While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on the rock cakes in Brief Encounter).
I said: ‘Un croissant’. The woman at the till said: ‘Una brioche’. Well, I have since discovered that there is a word croissant in Italian, and indeed a word cornetto with the same meaning. But she was quite right: they call croissants brioches.
This is a deep question of semantics. In Spanish there is a word cruasan that answers to the breakfast pastry with the moonish shape. It is not, once bitten, quite what the French would call a croissant, because the mixture used to make it is more like a bun dough than flaky pastry.
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