Chef Freja
Danablu Mad med Rå Æggeblomme
Danish blue cheese layered on dark rye with a raw egg yolk nestled on top, red onion rings, and chives. The last piece at a Danish lunch, and the one that stays with you longest.
Culinary Explorer
A cooking platform built around craft, culture, and the stories behind what we eat.
Rejemad
Created by Chef Freja
The most beloved piece of smorrebrod in Denmark, a generous mound of small cold-water shrimp on buttered franskbrod with a thin layer of mayonnaise, a slice of egg, a lemon twist, and fresh dill.
Sandwiches & Wraps
Danish
Dinner Party
Special Occasion
Weeknight
20 min
Active Time
8 min cook•28 min total
Yield4 pieces
The first warm Saturday of the year in Copenhagen, the tables come out. Chairs dragged into courtyards, blankets spread in the King's Garden, every cafe along the water suddenly full. And somewhere on almost every one of those tables is a piece of rejemad.
Rejemad is the shrimp smorrebrod, and it's the one piece almost every Dane agrees on. Small cold-water shrimp, piled generously on a slice of buttered franskbrod (the fine-crumbed white bread that is the quiet counterpart to rugbrod in Danish baking), a thin layer of mayonnaise beneath, a slice of hard-boiled egg, a twist of lemon, and a crown of fresh dill. That's the whole dish. Its power is in its restraint.
Two things matter more than anything else: the shrimp and the bread. The shrimp should be small, sweet, cold-water, and hand-peeled if you can manage it. Pre-peeled shrimp from a tub will do, but the difference when you've picked them yourself is something you taste immediately. The bread should be franskbrod, dense and fine enough to hold the weight of the shrimp without collapsing. A rustic artisan loaf with big holes is the wrong bread, and the shrimp will fall through.
I'll walk you through every step. By the end you'll understand why this simple thing is the piece of smorrebrod the Danes love most, and why the season for it is the long bright evenings when you want lunch to stretch into the afternoon.
Rejemad is one of the few pieces of smorrebrod traditionally served on white bread rather than dark rye, a distinction codified in the late 1800s when Copenhagen's smorrebrod restaurants began writing down the grammar of the open sandwich. The shrimp themselves are typically Pandalus borealis, the small cold-water species fished from Greenlandic and North Atlantic waters, and hand-peeling them by the thousands was once a Danish household skill taught to children at the kitchen table. The sky-high tower of rejemad, sometimes built with two hundred shrimp or more on a single piece of bread, became iconic at twentieth-century Copenhagen institutions like Ida Davidsen and Schonnemann, though the home version has always been simpler, shorter, and just as loved.
The technique, the tradition, and the story behind every dish.
Discover Culinary ExplorerIngredients
small cold-water shrimp
Quantity
400g
cooked and peeled
franskbrod (Danish white bread)
Quantity
4 thick slices
good unsalted butter
Quantity
60g
softened
good-quality mayonnaise
Quantity
4 tablespoons
eggs
Quantity
2 large
unwaxed lemon
Quantity
1
fresh dill
Quantity
small bunch
fronds picked
flaky sea salt
Quantity
to taste
black pepper
Quantity
freshly ground, to taste
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| small cold-water shrimpcooked and peeled | 400g |
| franskbrod (Danish white bread) | 4 thick slices |
| good unsalted buttersoftened | 60g |
| good-quality mayonnaise | 4 tablespoons |
| eggs | 2 large |
| unwaxed lemon | 1 |
| fresh dillfronds picked | small bunch |
| flaky sea salt | to taste |
| black pepper | freshly ground, to taste |
Equipment Needed
- •Small saucepan for the eggs
- •Sharp knife or egg slicer
- •Small serving plates
Instructions
- 1
Boil the eggs
Bring a small saucepan of water to a gentle boil. Lower the eggs in on a slotted spoon and cook for exactly eight minutes. You want the yolks just set and still bright yellow, not chalky. Transfer the eggs straight into a bowl of cold water and leave them there until they are completely cool. A cold egg peels cleanly and slices without crumbling. A warm one tears and ruins the neat disc you want on top of the shrimp.
Crack the shell gently all over before peeling. The water from the bath seeps in under the membrane and lifts it away in one piece. - 2
Check the shrimp
Tip the peeled shrimp onto a plate and spread them out in a single layer. Go through them with your fingers and pick out any bits of shell or the dark vein along the back. Even hand-peeled shrimp hide the occasional fragment, and a single piece of shell against the teeth ruins the whole piece of smorrebrod. This small act of attention is what separates a careful rejemad from a careless one.
If your shrimp came in brine, pat them dry with kitchen paper before you pile them. Wet shrimp slide off the bread and make the mayonnaise run. - 3
Butter and dress the bread
Spread each slice of franskbrod with a generous layer of softened butter, going right to the edges. The butter is not decoration. It's a seal between the bread and everything that follows, and without it the moisture from the shrimp and mayonnaise will sink in and turn the bread soft within minutes. Over the butter, spread a thin, even layer of mayonnaise. Thin. You want the shrimp to taste of the sea, not of the jar.
Use good Danish-style cultured butter if you can find it. The slight tang of the butter is part of the flavor, not a neutral background. - 4
Pile the shrimp
Heap the shrimp onto each slice of bread. Be generous, more generous than feels sensible. Rejemad is a dish of abundance, and the shrimp should sit in a proud mound that rises well above the bread. Arrange them with the curl of each shrimp facing outwards if you can manage it, so the surface catches the light and looks like what it is: a hundred small pink commas laid carefully against one another. Don't press them down. They should look piled, not packed.
The old Copenhagen smorrebrod restaurants measure rejemad by how high the tower rises. At home you don't need a tower, but the principle stands: more shrimp than you think, always. - 5
Finish and serve
Slice the cold eggs into neat rounds with a sharp knife or an egg slicer. Place one slice of egg on the crown of each mound, slightly off-centre so it looks set down rather than staged. Cut four thin slices from the lemon, make one cut from the centre to the edge of each slice, and twist the two sides in opposite directions so the peel lifts into a small spiral. Balance a lemon twist on top of each piece. Scatter the dill fronds over everything, finish with a pinch of flaky salt and a turn of black pepper, and serve at once. Smorrebrod waits for no one, and rejemad least of all. You'll know when it's right because the layers stand tall and the dill looks like it just landed there.
Chef Tips
- •Source matters more than technique with rejemad. Look for small cold-water shrimp, ideally fjordrejer or Greenlandic, sold either freshly peeled at a good fishmonger or in glass jars in brine. The large pink tiger prawns sold in supermarkets are the wrong animal entirely. They are too big, too firm, and the flavor is nothing like what this dish wants.
- •Franskbrod is the specific Danish white loaf with a dense, fine crumb. If you can't find it, a good brioche-style sandwich loaf or a dense white tin loaf will stand in. Avoid anything too airy. A rustic sourdough with an open crumb is the wrong texture.
- •Serve rejemad with something cold and crisp in the glass. A Danish pilsner, a cold glass of Riesling, or a small measure of aquavit if the lunch is that kind of lunch. Avoid heavy reds. They fight the shrimp.
- •Build each piece to order. Rejemad made more than ten minutes ahead starts to sag, and a sagging rejemad is a sad thing. If you're feeding a crowd, lay everything out as a build-your-own station and let each person make their own.
Advance Preparation
- •The eggs can be boiled up to two days in advance and kept in the fridge in their shells. Peel and slice just before assembling.
- •Pick through the shrimp for shell fragments up to a few hours ahead and keep them covered in the fridge. Bring them just to cool room temperature before serving, straight from the fridge they taste muted.
- •Never assemble rejemad in advance. The bread turns soft within ten minutes, and the dish depends on the contrast between dry bread, cool shrimp, and fresh dill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nutrition Information
1 serving (about 200g)
Calories
435 calories
Total Fat
28 g
Saturated Fat
11 g
Trans Fat
0 g
Unsaturated Fat
15 g
Cholesterol
320 mg
Sodium
1020 mg
Total Carbohydrates
21 g
Dietary Fiber
1 g
Sugars
2 g
Protein
27 g
Where cooking meets culture.
Culinary guides, cultural storytelling, and the editorial depth that makes cooking meaningful.
Discover Culinary ExplorerMore from Smorrebrod med Fisk (Fish Smorrebrod)
Browse the full collection
Chef Freja
Danbomad med Peberfrugt og Karse
Thick-sliced Danbo on properly buttered rugbrod with sweet pepper rings and a crown of garden cress. The cheese smorrebrod that lives in every Danish lunchbox, from the first day of school to the last day at the office.
Chef Freja
Dyrlaegens Natmad
Copenhagen's most storied smorrebrod: leverpostej, cold salt beef, trembling aspic, onion rings, and fresh cress on dark rugbrod. Invented at Oskar Davidsen's in the 1880s for a hungry veterinarian and still one of the great pieces of the Danish lunch table.
Chef Freja
Esrommad paa Rugbrod
Pungent Esrom from North Zealand on dark rye with paper-thin radish and fresh chives. The cheese course that closes a proper Danish smorrebrod spread, one of the quietest, most satisfying bites in the whole tradition.