Dildsnaps

Midsummer in Denmark, and the dill is everywhere. It grows faster than you can use it, tall and feathery and electric with fragrance, filling every garden and market stall from late June through August. This is when you make dildsnaps.

The process could hardly be simpler. You take fresh dill, steep it in a bottle of clear aquavit, and wait. Three days. In that time the spirit pulls everything it needs from the herb: color, fragrance, a grassy warmth that sits somewhere between anise and fresh-cut hay. When you strain it and hold the bottle up to the window, the liquid is pale green and luminous. That color is real. It comes from the dill and from nothing else.

What matters here is the quality of your dill and your patience with the steeping. Use dill that smells like something when you crush a frond between your fingers. Give it three full days, no more, no fewer. And serve it so cold that frost forms on the glass the moment it leaves the freezer. At a Danish frokost, the long celebratory lunch, snaps is poured in small measures and drunk in one, always with a skål, always with eye contact across the table. The dill in the glass meets the fish on the plate, and for a moment the whole meal makes a kind of sense that's hard to explain and impossible to forget. You'll know when it's right.