AYLİN ÖNEY TAN
Just bread!
Last week I was invited to a great pair of tastings in Copenhagen. I will have to wait till March to write about them, but I cannot help but write about the Danish food scene, but do not expect news from the trendiest new hamburgers, Noma-protected new outlets, fermentation craze and how Copenhagen became the gastronomy capital of the world. I would like to write about the city I remember from my childhood, the old school cooking, the tastes I remember fondly, and my quest on finding them. Copenhagen was the first city I visited abroad with my family when I was in primary school, so in a way, my first bites of foreign food were Danish. Needless to say that I fell in love with Danish pastry instantly. But then there were these unexpectedly tasty open sandwiches. Strangely enough, one of my first foreign food words to learn proved to be “smørrebrød,” or maybe it was the second word, as I picked “pretzel” before in Berlin, where we stopped on our way to Denmark. I’ve never seen such a dish before, it was not a sandwich, but it was not like a cooked dish either. It was just bread piled with a wild variety of things. The reason I am saying things is that there were the most unexpected combinations of various foodstuff that went into the piled heap on bread, lingonberries, roast beef, eggs, shrimps, curried chicken salads, and lots of cured, smoked fishes that I did not know about. I remember how I was shocked when I saw lingonberry jam topping the pinkest roast beef and my first nose ripping raw horseradish shaving.
February 20 2022
