Recipes from Denmark

The old fish market in Copenhagen was on the Gammelstrand, where a stocky statue of a lady fishmonger stands on the canal bank, impassively eyeing a pair of famous fish restaurants, Krøg’s and the Fiskehuset. These are sempiternal and dignified institutions, where the menus include some of the best-known Danish fish dishes but also reflect a certain deference to the French tradition. This used to be prominent in the cuisine of wealthy Danish households and in Danish cookery books, but it never prevailed in Denmark generally. There is a real wealth of traditional and authentic Danish dishes, a few of which appear in some of the classical Danish cookery books, such as those of Fru Mangor (1837 onwards), but of which no real survey existed before Westergaard’s masterly compendium of local Danish recipes (1974).