Croissants, Cakes & Curious Tales: The Delicious History of French Pâtisserie

So some of these cakes have royal connections.

One was inspired by a bicycle race.

One is supposed to have been created by accident.

One is named after window shutters.

And another has perhaps the rudest name in French gastronomy.

And one of the most famous French pastries of all may not even be French, really.

We're also going to visit some of France's great historic cake shops, including a Paris patisserie that has been serving cakes since Louis XV was on the throne.

So, Leo, where should we begin?

Surely, there's only one possible answer.

The croissant?

The croissant.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if you ask anyone what image comes up in their mind when they think of France, most people will say the Eiffel Tower, a baguette and a croissant.

But this is a pastry that has a bit of a complicated past.

Yes, because its ancestors are actually Austrian.

Its creation is usually linked to the Austrian Kipfer, if that's how it's pronounced, a crescent-shaped baked goods that existed centuries before the modern French croissant.

And here's where one of these lovely stories come in.

So there's a legend that their crescent shape commemorated the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at Vienna in 1683.

They say, these are legends, blowers, that bakers working through the night supposedly heard the Turks tunnelling beneath the city, raised the alarm, and that helped save Vienna.

They then baked crescent-shaped pastries so that everyone could symbolically eat the Ottoman crescent.

Mmm.

I'm not sure about this, true or false.

Well, in reality, historians haven't found any real evidence at all that this is how the croissant was born.

Anyway, what we can say is that eventually French bakers transformed the idea into the golden, flaky, buttery croissant we know today.

So although the family tree has Austrian roots, the delicious croissant we recognise today is very much a French icon.

Definitely.