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Croissants, Bagels and the Ottomans: Stop It
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: bagels, croissants, food, Jonathan Taylor, The New York Times
Jonathan Taylor writes:
I suppose there's great reason to think R.O. Blechman is being purposely playful with the phrase "most likely true," but I'm still irked to see two most likely untrue food-history fancies, about the invention of the croissant and the bagel to commemorate battles against the Ottomans, reamplified in the Times today. Food historians have long doubted the croissant's connection to the siege of Vienna, noting that known references to it emerged only centuries later. And the Forward recently noted, "Contrary to legend, the bagel was not created (in the shape of a stirrup) to commemorate the victory of Poland's King Jan Sobieski over the Ottoman Turks in 1683. It was born much earlier in Krakow, Poland, as a competitor to the obwarzanek, a lean bread made of wheat flour and designed for Lent. In the 16th century and first half of the 17th, a 'golden age for Poland's Jews,' the bajgiel became a staple in the national diet."
Thank you.
Comments
Interesting stuff. A few points — when I lived in Vienna (1992-95), bagels were so rare that a newspaper I worked for dedicated an article to a successful “hunt” for one in the city. (I think today you can get them at any McDonalds.) I don’t think the Viennese trot out that croissant myth too much, I’m barely familiar with it.
On the Turkish siege tip, there’s some other legend about the introduction of coffee to the city that also dates from that moment, it’s something to do with a stalwart Habsburgian finding himself trapped behind enemy lines and bringing it back at great peril etc etc.
According to Elizabeth David, the baguette finds its origins in Vienna—for generations the baguette was called pain viennois—“Viennese bread”—which leaves its vestigial trace behind in the ubiquitous Semmel, a debased version of which we call the “Kaiser roll.”
Somebody trotted it out to Russell Maloney, who put it in a 1944 Talk piece—one of the “Our Own Baedeker” items of the era whose willful obtuseness makes me cringe.
According to Wikipedia, after the Battle of Vienna, “the Austrians discovered many bags of coffee in the abandoned Turkish encampment. Using this captured stock, Franciszek Jerzy Kulczycki opened the third coffeehouse in Europe and the first in Vienna, where, according to legend, Kulczycki himself or Marco d’Aviano, the Capuchin friar and confidant of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, added milk and honey to sweeten the bitter coffee, thereby inventing cappuccino.”
Wikipedia also says, “There is no historical basis for the recent urban legend according to which the drink was supposedly named after the Blessed Marco d’Aviano, a Capuchin friar and charismatic preacher who inspired the resistance to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. The story gained some unwarranted credibility in 2003, when it was good-naturedly reported by the BBC World Service at the time of d’Aviano’s beatification”!
This brings to mind my (deep, reportorial) investigation into the true origins of the everything bagel last year around this time.
The croissant and the baguette are both subject to myth, and both have been credited (with varying authority) to the same man: August Zang, an Austrian officer who opened a Boulangerie Viennoise at 92, rue de Richelieu in 1839. This bakery served the standard kipfeln and kaisersemmeln, that is, a crescent-shaped roll and what Americans call a Kaiser roll, but which in France seems to have become the pain viennois. The crescent’s transformation into its French description - “croissant” - is easy enough to accept. Some French sites credit Zang with the baguette as well, saying it was inspired by the pain viennois he brought to France. The pain viennois, however, was often described in 19th century sources as “little”, and often (in English accounts) as a roll, so that it probably did NOT have the long, baguette-like form it does today, but (logically) looked more like an American Kaiser roll. The French, on the other hand, had had long breads since Louis XIV, albeit not as thin as the baguette, so they didn’t really need exterior inspiration. An old article in “The Economist” credits a change in labor law in 1920 for limiting bakers’ hours and so requiring a bread that baked faster. However, the actual law seems to date from 1919, and some of the article’s other claims about the bread are dubious. What does seem to be true is that its creation depended on the steam oven first introduced in France by… August Zang. And so he, if distantly, ends up with the credit just the same.
Very fascinating, Jim. Thank you so much for that authoritative summary of these thorny latitudes. All hail Zang!