A rich crescent- shaped roll.
One night in 1686, Turkish soldiers from the Ottoman empire attempted to gain access to Budapest, the capital of Hungary, by sneakily tunnelling under the city’s fortifications. The good citizens of Budapest, snoring in their beds, heard nothing as their mole-like enemies burrowed right beneath their floorboards—nothing, that is, until the Ottomans started tunnelling under a bakery where bread-makers and pastry-cutters had gotten up early to prepare the next day’s wares. Hearing the scuttling and smelling a rat, the bakers raised the alarm, thus foiling the Turks’ subterranean attack; to commemorate their part in the victory, the bakers of Budapest invented the croissant, a flaky pastry shaped like the crescent moon on the defeated Ottomans’ flag. This story, as much as it sounds like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes, is the traditional explanation for the appearance of the croissant, a pastry whose name is indeed the French word for crescent. In origin, however, the word croissant, as well as the word crescent, derives from a Latin word that did not initially describe a shape but rather a process: that word is the Latin crescens, meaning growing. One object that has always grown and shrunk before everyone’s eyes is the moon, and thus the phrase luna crescens—growing moon—came to describe the earth’s satellite as it waxed from new to full. Eventually, the Latin crescens came to be so associated with the waxing moon that the word—and its English and French derivatives, crescent and croissant—came to refer to anything shaped like a lunar arc. It was this sense of the word croissant that led to the pastry’s French name, a name that first appeared in English at the end of the nineteenth century. Other words that derive from the same Latin source include increase (a synonym for grows), crescendo (the climax to which a piece of music grows), and creature (a thing that grows to maturity).
Croissants are a type of French breakfast pastry that is crisp, crescent-shaped, and flaky, made from yeast dough. They are best enjoyed hot and can be reheated by lightly wrapping them in foil. To make perfect croissants, it’s important to layer the butter well, chill the dough to keep it firm, and work quickly to avoid the dough becoming too warm and soft. The dough is allowed to rise at a warmer temperature after shaping.