Croissant

Butter folded into a yeasted dough in dozens of thin layers, shaped into a crescent or a straight log and baked until the outside shatters and the inside pulls apart in a honeycomb: the croissant is the test piece of every French bakery. Its ancestor is the Viennese kipferl, a plain crescent roll that arrived in Paris with Austrian bakers in the late 1830s; the version made from puff-style laminated dough is a French development from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first recipes for it appear around 1900. In France a croissant au beurre is by law made with butter and is traditionally straight, while the croissant ordinaire, made with margarine, is curved so customers can tell them apart at the counter. Outside France that rule is unknown and most croissants are curved whatever is inside them.