COPENHAGEN — Danish pastry is really French and was born of a baker's mistake, but it has nearly become all things to all people.
It is a morning staple in the United States. To order it, you don't even have to say pastry--just Danish.
Europeans like their Danish lighter, more elegant.
In Denmark, no party or leisurely Sunday breakfast is complete without the pastry, which the Danes call Viennese.
"It's like the Danish flag, which we fly every time we celebrate something," said Merete Thomsen, a secretary in Copenhagen.
To Germans, the pastry is a "Copenhagener."
According to the Danish bakers' union, the distinctive dough was created 350 years ago by Claudius Gelee, a French apprentice baker who forgot to add butter to the flour and tried to hide his mistake by folding lumps of it into the dough.
To the astonishment of Gelee and his colleagues, the result was the lightest dough ever seen in France.
Gelee opened a Paris cafe in 1622 where he served the pastry the French call "a thousand leaves" and repeated his success in Florence. Italians call it "folded pastry."
