Croissant

The croissant is a study in butter and patience: a yeasted dough folded again and again around sheets of butter, then baked until the layers puff into a crisp, shattering shell over a soft, honeycombed interior. A good one is fragrant, faintly sweet and leaves flakes everywhere.

In France it is a morning ritual, bought fresh from the boulangerie and eaten plain or dunked in coffee. The all-butter version (croissant au beurre) is traditionally shaped straight rather than curved.

Although it is the emblem of French baking, the croissant descends from the Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped bread. It arrived in Paris in the 19th century — popularised after an Austrian officer opened a Viennese bakery — and French bakers transformed it by applying laminated, butter-layered pâte feuilletée technique.

By the early 20th century the flaky modern croissant had become a fixture of the Parisian café, and today it stands worldwide as shorthand for the French breakfast itself.