D is for Denmark

D is for Denmark

Hello, Sunday and hello, D-Day. Yes, it’s time again to crack out both the map and the kitchen utensils, and head off to a new culinary destination. With a brief sigh of relief, I saw that a mere four countries on this planet start with the letter D: Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica and the Dominican Republic. While I am intrigued about the cuisines of the latter three, I’m trying – as far as luxury will allow – to go for places with which I have some connection (however tenuous) and that means: God morgen Danmark!

According to various statistics, Denmark has it good. For years, it was named the happiest country in the world (this year, it was controversially overtaken by its Scandi neighbour, Norway). It’s home to one of the world’s best restaurants, noma; they are entitled to INSANE employment benefits, and their unis are free. FREE! Not only that, but it appears to me that absolutely all of them are drop dead gorgeous. Seriously, if you suffer from any shred of self-confidence issues, it might be wise to avoid Denmark, or at least walk around with your eyes closed whenever the Danes are out and about, which is all the blimmin’ time. A few years ago, my – for the record, downright brilliant – parents and I headed to Copenhagen to celebrate my birthday. Having met in the city’s main station, we started the longer-than-anticipated pilgrimage to our accommodation, which took us right across the city and out the other side. As a family, we are unbending and uncompromising walkers, and so no matter the length of the prospective journey, we will categorically NOT step foot in a taxi. At a push, we’ll jump on an underground, but a jolly good stroll (or as the case may be, a 10-mile trek) is more our style. So, there we were, dragging ourselves and our luggage through Copenhagen, red-faced and sweating in clothes we’d all been in for hours on end, and it did not take long to dawn on us that, boy, are these Danes good-looking. And tall. And effortlessly stylish. Oh. Great.

So, the question is: what the Dickens are these guys doing – and eating – to get that way? First and foremost, there’s hygge. Unless you’ve lived the life of a hermit the last year or so, you’ll have heard of hygge. You might not be able to pronounce it, let alone understand it, but you know it’s there, lurking on every book shop shelf, trying to entice you with its seductive promise of a better life. The concept of hygge is difficult to define: it’s kind of an inherent cosiness and warmth that permeates every aspect of life. As far as I can tell, the UK publishing industry equates this feeling with patterned woolly socks and logs, and a devil-may-care attitude towards the amount of hot chocolate you consume. In reality, hygge is so much more. Upon asking my Danish teacher to elucidate a little on the topic, she struggled to actually define it, resorting instead to simply listing things that can be hyggelig (the adjectival form of the noun hygge): parties, clothes, rooms, buildings, household objects, toothbrushes, dog collars, the dust at the bottom of a cereal box…(caveat: some of those may be ever so slightly exaggerated) – in a nutshell, everything. And apparently, that genuinely has a lot to do with the Danes’ level of happiness and well-being. But it’s something that cannot really be imitated, no matter what the 2016 bestseller list tells you. To reach true hygge, you just have to be Danish.

But brush off that disappointment, friends, for there is food! Unlike hygge, Danish food – det danske køkken to the natives -is something we can all enjoy, down to the last artery-clogging crumb. Although not one of Europe’s most celebrated, Danish cuisine boasts some glorious creations: flæskesteg (roast pork with crackling), boller i karry (pork meatballs in curry sauce), frikadeller (pork or veal meatballs) and the absolutely blow-your-mind delicious stegt flæsk med persillesovs. This triumph of a meal consists of slices of fried pork served with potatoes and béchamel sauce with parsley. Voted the national dish in 2014, a plate of this stuff will make you feel two things: 1. “GODDAMN, I’m moving to Denmark IMMEDIATELY so I can shovel this in my face every damn day” and 2. “I wonder what I could have done with that year I’ve just knocked off my life?”. My mum wisely ordered it in one restaurant we visited and we were sold; hook, line and béchamel-coated sinker. It is allllll about Denmark.

Despite the abundance of excellent savoury options available, my sweet tooth (or rather, entire mouth of sweet teeth) could not let D pass me by without having a bash at something from the famous arsenal of Danish baked goods. Danish pastries are known all over the world, and with good reason. However, don’t go ordering a Danish pastry in Denmark, as the Danes do not claim these treasures for themselves (maybe not so smart after all, you crazy Danes): instead, they’re referred to as Wienerbrød, or Viennese bread. The concept of what we know as Danish pastry was originally introduced into Denmark by Austrian bakers back in, errrrr, yore, and since then has taken on a life of its own in the country’s baking culture. As in much Northern European baking, especially Scandinavian baking, recipes are heavy on the spice: cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and black pepper are all bound to be knocking around in a recipe somewhere, a tradition which dates back to the Middle Ages, when Europeans went absolutely ga-ga for the stuff. It was like the medieval version of the current trend for quinoa, kale, chia and coconut oil, expect infinitely less annoying.

And what is the epitome of Wienerbrød? Well, kanelsnegle of course! Let me break it down for you: kanel is the Danish word for cinnamon, and snegle means snails. Mercifully, kanelsnegle is not some demented variation of French-style snails (delicious, by the way) but rather what we’d call cinnamon swirls. Just a little note on the pronunciation of the word itself: it is not, as you might justifiably expect, pronounced “kan-ell-sneg-le” or “kan-ell-sneg-ul”. No. It’s more like “kan-err-snei”. OF COURSE IT BLOODY IS! Unfortunately for learners of Danish like myself, this utterly bananas pronunciation is a rather common trait of the language (the word chokoladekage? “sho-koh-lille-kay”, obviously), which I’m starting to believe is a tactic to put foreigners off moving there and stealing all the hygge.

This week, I decided to really challenge myself and work from a recipe written in Danish. God only knows what would have happened if a Danish person had just talked me through the recipe - I imagine my kitchen would probably have been on fire at some point or another – but reading it isn’t too tricky at all. The recipe I used was not a typical Danish pastry Brits have come to know and love using puff pastry, but rather a sweet bread dough rammed with a straight-up criminal amount of butter, sugar and cinnamon. Although my love of cooking started with baking, I’m not a bread baker at all. Any mention of yeast in a recipe and I’m out; to me, baking with yeast is too risky and far too unpredictable – the great mystery of how it works is enough to send me running for the hills. BUT, this being a challenge and all, I decided to give it a whirl. The recipe itself is simple enough, although the sheer amount of butter, sugar, eggs and milk is a little daunting, but I have to say, I think I need more practice. The dough was definitely soft and squishy and gorgeously aromatic, and the filling sweet and unctuous, but getting the right filling-to-dough ratio is a real gamble. Too little filling and your little snails will be too doughy and dry; too much and they will be swimming in a vat of butter as it oozes out during the baking process, meaning they don’t bake properly. Generally, I’m a ‘the more butter, the better’ kind of person, but in this case, it is definitely detrimental to the final result. For a first attempt, my snails weren’t too terrible. They certainly taste pretty great, as you would expect from the combo of ingredients, but the execution needs a little work. The whole process from start to finish also requires a certain time commitment, which perhaps I was just a bit too nonchalant about, whipping them up without too much care and attention late on a Saturday afternoon. In any case, there is no doubt that Danish food – especially Danish baking – is a good time all round. It’s generous and warm, and fills you with a sense of glowy, tra-la-la, snuggly goodness…also known, perhaps, as hygge.