In the memory of my 7-year-old self, there was so much that made Racine, Wisconsin, special. As a brand-new arrival from Mumbai, I thought Racine possessed many of the traditional trappings of Americana I had extrapolated from secondhand 1950s Archie comics: four complete seasons requiring four different wardrobes; Kewpee burgers the size of your head served with unapologetically caloric malted milkshakes; a singular Main Street; local festivals with hulking cream puffs; and freshwater fishing tournaments with participants lamenting the ones that got away. At the same time, Racine had so much that made it unlike any other city in the country: Frank Lloyd Wright architecture; preserved remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair; the incomparable Lake Michigan shoreline; and the epicenter of the greatest prom in the world.
But, for those not in the know, what has put Racine on the map is the city’s true pride and joy: a fruit-and-nut stuffed pastry that is perhaps the last visible bastion of a once-booming Danish enclave. Welcome to Kringleville.
Racine’s version of the originally Scandinavian kringle is, at its best, numbingly sweet and astonishingly butter-forward. It takes three days to roll, fold, and rest the 36 layers of butter, margarine, and dough that make up its surprisingly low profile (it measures less than an inch between plate and icing). That super soft but dense puff pastry is then swaddled around your choice of sweet filling — classic flavors like almond and apple, or perhaps a more daring pumpkin caramel, a chocolatey-caramel pecan-stuffed turtle, or cherry cheese — and then finally spun into a large, flat ring, blanketed with a powdered sugar glaze.
Kringle defined, and still defines, Racine. The city once boasted the largest Danish population in North America. At the turn of the 20th century, the new Danish arrivals brought their baking traditions, and kringle quickly took over the town — a full-blown pastry phenomenon. Women competed to be crowned the Kringle Queen of Racine. The pastry inspired a polka, as well as an annual festival. And despite chiefly catering to southeastern Wisconsin, its reputation loomed so large and its champions were so fervent that kringle beat out the beloved cream puff to become the official state pastry in 2013. Today, some of the original family-run bakeries from the 1930s and ’40s — like Lehmann’s, Bendtsen’s, and O&H — still proudly steward the city’s kringle-making legacy.
In every city I have lived since leaving Racine — from Atlanta to D.C. to New York — I have carried kringle with me, paying any FedEx fee to ship them across the country. I have brought it to my workplaces and potlucks and given it as gifts to friends who are grieving and celebrating alike. My parents have routinely sent me kringle during birthdays and holidays. On one occasion, at the beginning of the COVID lockdown when feelings ricocheted between scared and lonely, a friend left me a slice on my front stoop.
Kringle’s intensely familiar taste hits like deja vu, even if you’ve never had it before. It’s such an obvious pastry, with the perfect balance of filling, icing, and dough, that it somehow seems like it’s always been around, a comfort food waiting to be remembered.
But it’s the winter holiday season when kringle really shines. For Thanksgiving, a cranberry- or pecan-stuffed kringle is an upgrade on pie. For Christmas, nothing screams holiday spirit more than a Kringle Kris Kringle (perhaps coupled with a Kris Kringle-themed kringle tour?) O&H Bakery, which opened in 1949 and is one of the most prominent torchbearers of the Racine kringle, regularly releases new holiday variations, from the cream cheese and toffee-stuffed Reindeer Tracks, to the chocolatey Christmas Fudge, to the red velvet-inspired Santa’s Secret. And for those far from Wisconsin, Trader Joe’s often stocks O&H kringles during the winter season.
None of these flavors, of course, are traditional in the Scandinavian sense. The Racine interpretation looks like a bulldozed version of its yeasted and airy Danish predecessor. A commenter in the Denmark subreddit called the Racinified kringle “an American abomination” while another referred to its saccharine-sweet ingredients list as “violently American.”
How the kringle came to be the way it is today is a centuries-long story, molded and transformed by every baker and burgh it has come across, a true product of migration.
