with crescent shapes most people can take up to three attempts to achieve perfect coverage.
In France when I was working as a baker's apprentice I learned the cheap croissant should be curved and the straight ones were always made with butter.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, so banks, schools and offices stay open, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it.
COLOPHON
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