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great food, great characters, stunning landscape! artisan, foodie, lake district, cumbria food, restaurant reviews, magazine, lucy, beatrix potter, yew tree, slow farm, Marmalade Festival, Cumbria on a plate
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Swedish Xmas Smorgasbord
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Location: Blogs Baby Luke goes Bananas! |
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| Posted by: CeciliaC |
Saturday, January 07, 2006 |
More Swedish traditions – Christmas Eve as celebrated in Grasmere, complete with red cabbage, herring and aquavit!
Swedes hold their main Christmas celebrations on Christmas Eve, which works perfectly for us; we do it the Swedish way on the 24th and then we have a (semi) traditional English dinner on Christmas Day – which the visiting Swedes love (they even insist on watching the Queen's speech). This year (well, last really), there was a bit of an aquavit crisis. Booths, that wonderfully well stocked supermarket, have, for some reason decided to discontinue their stocking of Aalborgs Aquavit (a very tasty aquavit, even if it is Danish). Vodka is a possible substitute, but it just lacks flavour of course. So we had to get aquavit flown in with the family coming over. Please, review your purchase list, Booths! All the Swedes in Cumbria (and there are more than you might think) want it back.
Anyway, the Christmas Eve smorgasbord included: three kinds of pickled herring (bought at Stockholm airport...), gravlax with a home made gravlax sauce which Martin prepared out of this 1960s paperback cook book of Scandinavian and German cooking, deviled eggs CCs way (mix the egg yolks with mayo, Dijon and quite a bit of curry powder - devine!), patés, honey roast ham, mustards, Dad's home made Swedish meatballs, red cabbage cooked with onions, apple, vinegar and sugar (actually, this was a left over from the Goose fest), green cabbage stewed with cream and the piece de la resistance, Jansson's temptation, a potatoe gratin with onions, cream and a particular kind of anchovy, pickled in vinegar rather than oil. It's sooo much better than it sounds.
At the table, you drink beer and do shots (or preferably, parts of shots, if you are going to last the meal), before which a traditional drinking song is always sung. My two teenage stepsons have yet to join in, but know what to expect now...
On the 25th we had an organic freerange chicken (which was of the same weight as me when I was born, according to Dad – I was pretty pathetic) from Plumgarths, with roast potatoes, honey roasted parsnips, gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Unorthodoxically, we began the meal with a green leaf salad with pumpkin seeds – definitely the healthiest thing I ate in about seven days... |
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