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.