Torskerogn med Remoulade

Torskerogn belongs to the deepest weeks of Danish winter. January into February, when the cod are spawning in the cold waters around Bornholm and the fishmongers at Copenhagen's Torvehallerne lay out the heavy pink sacks on ice. You don't find cod roe in July. The season decides, and the season is now.

This is an old piece of the Danish lunch repertoire, the kind of smorrebrod you'd find at the wood-panelled frokostrestauranter along Nyhavn and down by the harbour, where clerks and dockworkers sat elbow to elbow with a glass of beer and a schnapps and ate their way through herring, roe, liver paste, and cheese in the proper order. The roe was always the quiet piece. Not the showiest, not the one people talked about, but the one the regulars ordered without looking at the menu.

Here is what you need to understand before you start. The roe is poached whole in its sack, chilled completely, sliced thick, floured, and fried in butter until the edges turn deep gold. Then, and this is the part people get wrong, it's cooled again before it goes on the bread. Hot fried roe on cold rugbrod is not this dish. Cold fried roe on cold rugbrod, with cool remoulade underneath and bright chives on top, is. The temperature is part of the flavour. You'll taste it and you'll understand.

The hardest part of the whole thing is the patience. The poaching is slow, the cooling is slow, the frying is fast and the second cooling is slow again. But none of it is difficult. If you can bring a pot of water up gently and fry a slice of something in butter, you can make this. And when you lay the first piece on the plate and see the mahogany slices against the dark rye with the yellow remoulade showing at the edges, you'll feel what the old lunch counters knew: that the simplest things are often the ones worth sitting down for.