After a long day trading agony for tedium, we awoke in Copenhagen at 2:30. We’re staying with our friend Kelton Minor at Egmont, a student cooperative. It’s kind of like a college dorm, but in Denmark, so everyone is so beautiful it hurts to look at them. Luke being sensitive, Kelton took us to a gluten-free bakery for breakfast.
In Denmark, Danishes are not pastries, but people. This explains the weird look I got when I ordered one. “Here they call them Vienna Breads,” Kelton explained.
“What do they call them in Vienna?” I asked.
“Russia Lumps?”
“America Loaves?”
“Ew.”
A former Cornellian and a Fullbright Scholar, Kelton is wonderfully fun to talk to about everything from the aesthetics of accessible design to the genealogical history of his host nation: “All the men are descended from Vikings, and all the women are descended from the most beautiful women of every village the Vikings pillaged.”
Denmark is at the wheel of the New Nordic culinary movement, Kelton explained, which binds a slow/local ethos to the region’s ancestral cuisine. The result is food with terroir, food that is uniquely delicious.
“Everything tastes so real,” I said, for lack of a better word. From the romkugle and espresso we had for breakfast to the street vendor hot dogs we enjoyed for lunch; from the pizza Kelton’s host parents, Bo and Christina, baked in the brick oven Bo (a telecommunications expert) built himself to the aeblekge we gulped down for dessert – every dish here has been subtle, wholesome, and comforting.
A healthy appreciation for work-life balance is probably what gets the Danes through these balmy Scandinavian Januarys (though Luke and I timed our trip well, as it’s currently colder back in Brooklyn). There is a Danish word, hygge, which Kelton translates as “the feeling you get when it’s snowing outside and you’re sitting in front of a fire, drinking hot chocolate with your best friend.” After the Murphy’s hell that was yesterday, it’s good to get some hygge back in my life.
Can you ask him what we’re supposed to do with the pine cone he sent us? The diagram says to put it in the oven BUT WHAT HAPPENS THEN
Rinse, repeat?
Kelton sez: “Please tell Alex:
Step 1) Let the pinecone sit for one month until it opens up to reveal its seed pods
Tell her that I’ll respond with step 2 in one month’s time
*crucial note: the pinecone must be kept indoors, heat turns the pinecone on. As it turns out, pinecones have rather slow libidos unless they are placed into an oven at 350 F for 30 minutes, in which case the seeds appear right away… but why cut the romance short?”