On prison pastries and Viennese bread

Kage – that means cake. You pronounce it like ‚kaaayye‘. It was the first Danish word I learnt here. Although that might be due to the fact that I work in a café, I like to think the reason is that cake constitutes an integral part of Danish culture. And it certainly does. Sticky-sweet pastries containing lots of sugar, butter, chocolate and cinnamon feature prominently on breakfast tables and at every birthday celebration.

It came to my attention recently (and yes, I do spend a lot of time around cakes) is that many of these high-calorie treats are oddly named after geographical locations that, at first glance, seem to bear no obvious connection. The most common example, aptly named Danish pastry in English (in German Kopenhagener), is called Wienerbrød in Danish. Note that I would like to provide phonetic spelling here, but this sound is one of the hardest to pronounce in the Danish language, and doesn’t really exist in English. Or German. Or any other language I have ever heard of. Imagine you have something stuck in the back of your throat and you’re choking. That’s about what it sounds like.
Returning to my original topic, Wienerbrød is not really Austrian, it’s a quintessentially Danish thing. So how come the name? The general consensus among historians is that in the mid-nineteenth century the Danish junior bakers went on strike. So their bosses imported staff from Vienna, who brought their knowledge of all things pastry to Denmark. The Danish public soon developed a taste for these products and consequently the bakers created pastries in all sorts of different shapes and flavours. Ironically, here in Western Jutland, there is also something called Københavner (Copenhagener), a variation of Wienerbrød, topped with poppy seeds, and in no way equivalent to the German term Kopenhagener.
My personal favourite however is the Spandauer, again a geographical term. This round puff-pastry treat consists of a thick pastry case decorated with icing and filled with vanilla pudding crème. It wasn’t invented in Spandau, a suburb of Berlin, as you might think if you were familiar with the name. (Unlike me, who for the first three months of her stay in Denmark ate Spandauers without giving the name a second thought. It was only when I spent a weekend in Berlin just after New Year’s with my brother and our train passed Berlin-Spandau that I realised that Spandau is actually a place. Shame on me)  Anyway. The name comes, according my research, from the fact that there was a prison located in Spandau. And the cake’s shape is supposed to suggest that the pastry rim ‘traps’ the crème on the inside. Obvious.

Strange naming customs aside, it is safe to say that the craft of baking is highly appreciated in Denmark, by natives and foreign residents alike. Indeed, when asked by our Danish teacher what the advantages of living in Denmark were, my Canadian classmate answered straight away: “The bakeries!”