As much as I love foreign travel, there is a bittersweet element to it. When I leave a place, I’m fairly certain I’ll never be back. There’s just too much of the world left to see, and too little time, to backtrack.
I often find that places leave certain sensory imprints on my very soul that I know I’ll never get to experience ever again. I can try. I can come close. But some things can never be reproduced. That’s why nostalgia exists. Therein lies the heartbreak.
I’ll never have authentic gelato like the kind I had in Italy. Not the neon-colored kind that the tourists go for, but the dense yet somehow creamy, subtle and light kind the Italians choose. Yes, I can buy gelato in the grocery stores here at home, but it doesn’t taste the same or have the same texture, and even if it did, it doesn’t come with the sights, sounds, smells and overall vibe of an Italian neighborhood.
There will also never be anything quite like eating fresh, juicy prickly pear (tuna) fruit (white, never red for me) in a Mexican mercado bustling with people on a hot summer’s day. Or lounging like a queen on a pile of Turkish carpets, on a balcony overlooking Selçuk, Turkey, while savoring sweet, crumbly halva and lime tea that looked like Jell-O.
But today, at the very start of what I’m sure will be a raw and rainy Pacific Northwest winter, I’m remembering Icelandic rúgbrauð. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything more satisfying and comforting than this dense and unexpectedly sweet Icelandic rye bread, especially when it’s toasted and loaded down with melted Icelandic butter and accompanied by a cold glass of Icelandic milk. (The dairy products in Iceland—the butter, milk, yogurt and thicker skyr are all so much better than anything I’ve encountered elsewhere.)
Rúgbrauð tastes even better, somehow, once you’ve seen how it is traditionally made. Iceland sits over a volcanic hotspot, and its underground water reservoirs are constantly replenished by rain. As we all know, heat plus water equals steam. Iceland is a geothermal goldmine, with hot springs, geysers, and steam vents all over the place. For generations, Icelanders have taken advantage of this natural heat by burying pots of bread dough in the warm earth and leaving them to bake, or creating underground ovens near steam vents and steam-heating the bread for 24 hours.
Dear Husband and I had the distinct privilege of seeing one of these steam ovens in action when we visited a horse farm which I’ll be blogging about at a later date. This particular oven had been in use since at least 1886. When it was opened up, what we saw was milk cartons. That was confusing. They were steaming milk? It turns out that their waxed milk cartons make the perfect containers for their bread dough. They put the dough inside, place it in the oven, and when they take it out, they simply peel the cartons off and discard them, and then they have perfect loaves of rúgbrauð. I had always wondered why the loaves were long and square at the end. Now I knew why.
There’s something deeply satisfying about knowing that your bread emerged from Mother Earth herself. It makes you feel connected to nature in a way that most food experiences don’t. And lest you doubt the power of Iceland’s geothermal heat, I can personally attest that the hot water coming out of many Icelandic taps is enough to scald the flesh directly off your bones. You’ve been warned.
On our last day, I was really looking forward to getting back home, but I was also having mixed emotions. One of our last stops before the airport was Kolaportið Flea Market, and one of the things I grabbed on a whim was a loaf of homemade rúgbrauð. I figured it would be like taking a little piece of Iceland home with me.
It always takes me a few days to recover after a trip: the accumulated exhaustion of constant travel, unpacking, and catching up with everything that mounted up during my absence. So it was a few days before I thought about the bread again. And then, one day, there it was, and sure enough, it was every bit as good as I remembered, and it transported me right back to Iceland in my mind. I could almost smell the steam.
Of course, DH had some, too, and despite the fact that I was slicing the bread thinner each day, inevitably, one chilly morning I stood in the kitchen in my pajamas and bunny slippers, staring at the last slice of rúgbrauð, which I knew DH had saved just for me. I toasted it very carefully so as not to burn it, and then I drowned it in butter. God, it smelled good.
I shuffled into the living room with it, and wrapped myself in my fuzzy, weighted blanket. I stared down at what would surely be my last slice of homemade rúgbrauð. I ate it slowly and had a nice long think about all the amazing things I had experienced in Iceland. I knew I’d carry those memories for the rest of my life, but this was the last time I’d be able to taste them.
But even if the sensual dimensions diminish over time, and the memories become mere shadows, how lucky am I to have so many amazing shadows? I have Italian neighborhoods and Mexican mercados and steaming Icelandic geothermal ovens full of aromatic rúgbrauð. I was probably the only person on earth at that exact moment who was getting tears in her eyes over a piece of toast.
And that is truly a gift.
Incidentally, you can get recipes for rúgbrauð online. Here’s a good one. I’ll probably never make it because I’m lazy and the ingredients take a bit of extra effort to find. And I’d worry that if it didn’t taste as good, it might replace the memory of my last slice of rúgbrauð. And when something is already perfect, it’s often best to just leave it be.
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