rødgrød med fløde

I've never been to Denmark or even met anyone from Denmark, but I've heard that Danes get a great deal of malicious pleasure out of asking foreigners to pronounce rødgrød med fløde and mocking the invariably mangled results. It's almost impossible for anyone whose native language isn't Danish to navigate the combination of the uvular fricative of the "r," the "ø" which sounds something like an "o" pronounced with rounded lips, the "d," which is a softer version of the "th" in "the," and the glottal stop called a stød that gives the impression that you're trying to gulp the word back down before it escapes. If you're curious what the phrase is supposed to sound like, you can listen to it here.

If it weren't for the pronunciation, Danish would be a remarkably easy language to learn. The vocabulary is fairly limited, since, like German (from which many Danish words are derived), complex concepts can be expressed by stringing smaller words together, making it relatively easy to figure out their meaning. Grammar is simplified by the fact that the verbs have same form for the first, second, and third person in both the singular and the plural. As a joke, though one that I'm sure only I found amusing, I wrote out the present tense of Danish verb "to sleep" in all its identical forms -- jeg sover (I sleep), du sover (you sleep), han/hun sover (s/he sleeps) and so on -- in chalk on a blackboard and hung it in the guest room.

Rødgrød med fløde is also a Danish dessert, made of stewed fruit drizzled with cream for a striking effect in red and white, the colors of the Danish flag. It's typically made with with ribs, that is red currants, but since I didn't have any, I used strawberries and put a few raspberries on top for decoration. Here's the recipe:

2 pints (1 kilogram) of (preferably red) berries

3/4 cup (150 grams) of cold water

2 1/2 tablespoons corn starch (or kartoffelmel (potato flour))

1/4 cup (50 grams) of sugar (less if, like me, you prefer tart desserts, more if you have a sweet tooth)

Cream for topping

Put the berries (cut up if necessary) and sugar in a saucepan and heat over a medium flame for a few minutes, until the berries are soft. Remove from stove.

Dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water and gradually wisk into the fruit. Put the saucepan back on the stove and heat until the mixture simmers and thickens slightly. Taste, adding more sugar if necessary.

Set aside to cool with a little extra sugar sprinkled on top to prevent a skin from forming.

Serve with cream. I'm sure it would be equally tasty and just as pretty with sour cream, plain yogurt, or vanilla ice cream.

And you'll enjoy your rødgrød med fløde all the more because no-one's asking you to to pronounce its name or taunting you with another, curiously apposite, Danish tongue twister: Man kan ikke altid plukke frisk frugt med en brugt frugt plukker -- You can't always pick fresh fruit with a used fruit picker.


edited to fix the broken link to the photo