Ask for a Danish in Copenhagen and you get a blank stare. The Danes call it wienerbrød, Viennese bread, while in Vienna the same pastry is Kopenhagener Plunder. The explanation starts with an 1850 bakery strike in Denmark. Desperate owners brought in replacement workers, many from Austria, who carried their plunder pastry and the technique of Viennese lamination. When the strike ended, Danish bakers kept the method but supercharged it with far more egg and butter, and kept the foreign name because exotic labels were fashionable marketing at the time.

The episode breaks down the engineering: a yeasted dough of flour, milk, eggs, and sugar, rolled around thin butter slices and folded in thirds three times for 27 layers, chilled between folds so steam can puff the layers apart in the oven. From Denmark the pastry spread and changed: cardamom in British dough, dulce de leche and quince paste in Argentina’s facturas, and baked-in cream cheese and heavy icing in America. There, Danish immigrant L. C. Klitteng promoted it from 1915 to 1920, claimed he baked for President Woodrow Wilson’s December 1915 wedding, ran a Danish Culinary Studio on Fifth Avenue, and got Broadway restaurateur Herman Gertner to put the pastry on his menus.

• Plunder comes from German roots meaning to puff up or expand, not to pillage.
• Unlike puff pastry, a Danish rises from both yeast and steam, and it is richer than a leaner croissant dough.
• Mass-market versions often swap butter for hydrogenated sunflower oil, which ruins the steam effect.
• Danish bakeries sell spandauers, snails, kringles, and seeded frøsnapper twists filled with marzipan or remonce.
• Klitteng was featured in trade periodicals including the National Baker, the Bakers’ Helper, and Bakers Weekly.