The Danish Ryebread - a cultural introduction to the humble Danish kitchen.

Eating healthy is a major topic for people all over the world, and every nation seems to have age old wisdom connected to this important subject...

Even the Danes!

Denmark is a country that is too cold and wet for fresh vegetables except in the summer months. The sun only provides vitamin D from May to August in the hours around noon (due to the curvature of the earth), and only the rough kale is left in the winter if you want vitamin C because it can survive frost. We do have pigs, and since the iron age they have made us get through the long and tedious winters. We also have beer and that makes the tedious and long winters almost tolerable. But it was never beer and pork that made our sickly, transparent, white haired, little children survive. What make them survive is rye bread!

Two pieces of typical, industrial, Danish ryebread from the supermarket. It does look healthy doesn't it?

Ryebread is made from rye flour, water and sourdough. As you can see in the picture above it is common to have whole rye grain in it as well. You can add beer, sugar, seeds from oil rich plants like sunflower, flax and so on, but the bread in the image is mainly just rye.

It is healthy, but I am not sure anybody knew for sure back when I was a kid. It was just common knowledge and not a thing you were supposed to discuss. I mean... LOOK AT IT! first recently have all the fantastic benefits been discovered (and they will probably be rejected and re-accepted a couple of times before we reach a real understanding of the human digestion). In the end it is enough to know that it is packed with dietary fiber, has a slightly bitter taste and takes good teeth to know why it was considered the best food for strong and healthy children. White bread has always been treated as a kind of desert. The soft, sweet whiteness gives the wrong association when you want your children to be reckless outdoor types, that fall down from trees, and stays out all day and and only comes in to bother you at about supper time (which is pretty much the childhood ideal around here).

CCØ - image from Wikipedia showing a so called Smørrebrødsjomfru (open face sandwich virgin) preparing the food at Ida Davidsen restaurant back in the fifties. Here's the Wikipedia article about the restaurant version of rye bread sandwich, called Smørrebrød..

Rye bread is eaten both on restaurant and at home as a kind of open sided sandwich that you eat with knife and fork, and sometimes as a real sandwich which we call, klapsammenmad (puttogetherfood) if you are in a hurry. It is interesting that if you say: one food it means one of these open sandwiches, while two foods will be two of them. To Danes this is simply the basis lunch meal. It is the main ingredient in the school lunchpack and it is eaten with softboiled eggs in the morning, as bread to go with the hot meal at supper, and you eat it in the evening if your parents are too tired to make you something hot.

Then you take out the ryebread, butter and as many kinds of ryebread toppings as you have in your fridge (and that can be quite a lot). The toppings are called, pålæg (put on). The list of things you put on ryebread is very long. Pork, fish, beef, vegetables, egg, intestines. Smoked, canned, boiled, fried, pickled. In the large version it can be an enormous buffet where you simply won't be able to taste it all, but in the simple daily version you just butter a couple of bread slices and add what you like.

Here is my lunch today.

A thing I really like: Cod's liver in cod liver oil. This one is produced in Iceland.

buttered bread with cod liver, mayonnaise, lemon juice and black pepper.

And the simple sandwich with sliced potatoes (normally boiled, but this one was baked), mayonnaise, salt and black pepper.

I used to bake our ryebread myself but haven't done so for a couple of years. I only bake sourdough white bread. But as I very seldom eat white bread I have decided to get back in the routine.

Here you can see a very thorough woman making Danish rye bread (it doesn't have to take 4 days):