Ham and Cheese Croissant Bites

Look for mini croissants at bakeries or use frozen and thawed. The honey Dijon balances the richness of the butter and cheese. Swiss cheese can substitute for Gruyère. Brushing with the seasoned butter creates a beautiful golden finish.

The croissant is among the most thoroughly debated pastries in food history. Most historians trace it to the Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped bread roll made from yeasted dough, for which written records exist as far back as the 13th century. The famous story connecting the crescent shape to the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 — in which bakers supposedly heard Ottoman troops tunnelling under the city walls and celebrated the thwarted attack by baking crescent-shaped pastries — is a romantic legend. Food historian Alfred Gottschalk first published this account in the inaugural 1938 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, and culinary historians today classify it as almost certainly invented long after the fact. The documented path of the kipferl to France is far more prosaic. In either 1838 or 1839 an Austrian entrepreneur named August Zang opened the Boulangerie Viennoise at 92, rue de Richelieu in Paris, serving kipferl and other Viennese baked goods. His patented steam oven created the characteristic glossy surface that became the marker of quality, and the French quickly adopted and renamed the crescent-shaped pastry croissant after its shape. The earliest known recipe for the present-day laminated croissant — made by folding cold butter into thin layers of yeasted dough, the technique that creates its signature flakiness — appeared in a French publication only in 1905. As food historian Jim Chevallier summarised: the croissant's shape originated in Austria, while the butter-laminating technique was a French innovation. The croissant jambon-fromage, filled with ham and cheese, became one of the foundational offerings of the French boulangerie and has been a fixture of café culture across France since the 20th century.