Colombié’s modern croissant recipe was published in Paris in 1906. It appeared in Auguste Colombié’s Nouvelle Encyclopédie culinaire and is generally identified as the earliest recipe matching the modern pastry’s shape, laminated texture, and flavor.
That date matters because earlier croissant-like pastries existed, but they were not necessarily made with the yeast-leavened laminated dough associated with croissants today. The Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped pastry documented centuries earlier, provided an important inspiration, while French bakers gradually developed the richer, flakier form.
The 1906 recipe is sometimes confused with Sylvain Claudius Goy’s 1915 recipe in La Cuisine Anglo-Americaine. Goy’s version is also historically important, but it came later. Likewise, references to croissants in 19th-century sources do not prove that those pastries had the modern laminated structure.
Paris was central to this transformation. Viennese baking traditions reached the city in the 19th century, and French pastry makers adapted them into the viennoiserie style now associated with the croissant.