It's wonderful to drive through the Danish countryside in summer. And, almost anywhere, you can add a little something to your trip by stopping at one of the many roadside, stable-door or farmshop places where home produce is on sale. Here you can buy everything from homemade elderberry cordial to half a lamb. Quite often, such sweet-tooth articles are on sale as honey from own hives or jam made from homegrown berries.

'Taking parsley away from a chef is tantamount to making it impossible for him to practise his art,' is what the Frenchman Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc d'Antic once wrote. And it is certainly true that most Danes - including chefs - can hardly imagine, for example, new potatoes turned in butter without a sprinkling of parsley. Herbs are being used as never before in restaurants.

Apart from parsley, there are chives, chervil and sorrel in saucepans and frying pans. And they are often used with a liberal hand, so that everything from sauces to bread has a fresh tinge of green to it.
Some restaurants even have a small plot of land where they grow their own herbs along trusted traditional lines.

Who is the quickest and who has the best connections? That is the big question amongst all the country's chefs every year when the first new Danish potatoes come on the market. There are only a few of them and they cost a small fortune - about DKK 100 a kilo. But the restaurants will do anything to be able to serve them, turned in butter and with a sprinkling of parsley. It's the start of a potato hunt, every bit as intense as the one that is unleashed every year in France to get hold of the first bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau.

New potatoes are not the only produce that restaurants will move heaven and earth to get hold of. When the season's first shrimps, asparagus, strawberries or St. George's mushrooms - small yellow mushrooms - appear on the market, you have also got to get there first!

'A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye,' said the famous 18th-century French master chef Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. There is plenty of opportunity to round off your meal with cheese at Danish restaurants. And not just with cheese from France, Italy and Spain, for Denmark is beginning to gain increasing prominence on the cheese market. In fact, Denmark has won the world championship in the 'blue cheese' category in the USA for three years in a row. A number of small dairies now produce quality cheeses using traditional methods. One example is Fanø Mejeri, where visitors are welcome to watch the production process from behind a glass screen.

Surrounded by Øresund and the North Sea, Denmark is quite naturally a fishing nation. Every night, depending on the time of year, tons of freshly caught plaice, Dover sole, lemon sole, zander and shrimps arrive at Copenhagen's fish market (Fisketorv). A few hours later, they are served, steamed, turned in butter or fried, at, amongst others, the fish restaurants in Copenhagen.

There are a couple of these along Gammel Strand, with views of the canal and the city's very first fish market. That was where fishwives and shrimp-sellers used to sit and sell their fish, vying with each other for custom, while exchanging insults and quarrelling with the so-called 'rødstenskællinger', women who had been in prison and now made a living from crushing red bricks along the quay and selling the resultant powder as a polish to the copper factory in Copenhagen. Today, there is still one fishwife who sells all sorts of delicious seafood wearing traditional dress.