They were. Croissan’wiches are edible with some mayo and mustard, but mayo and mustard make many things better.
Almost exactly my experience as well. I was 7 or 8, in Paris with my family, and we had breakfast consisting of croissant, hot cocoa, coffee and juice. I liked the croissant, but didn’t care much for the “exotic” flavors of stuff like orange marmalade.
I’ve never not known about them. Not hard to get good ones in Montreal.
I don’t remember not knowing what they were. I wasn’t alive in 1970 but for m, born in the 80s, croissants were not weird or foreign in any way.
I had heard about croissants, but only had crescent rolls. It wasn’t until I honeymooned in Montreal in 1982 that I actually tasted one (and American croissants are just a cheap knockoff of the real thing).
As some others have said, I don’t remember not knowing what they were. I think my grandmother used to serve them to us. (Born in 1969.)
hold it! now i remember, it was in that reader’s digest article about bread.
Don’t bother. Burger King’s “croissants” are just slightly modified hamburger buns.
Oh God, same here. I was in Wisconsin, but yeah, the King was my first introduction to the croissant. Late 80s.
/And I’ve been to France! That was much later, but still.
//Pity I had to learn about this from a fast-food chain.
I’ve known about them as far back as I remember–born in 1976. I knew about them and ate them long before Burger King’s abomination was invented.
Oh god. This is bringing back a horrible, repressed memory of a high school class field trip to Alberta and a continental breakfast at the shitty chain hotel. Costco croissants. Margarine-laden, greasy to the touch, SOFT outside, sweet tasting… ew ew ew. I imagine that’s what the Burger King Cro-Sandwich is surrounded by?
Same here, but I don’t remember how old I was. Would’ve been early 80’s, I guess, so 10-ish?
Joe
Around 1977 IIRC (I must have been 5 or 6 at the time), same time as I had my first one, and I was living in Cape Town.
Me, too. I’d say I first learned of them around, say, age 7, or 1992. They were at Western Sizzlin’, a local buffet/salad bar place that had just put in a bakery bar. I’d eaten them before that in the form of pigs in a blanket (with those tiny sausages, not hotdogs) but I didn’t know what they were called then. I just called them blankets.
Not even as good as a Costco croissant. In my memory, the Burger King croissants started out being pretty decent (for fast food, anyway) but at some point they went cheap, and the “croissant” part of the sandwich became, like I said, a slightly modified hamburger bun.
Now it could be that my memory is playing tricks and it has been the same horrible bun all along.
As to the history/location etc. I am in PA, and first exposure was early 80’s (not sure exactly)
Since I have memory of bread (born in 1970). Peru.
September 1970, Paris France.
Why? What is significant about 1970?
But if you were in Wisconsin, you could’ve walked down State St. in Madison and ducked into a little french restaurant called The Bakers’ Rooms of the Ovens of Brittany.
Where you could watch the very different people* making very different rolls, buttering and folding dough into 54 layers.
*an offshoot of the Findhorn Community in Scotland (remember the people moving boulders with their minds in My Dinner With André?), they moved to Madison en masse to make croissants.
This. They were probably the third bread product I was introduced to, after sliced loaves and chapattis.