- Picturing this on a favorite channel of the cable package that is my collective unconscious:Hitchhiking in Denmark in the 70’s. I’m 17 and my boyfriend, who’s a year older, is Apache with black hair flying. While we did not do the bait and switch, I was dangled closer to the shoulder than he. August, height of Danish summer. It’s a moderate height. Short sleeves and long jeans.
- We prayed for a Citroën cause we had never been in one. I wanted to experience the hydraulic suspension. The closest we came was a Jaguar and that was good. Bucket seats so I sat on his lap, my face pressed up close to the windshield. I have yet to ride in a Citroën.
- Danes will always feed you. Or they would then and I suspect 30-some years has not changed that. Perhaps this has changed, but back then we ate 6 times a day. Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, evening tea. Drop in on someone and the odds were good they would be eating.
- Many of the meals were smørrebrød. Buttered bread, open-faced, with something on top. Unlikely for dinner, but most likely at all other times.
- Some memorable meals:In a farmhouse, outside Copenhagen, breakfast. Warm from the oven, bumpy-textured brown bread, butter at a spreadable temperature (Danish summer, perfect for butter, cool but not cold), last night’s potatoes. Butter bread, slice potatoes, stick potatoes to butter. Eat and repeat. I have no memory of ever being full when I was 17…………………………………………………………………………Morning after a blow-out party, bedroom doors open, folks emerge in jumbled pairs, breakfast is served. Bread – brown, thin and densely crumbly + white “Franskebrod” – butter and what’s in the fridge. Tubes of mayonnaise and remoulade, canned liverpostej, cheese, smoked fish, other odds and ends. AND – bottoms up in tiny, icy glasses – aquavit, caraway flavored. It went down easy that a.m. when I was resilient as a trampoline.
- And now, here in DC, every Veterans Day weekend my extended family lines up early for the Danish Club of Washington’s Christmas Bazaar. We are Danes, after all, or at least partly so. Lots of family Christiansens behind, beside and yet to come. We go for lunch, not so much for shopping. The smorrebrod have become bigger (Americanized?) over the years, and some of the shrimp have been replaced by macaroni, but the combinations remain the classics, and we love them. Three would be plenty, but I always take four – and feel just a teeny bit older than 17.
The Lunch Encounter 
Pingback: Inside Outwich « LUNCH ENCOUNTER