Toast Skagen

Despite the Danish-sounding name, Toast Skagen is Swedish — credited to restaurateur Tore Wretman (1916–2003), who bought Stockholm's Riche in 1945 and later ran Operakällaren. By popular account he improvised it in 1956 during a sailing regatta off Skagen, Denmark's northern tip — using the galley's eggs, oil, shrimp, roe and bread to cheer a becalmed crew — and named it for Skagen (treat as legend). By the late 1950s the shrimp salad Swedes call skagenröra was on Riche's menu. It became the obligatory starter at Swedish dinner parties and the Saturday-lunch order at every brasserie. The hand-peeled cold-water shrimp matter — North Sea (Pandalus borealis) shrimp, sweet and tender — folded with mayonnaise, dill, lemon, mustard. Spooned onto a butter-fried slice of bread, topped with shiny black roe (löjrom — the roe of vendace, Coregonus albula; the Bothnian Bay version is EU-PDO Kalix Löjrom, served at the Nobel Banquet).

A mound of sweet shrimp barely held together with mayonnaise and dill, perched on butter-fried white bread. The bleak roe on top pops salt-saline against the cool mayonnaise — the contrast is the whole dish.

Cold-water Pandalus borealis shrimp taste sweeter than warm-water species because of their free amino acids: glycine and alanine are themselves sweet-tasting and are the main drivers of shrimp's sweet, savoury flavour. Cold-water shrimp accumulate these small molecules as osmolytes (which also act as cryoprotectants), so the levels run higher and read on the tongue as pure sweet. These free amino acids are unstable and degrade during freezing and storage, which is why pre-cooked, long-frozen shrimp taste flat — and why the dish insists on hand-peeled fresh shrimp.