Rye-bread and the Amagermad

In Scandinavia you eat a lot of rye-bread. It is the backbone of the Danish Smørrebrød and the Swedish Smørgås (the Swedes do have a terrible dark sweet bread too, but for educative reasons we will surpass this). In Norway it is called flat-bread (flatbrød) hard baked and very thin, In Sweden and Finland you have crack- or break-bread (knäckebröd), very hard baked and dry. In Denmark you have a soft, fresh-baked variant simply called rye-bread similar to the Northern German black bread.

Swedish rye-bread (knäckebröd) and Danish rye-bread (rugbrød)

The general opinion is that you need to eat rye-bread or you will get weak, lazy, dim and impotent, and Children are taught that their limbs will wither and that they will not be able to use an Ipad if they do not eat rye bread.

Bread made from wheat is considered some kind of dessert or snack. And a dessert-snack is the subject of this post: the Amagermad!

The Amagermad

Amager is a large Island whose northern coast is part of central Copenhagen. In the early seventeenth century the Danish king Christian the Fourth imported some Dutch people to let them do their stuff: trade, entrepreneur, rise early and go early to bed, tulips, Sinterklaas... things like that. And he build a new suburb to them: Christianshavn (Christian's harbour).

The POLICE hunting cannabis in Christiania

Today the place is probably mostly known for Christiania, the anarchist freetown, but the thing about the Dutch people (who did not really show up in larger numbers) is not forgotten. I might just guess here (hey, that's what history is all about, isn't it?), but as the Amagermad uses a slice of... ohh... Sorry I might have forgotten a very important thing.

Smørrebrød

In Denmark you eat buttered rye bread with meat, fish or vegetables on top. This is called smørrebrød and is eaten with knife and fork if at home, and with your hands if out in the open or in School, where this is the normal thing to put in your lunch-bag. Below is a plate of plain smørrebrød.

Classic plate of smørrebrød

The things you put on top is called pålæg (which mean Put-onto) and can actually be anything. But potatoes, egg, salami-like sausage, liver-spread and pickled herring are some traditional and very popular choices.

The Amagermad part II

So now we can get on with the Dutch people in Amager and their entreprenourishing habits. Because the Amagermad (did you notice that the first part of this word is Amager like the island Amager?) is really just a plain piece of smørrebrød with the decadent, southern white-bread (called french bread in Denmark) as pålæg (put-onto). So this is really the dessert version of rye-bread: you put white bread on top! In the de-luxe version you add honey as shown below:

The deluxe verison of the Amagermad

So that's all folks. It tastes GREAT.

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The image of the police in Christiania is from the Danish version of the magazine Vice. The image of the classic smørrebrød plate is all over the internet it seems, so I don't really know who to point to.