The kringle’s roots can be traced to 11th-century Turkey, where bakers created “pleated or folded bread” that would eventually become phyllo dough, the basis of baklava. As trade with the Ottoman Empire brought food and knowledge into Europe, historians believe that Austrian bakers replaced the oil needed for phyllo with butter, birthing the strudel in the process. Around the same time, Roman Catholic monks in the 13th century began traveling through Scandinavia to convert pagan Vikings while gifting sweet pretzels along the way. Monks had developed the pretzel shape inspired by arms folded across the chest, mimicking the way many Catholics prayed in the Middle Ages. Fast forward to 1850, as bakers in Denmark went on strike, Viennese bakers traveled from Austria to take their place, bringing with them a prowess in laminated dough. The Austrian puff pastry was incorporated into the pretzel shape and filled with Danish favorites, like marzipan and raisins.
Simultaneously, across the Atlantic, the first white settlers arrived in Racine in 1835, displacing the Indigenous Potawatomi people who had lived there for centuries. In the decades that immediately followed, the town became a magnet for Danish and Czech immigrants, many of whom were fleeing the European potato famine, looking for land and opportunities at manufacturing firms like the J.I. Case Company and Mitchell Wagon Co. Some of those Danish immigrants, like O&H founder Christian Olesen and Bendtsen’s founder Laurits Bendt Bendtsen, carried on the Danish baking tradition, developing their own version of a kringle parallel to their counterparts in Copenhagen. Over the decades, the kringle saw its unique adaptations in Racine, most notably with the uncrossing of the pretzel into the oval shape popular today.
In recent decades, Racine’s Danish American community has assimilated. The Danish-language newspapers have all but disappeared, as have “The American Scandinavian” and “The Danish Hour” weekly radio broadcasts. Dania Hall, a gathering spot for Danes in Racine that once housed a Danish school and library, has shut down. Racine often gets compared to Solvang, a town in California that has turned its Danish heritage into a theme park, with wooden windmills and a replica of Copenhagen’s Rundetaarn. Except Racine has nearly no evidence of its Danish history. Kringle is the remaining residue, even though the version of it that lives on is unrecognizable from its Danish equivalent.
Racine is a prototypical Rust Belt city, one that came up through a manufacturing boom that has since waned. I feel odd writing anything about a place where I have no remaining family or friends, where I have not visited in over 10 years. My only remaining link to Racine is through the O&H kringle I pick up at Trader Joe’s as the temperature starts to drop every year. It’s a connection I cling to. When I meet other people from Wisconsin, talking about kringle is my other calling card, a proof of childhood. During a trip to Milwaukee in 2016, I told an Uber driver that I grew up in Racine. He paused, and then said the obvious retort, “But you’re not from here.” It’s an argument I’ll never bother to dispute because, at its core, I don’t disagree.
I sometimes feel a nagging guilt for indulging in and even promoting a food culture that, over time, feels less and less like mine. What I do get to credibly keep, however, are my own memories, my own relationship to a city. That’s just for me. And that’s the beautiful thing about food. The reason it outlasts every other form of nostalgia is because it’s endlessly replicable and inherently personal. Buildings shutter, clothing wears out. But the feeling of taking a first bite of a comfort food can be re-created wherever and whenever. And the memories associated with it are perpetually additive.
For less than $10 at Trader Joe’s, the kringle fuels a new winter ritual: I stick a slice in the microwave for eight seconds to let the laminated dough soften, and though the package claims to feed 12 people, that has failed every time. Now, during the holiday season, my partner and friends get to share in a small part of my childhood, and I think of them with every new kringle wreath I buy. And by passing it on, I get to contribute to that long lineage.
Trisha Gopal is a James Beard-nominated writer and editor who covers race, identity, and the issues facing immigrants and communities of color. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Tilda Rose is a Finnish-American artist and illustrator working in editorial and children’s books.
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis
