Edda - homemade bread for breakfast

On our travels in Iceland we always meet people whose hearts beat at least as enthusiastically about Icelandic cuisine as ours.

During our last stay in Reykjavík we looked for a room in a small guest house in Reykjavík and started talking to Edda, the lady of the house. Edda's passion also lies in good food and exciting recipes.

Edda's particular passion is cooking and baking.

Edda tells us that her mother was a great cook who had to raise Edda and her siblings with little money. For example, there were often black seabirds, a kind of poor man's food back then. Their mother soaked the birds in milk to neutralize the fish taste and then boiled them. Edda raves about her mother's buttery seabird dishes. Today, these dishes are practically unavailable in Iceland.

As a child, Edda couldn't really appreciate her mother's good cooking, she tells us. Her passion for cooking and baking only awoke when she went to the USA for a year as an exchange student. There were so many foods here that she didn't even know about back then in Iceland, and she loved her host mother's recipes.

Edda is not a trained cook, but she has worked several summers as a cook in a fishing cabin in northern Iceland and has written recipes for Icelandic magazines and the radio.

Guesthouse “Eric the Red”

Today she and her husband Rúnar run a guesthouse right in the heart of Reykjavík, diagonally across Hallgrímskirkja.

The house was built in 1934 by a Reykjavik architect. Rúnar bought it in 1996 and converted it into a guest house with 12 guest rooms. From the kitchen window you practically look straight onto Hallgrímskirkja.

Behind the kitchen is the breakfast room. Here, guests are served warm porridge in the morning, cereal, cold cuts and jam. It is comfortable to have breakfast here in a large group, to be able to exchange ideas with other guests from all over the world or to simply look at one of the many books about Iceland, Icelandic birdlife or Icelandic cuisine in peace and quiet.

By the way, the breakfast eggs come from the land-grabbing chickens that Edda and Rúnar keep in the garden. Only chickens, no roosters, Edda tells us, it's no different in the middle of the city.

Breakfast with homemade bread

Edda thinks home-baked bread is the best. And so she still bakes her own breakfast for her guests. Every morning there is fresh, warm bread with caraway seeds; she let the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator. Edda thinks the bread tastes best when it’s still warm.

She also often serves homemade crispbread, with plenty of caraway seeds, of course.

There are always sweet pastries on the breakfast buffet, sometimes a lemon or sand cake, but sometimes also an absolutely delicious date bread.

Crispbread, freshly baked caraway bread for breakfast

and delicious buttered date bread

By the way, Edda told me her recipes for these three breads. I'm looking forward to introducing you to the recipes in the next two weeks!



[Translated from here.]