Sømods Bolcher

Why it is renowned

Sømods Bolcher was made Purveyor to the Royal Danish Court in 1991, on the workshop's hundredth anniversary, and still supplies the royal household.¹²³ The workshop keeps its doors open: anyone can watch the sweets being boiled and pulled at Nørregade 36, free of charge, four times each weekday.⁴ The travel guide Indagare lists it in its Copenhagen pages, with the rhubarb sweets as the highlight and the lollipops as a souvenir to bring home.⁵

The story

L.P. Hansen started boiling sweets in 1891 on the second floor of Nørregade 49 in Copenhagen.¹² With no sons to follow him, he passed the workshop to the family of his childhood friend Martin Søemod, a butcher; Martin's son Theodor took it over in the early 1920s, and it has carried the Sømod name since.¹² In 1932 it moved across the street to Nørregade 36, through the courtyard.¹⁴ The method has not changed: pure sugar boiled to 180°C in the original boiler, now fired by gas instead of coal, then shaped by hand on the production table, with natural flavours and colours and no preservatives.¹ Output has grown from 27 to about 50 tonnes a year.¹ Camilla Søemod, of the fifth generation of sweet makers, works in the shop today.¹⁴

What to know it by

• Dameskrå⁶Liquorice boiled sweets, a long-standing favourite
• Hoste bolcher⁶Liquorice cough sweets
• Rabarber bolcher⁶Rhubarb boiled sweets
• Klumper⁶Large sucre d'or sweets