Kay Zander Mellish explores Denmark's obsession with butter, from supermarket price wars offering packages for 5-10 kroner to roughly 30 Danish idioms built around the word smør. Butter is everywhere in Danish life: smørrebrød, Christmas cookies, fried meats, and even the language itself.
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Hello and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Zander Mellish. The hottest competitive sport in Denmark. over the past year hasn't been handball or football or badminton. It's been chasing cheap butter in the supermarket. Recent inflation has doubled the price of butter in some places, up to 30 kroner. But if you rush, you can get a package of butter for only 10 kroner at this supermarket. Oh wait, only 3 packages per customer. But hey, look! This competing supermarket has matched the price, but this one has it for only 5 crowns. Oh, it's sold out for today. Better come earlier tomorrow. Butter chasing through successive supermarkets is how high-achieving, well-paid Danes like to spend their time. Nobody wants to spend 30 kroner for butter. Butter is a part of the Danish soul. The Danish word for it is smør. You might be familiar with smørbrød, the famous open-faced Danish sandwiches. Smørbrød means buttered bread. So even though inflation has hit Denmark recently, just like every place else in the world, supermarkets use low, low butter prices to bring in customers who will buy their other goods. Butter is big business in Denmark. It is one of the world's top 10 butter exporters. And dairy in general is a big part of the traditional Danish diet. There used to be shops called mejeri— dairy shops— that only sold dairy goods and eggs. Evolutionists would tell you that Scandinavians evolved to get more of their vitamin D from food, since they don't get much from the sun for most of the year. But while many Danes have turned away from cow's milk in favor of oat milk or almond milk, I have yet to meet a Dane who doesn't like butter. Lots of butter. To the extent it is sometimes called tandsmør, or tooth butter. That means there's so much butter on the bread, you can actually see your teeth outlined in the butter after you bite into it. You might get tandsmør if you go into a Danish bakery You can order a Hahnwerker mit Smör. This is a bun with butter, suitable for someone with big caloric needs, like a Hahnwerker, or construction worker who might be building with heavy bricks or big machines. You might get your Hahnwerker bun with Smör och Ost, butter and cheese, a meal full of heavy fats that will fill you up from breakfast until your lunch break. Butter, as I mentioned, is an important ingredient in smørrebrød, the famous open-faced Danish sandwiches. You put butter on the rye bread before you add fish or potatoes or eggs. In Denmark, butter is often melted over steamed vegetables. It's also used for frying meats. And it's a key ingredient in the famous Danish butter cookies, which is why the supermarket butter wars are particularly intense around Christmas cookie season in December. You can choose salted or unsalted butter, organic butter, garlic butter, truffle butter. And there are very few Danish homes without an open container of spreadable butter, a corn oil mix that is easier to spread on sandwiches. It's probably one of the first brands Danish children can recognize, since they see it on the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you're learning Danish, look up all the expressions that begin with the word smør. I counted about 30 in the official Danish dictionary. Like smørgriis, butter pig. That's someone who loves butter so much that they eat great amounts of it with gusto. Or smørtænder. That's a tenor singer with a voice like butter. Butter voice. Or smørhul, butter hole. A butter hole takes its name from the hole in the middle of a bowl of oatmeal. You make a hole so you can put a little pat of butter inside. But butter hole has a bigger meaning. A butter hole is a way to describe a small and very nice place, safe from the tumultuous world around it. A butterhole is the way many Danes see Denmark itself. And that's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. The new updated edition of How to Work in Denmark is now available. It contains 3 new chapters, including Managing Danes as an International. You can get it on our webshop at books.howtoliveindenmark.com or on Amazon, Google, If you are a Ukrainian speaker, you can get an absolutely free version of the book in Ukrainian, something we do for the Ukrainian refugees who are here in Denmark. You can get that on Google Play, Apple Books, or download it from the website howtoworkindenmark.com. There's a QR code you can use. This is something we like to do for refugees in Denmark. We did an Arabic language version the last time there was a wave of refugees. That time was from the Middle East. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram @howtoliveindk, the 2 is a number, or on Facebook at How to Live in Denmark. See you next time. See you next time.
