WITH ITS CITIZENS clad in layers, bicycle culture, and “window weather,” Denmark (and all of Scandinavia, really) is famously cozy. Each country has its own word describing a warm, connected feeling; koselig in Norway, mysig in Sweden, and hygge in Denmark. I chose to go to Denmark, but hygge is not why I went to Denmark—Hamlet is.
I read Shakespeare’s dark, psychological tragedy at age fifteen and swore I would one day visit Elsinore. I identified with Ophelia, Hamlet’s girlfriend. The inky Danish prince cloaked in anxiety felt like every teenage lad I ever fell for—most of whom dumped me. Somewhere very real in my adolescent catastrophe of a brain, I got it when Hamlet damned Ophelia to a nunnery and then when she dramatically threw herself into an icy brook. I totally got Romeo and Juliet too—those first bouts with love are category five, and all outcomes seemed plausible to me as a young romantic person. When something, even a gloomy tragedy, hits home, feels authentic, strikes a chord, it’s cozy. We’re complicated creatures who think crazy thoughts and feel emotion so deeply it brings us to our knees. We need to connect with art or stories to feel less alone in that humanity—it’s soothing to know someone else felt it too. I had a boyfriend who carried around a tattered copy of The Brothers Karamazov in his saxophone case like a philosophical baby blanket. You wouldn’t think that the long-haired rocker would be bound to the ethical debates of God, but he was. I mean, heck, I find Mozart’s requiem cozy, and it’s about death! Even on an excursion to find cozy in other lands, going to Elsinore, home of the dark prince, presented as far cozier than anything hygge I’d heard about.
Anyway, off to Denmark I went.
“The first condition to understanding a foreign country is to smell it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote. When I reached the shores of Denmark, every sense in my body was turned on so I could be open and available to hygge. I expected just by my touching Danish soil, hygge would wrap its arms around me. Within hours, I was let down. With Kipling’s words in my mind, I inhaled deeply standing on the taxi line, hoping to smell fog. Having been raised partially in Maine, fog conjures romance, seafaring life, and sweatshirts, and for some reason (probably because of Hamlet) I expected fog. But it was a sunny day. Onward. In the back seat of the taxi, I eagerly looked out the window and did see hygge things, red rooftops, Danes wrapped in woolen scarves and blue jeans holding paper cups of coffee, bikes, bread shops. But here’s the tricky part: even when I cupped my hands around a Danish ceramic mug brimming with milky foam and hot coffee, or noticed that there were blue wool blankets neatly folded over all of the chairs in outdoor cafés, heard a bell ring as I exited a bakery and ripped into a still-warm flaky croissant—to my surprise and disappointment, I didn’t feel cozy, or connected to any of it.
Layered sweaters alone do not make one cozy. What I was uncovering in real time in the land of the north was that if I wanted coziness, even if it felt unfair and exhausting after traveling all that way expecting that it would magically be available to me, I had to work at it. I wanted so much to feel really good inside just by being in the country where hygge was born. I wanted the glow of the candles to instantly translate to a glow inside of me, but it didn’t happen. In fact, at first, I felt alienated and alone, even on a cobblestone street. What did I have to do to get some of that hygge?
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TO MAKE MATTERS worse (for the time being), I hadn’t gotten an international phone plan. Unless I wanted to go broke because of astronomical roaming charges, the phone would stay in my pocket and turned off. Even though my knee-jerk reaction was to call home, being freed of what everyone else in my life was doing thousands of miles away, I was forced to slow down and sop up my surroundings. What soon became clear was that a defining characteristic of hygge was simply being present.
There are a lot of outdoor cafés in Copenhagen, and every table was crammed with people having a drink and chatting. What struck me most, probably because I didn’t have mine, was the lack of phones. At one particularly hopping café, I counted only one person on a phone, and that guy was standing up as if he had just excused himself to check a text. I’m sure Apple could prove me wrong—the Danes are probably just as addicted as we are—but it didn’t feel that way. People looked to be tête-à-tête no matter where I went. The chatting became my focus, and I began to feel cozy, even though I didn’t speak the language. I asked a bartender about the crush of conversation I was noticing: to Thea, the louder the café or bar, the more hygge. “This place is hygge because it’s so loud with chatter—it’s relaxed, you can talk about all sorts of things you want to talk about—good things, things you don’t want to talk about on a quiet bus.”
There were buses in Copenhagen, but as you might expect, bicycles ruled the transportation scene. Like fish, the people of Copenhagen darted and zoomed around on bikes in great schools. Most bikes had large buckets affixed to their fronts. Piled in them were fresh-faced girlfriends swathed in multiple woolen scarves, dogs, older people. And nobody was riding like pumpkins in carts; most were in conversation with the person peddling, or with their companion in the bucket. Togetherness seemed to be the order of the day. Coziness emerged like a ship from the fog.
“Handheld food rights our wrongs, turning a bad world briefly good.”
