Breakfast in Paris ...

Hungry ...?

...hmmmmm.. let's start the day exploring one of French breakfast delights...

...CROISSANT ... 

Appart from the fresh baguette with butter and jam spread on it, the king of the french breakfast is indeed the croissant, which can be found plain, or cooked with butter (croissant au beurre). You can dip it in your coffee, your hot chocolate, or cut it in half and put butter and jam on it. mmm... Delicious!

 A croissant is a buttery flaky viennoiserie  pastry  named for it's well known crescent shape. Croissants and other viennoiserie are made of a layered yeast -leavened dough. The dough is layered with butter, rolled and folded several times in succession, then rolled into a sheet,in a technique called laminating.
Crescent-shaped food breads have been made since the Middle Ages, and crescent-shaped cakes possibly since antiquity.

Croissants have long been a staple of French bakeries and pâtisseries. In the late 1970s, the development of factory-made,frozen, pre-formed but unbaked dough made them into a fast food which can be freshly baked by unskilled labor. The croissanterie was explicitly a French response to American-style fast food,and today 30–40% of the croissants sold in French bakeries and patisseries are frozen.

This innovation, along with the croissant's distinctive shape, has made it the most well known item of French food in much of the world. Today, the croissant remains popular in a continental breakfast.

The "birth" of the croissant itself – that is, its adaptation from the plainer form of Kipferl- the ancestor of croissants, before the invention of Viennoiserie – can be dated with some precision to at latest 1839 (some say 1838), when an Austrian artillery officer,August Zang, founded a Viennese bakery ("Boulangerie Viennoise") at 92, rue de Richelieu in Paris. This bakery, which served Viennese specialities including the Kipferl and the Vienna loaf, quickly became popular and inspired French imitators (and the concept, if not the term, viennoiserie, a 20th-century term for supposedly Vienna-style pastries). The French version of the Kipferl was named for its crescent (croissant) shape.
Alan Davidson, editor of the Oxford Companion to Food, found no printed recipe for the present-day croissant in any French recipe book before the early 20th century; the earliest French reference to a croissant he found was among the "fantasy or luxury breads" in 

Payen'sDes substances alimentaires, 1853. However, early recipes for non-laminated croissants can be found in the nineteenth century and at least one reference to croissants as an established French bread appeared as early as 1850.Alan Davidson, editor of the Oxford Companion to Food, found no printed recipe for the present-day croissant in any French recipe book before the early 20th century; the earliest French reference to a croissant he found was among the "fantasy or luxury breads" in 

Zang himself returned to Austria in 1848 to become a press magnate, but the bakery remained popular for some time after, and was mentioned in several works of the time: "This same M. Zank..founded around 1830, in Paris, the famous Boulangerie viennoise".Several sources praise this bakery's products: "Paris is of exquisite delicacy; and, in particular, the succulent products of the Boulangerie Viennoise";"which seemed to us as fine as if it came from the Viennese bakery on the rue de Richelieu.
By 1869, the croissant was well established enough to be mentioned as a breakfast staple,and in 1872,Charles Dickens  wrote (in his periodical All Year Round) of:the workman's pain de ménage and the soldier's pain de munition, to the dainty croissant on the boudoir table.

The puff pastry technique which now characterizes the croissant was already mentioned in the late 17th century, when La Varenne's Le Cuisinier françois gave a recipe for it in the 1680 – and possibly earlier – editions. It was typically used, not on its own, but for shells holding other ingredients (as in a vol-au-vent ). But it does not appear to be mentioned in relation to the croissant until the twentieth century.Fanciful stories of how the Kipferl — and so, ultimately, the croissant — was created are widespread and persistent culinary legends, at least one going back to the 19th century. However, there are no contemporary sources for any of these stories, nor does an aristocratic writer, writing in 1799, mention the Kipferl in a long and extensive list of breakfast foods.