One of the fun things about being an obsessive-compulsive baking and pastry blogger is that you get to pour over a lot of information on a relatively narrow range of subjects. I mean let's face it, when you churn out as many words as I do Monday through Friday, it takes a lot of research...sifting through books, magazine articles, online sources and old interview notes looking for interesting new tidbits of information. The advantage to all that, of pursuing a single subject — or small set of subjects — over several years and across all sorts of media, is that you begin to see patterns in the information. Sort of like the psychotic personality in the movie A Beautiful Mind, you start seeing things that might not be readily apparent to the casual observer.

One pattern that emerged early on in the history of joepastry.com was the tendency of food historians to habitually ascribe the origin of various breads to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, sort of as an interesting little piece of trivia. Though most people today aren't familiar with it, the Battle of Vienna was possibly the critical battle in modern European history — the point at which the Ottoman Turks, who at the time seemed poised to overrun all of Europe and extinguish once and for all Christian rule, the nation state system and emerging concepts of individual rights and democracy, were routed by a combined army of Habsburgs and Poles. As I said we don't think much about the battle now, but at the time it was considered, you know, important.

Where does bread come into it? Well, that's the puzzle. My own guess is that since bakery has been a highly refined art form in Vienna for hundreds of years — much longer than in places like Paris or London — people look for specific events in Vienna's history to tie the origin of certain foods to (oop — dangling participle). The Battle of Vienna, being so momentous, is merely the easiest of these. Thus there are stories linking the Battle of Vienna to the invention of the croissant, the brioche, the baguette, and of course the bagel, supposedly made to resemble King John Sobieski's stirrup (imagine the twisted mind of a baker who'd actually think that was a compliment...King John would have kept well away from that guy). It's why I have come to call the Battle of Vienna the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man.

Folks who've followed the site for a while already know the story: It was a gloomy night in Vienna. For two long months the Ottoman Turks under Pasha Kara Mustafa had been laying siege to the city. Supplies were dwindling, morale was low, the aura of doom was palpable. Down to the last of their precious flour stores, a group of bakers worked methodically onward in their shop that abutted the city wall. It was the wee small hours of the morning when suddenly: tap, tap, tap...tap, tap, tap. The bakers looked up at one another. What on Earth could that be? And then suddenly they realized: the Ottomans! They're tunneling into the city! Quick! Raise the alarm! No — wait! Let's bake something! Something edible we can spread around the city hours from now to let people know that imminent doom is approaching!

Well OK, so they don't always bake first (except in the croissant version). Some iterations have them running out and sounding the alarm. In others they pick up whatever implements are at hand and take on the Turks themselves, presumably impaling the bad guys on whisks and icing spatulas. But the story always ends with the Turks defeated, the populace grateful, and the bakers given sole rights to baking and selling the whatever-they-came-up-with by royal decree.

I gotta admit, it's a fun story. Personally I like the image of swarthy, bare-chested Austrians toiling away in their shop, just waiting for an excuse to go kick some Ottoman can. It offers me the happy illusion that instead of being fussy foodie primadonnas we pastry types are actually widow-makers in waiting. That inside every Jacques Torres there's a Chuck Norris waiting to get out. Yeah, well, a guy can dream.

Like just about every other phony food history story, these tall tales have interchangeable parts. They can take place either in 1683 during the Battle of Vienna, or in 1529 during the Siege of Vienna. Both pitted Europeans against Turks, though in the Siege of 1529 there was a lot more tunneling (the battle is also called the Siege of the Moles. Alternately, it can happen during the Battle of Buda(pest) in 1686, though in that fracas it was the Europeans who were besieging the Turks. Well heck, Turks like bagels too don't they? Don't they?