—NIGEL SLATER
Before my journey, I bought Magnus Nilsson’s The Nordic Cookbook, a four-hundred-pounder of Scandinavian food, history, and culture. Nilsson is a Nordic chef who, with his scruffy beard, long hair, and twinkly eyes, looks like a Viking. I was taken with his Norse hunter-gatherer ways while watching a food series on TV. Nilsson ice fishes, kneels in piney woods to pick wild sorrel, and risks his life traversing the steep cliffs of Stóra Dímun to gather fulmar eggs. He owns a restaurant called Fäviken way in the north of Sweden that celebrates the history, culture, and geography of the lands close to him. In particular, he embraces the food Scandinavians grew up with and already have in their larders. National pride, seeing and loving what’s already there—it’s all fucking cozy because HE finds it cozy, and you can tell on the page.
My focus in Nilsson’s all-encompassing bible became the time-honored Nordic sandwich smørrebrød. He writes, “Its origins can be traced back for more than a millennium and it exists in hundreds of variants. An open cheese sandwich speaks of the most fundamental aspects that make up a food culture in the Nordic region, but also demonstrates that a ‘taste chord’ can live a very long time if it’s important to people and provides meaning.” The idea of a “taste chord” struck me as fundamentally cozy—a harmony of personal taste, culture, identity, and temperature.
And as Nilsson had promised, there were sandwiches everywhere in Copenhagen. They were so omnipresent, I asked the concierge in my tiny hotel for help in finding an especially Danish one. He pointed me in the direction of a “place at the bottom of a little stairs” for smørrebrød—and where hygge would be thick. Handwritten map in gloved hand, I went walking along the cobblestones, noting every little round ancient window with glass bulging in the frames, where most of the time there was a candle glowing.
Nestled at the bottom of the “little stairs” was the Scandi restaurant that turned out to be the epicenter of my hygge journey. It was Architectural Digest’s version of a Beatrix Potter rabbit warren. Whitewashed walls and exposed dark wooden beams glowed in candlelight. There was a sheepskin over the back of each midcentury caned chair, and the entire menu was smørrebrød. The waiter, Jeppe, suggested ordering two or three. Soon plates piled with smoked salmon, chicken, and buttermilk-whipped-butter arrived, and as if he were presenting the keys to the city, Jeppe also placed a grey woolen envelope beside my plate.
“Pocket bread,” he said oh so proudly. I opened and pulled out a thick slice of warm dark rye. “You serve all your bread in this?” I asked, feeling the earthiness of the rye. It felt like something you would find in the forest. “Oh yes! There is a woman up the street who made eighty of these pockets for us. It’s called kuvertbrød [a play on the French word for “place setting”]—a piece of bread cut squarely so it can fit in a pocket.” Clearly, any young man who serves lunch like a child showing you an art project was someone I had to engage in the conversation of hygge.
“Hygge—hold on, let me go in the kitchen and ask the others.” He dashed away. Balancing the slice in one hand, I began piling forkfuls of creamy celeriac, poached chicken, and gherkins onto the Danish rugbrød. My other smørrebrød was flannel-like ribbons of roast beef topped with fried onions and a silken egg whose marigold-orange yolk melted down and around every corner. The heaping and soaking-up opportunities had room for variation or repetition; up to you.
After consulting his peers, Jeppe returned to thoughtfully present his views on hygge in English, but to hear it with the Danish accent—whoosh. “The thing about hygge is—you can do it with your grandma, or your girlfriend, or alone. It’s a wonderful feeling inside.” He stood there with his hand on his chest and became just a little bit verklempt. “Yah, see”—he took a breath and collected himself—“that’s the thing about my job! I always think it’s hygge!”
His emotion hit me in my core, for I too was a waiter, and felt the same way Jeppe did about it. God, I LOVED being a waiter. Coziest job I ever had. I loved serving hungry people. The East Village restaurant where I worked was filled with candles and a wood-burning oven. We didn’t have pocket bread, but there was a bottle of olive oil on every table so you could have as much as you liked. Lenny, my boss and one of the owners of the place, set the tone. In his stoic rock-and-roll way, Lenny just wanted people to be happy. Lenny was from Atlanta and knew the Black Crowes. He looked like he could have been a member of the Clash: white T-shirts rolled up at the sleeves, blue jeans, and spiffy shoes. He had tattoos all over his arms.
Lenny once told me that he found pitting olives cozy—yes, he actually said “cozy.” It’s funny to think about now since in no way did he vibe Jamie Oliver (though he did ripen tomatoes on our windowsills). When he mumbled the thing about the olives, he was at the pizza station in front of the fire. Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection (if you don’t know that album, get it right now) was playing. As he pressed Kalamata olive after Kalamata olive against a cutting board, extracting the pit without hurting the fruit, he pointed out that the task was methodical. He said it helped him collect his thoughts before dinner service. The more he pitted, the more he knew we would be prepared for the night. It was comforting, he said. Lenny died while he was still in his twenties of a heroin overdose. And he’s with me every time I cook.