Vishnu

It‘s absurd to make a competitive sport of bread and butter, but the cafes and bakeries in Copenhagen have done that. The latest gastronomic sensation there is bread and butter with a slice of cheese. This in a city where the best restaurants serve foraged food. Moss, ants, fermented things, objects from intertidal zones etc. It’s called bolle med ost (bun with cheese). There’s warm sourdough with a dark crust you can hear across the table. And an interior of irregular chambers to accommodate butter. Butter we thought we knew. We’d bought it for decades, sometimes made it. This is different, whipped into folds. It’s a different physical state of fat. The cheese (usually Gammel Knas, that takes more than two years to mature) is for the salt and the nutty finish. My wife and I became quiet whenever we ate the BMO. Married people will recognise this as one of the better sorts of silence. Neither party is in trouble. Copenhagen’s bakers have been competing over this kind of stuff: flour, fermentation, seeds, the precise condition of butter, the moment when cheese is to be sliced. We’ve now begun to resent all the bread and butter we’ve previously eaten.