Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 2 - Nordic Countries
Intro
So my cookery project moves eastward. By which I mean pretty much north from Poland. With two recipes from a Finnish book, a Danish recipe and a Norwegian recipe our longitude averages out in Sweden. So we’re heading north from Central Europe into Western Europe in order to go east, make sense?
Although the aim is to “travel” east-west on this project I’m not in a huge rush to do it. There’s a lot of variety in Europe and I don’t mostly be moving north or south until March. After the Eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus states the countries get larger and progress quicker so, all going to plan, we’ll still be nearer the Pacific than Europe in early summer.
The book(s)
This meal was initially intended to be specifically Finnish, based off the chapter in Falling Cloudberries: A World of Family Recipes by Tessa Kiros, a book I picked up when living in Oxford and which I simply haven’t used as much as I would like - unashamedly this is the main reason I chose Finland.
The savoury portion of the meal is indeed primarily centred on this chapter of this book but between my whims on the day and an awareness of my inexperience when it comes to baking affecting my decisions (I realised cardamom rolls may be overly ambitious) I opted to supplement these dishes with a couple from another source. Despite my lack of baking know-how being a big part of this decision somehow I still ended up baking.
The rather pretty cover of Falling Cloudberries.
The book I used as a supplement is European Peasant Cookery by Elisabeth Luard (sometimes supplemented with various subtitles), as I’ll discuss nearer the end a rather different cookbook! Finland is represented in this book, though a little scarcely, and I ended up opting for a Norwegian side and a Danish dessert.
The rather functional cover of European Peasant Cookery.
What I cooked (and adjustments)
Falling Cloudberries
To some extent I failed the Nordic countries by including neither a herring- nor a dill-heavy recipe. I have failed to indulge those stereotypes and am truly sorry. However I still did indulge in a cliché by cooking meatballs, not Swedish meatballs mind, but Finnish. Specifically Finnish meatballs with allspice, sour cream and lingonberries (page 33).
I can’t quite recall whether I doubled the allspice or not when making these but otherwise the only adjustment made was to remove the meatballs from the sauce to allow more time for it to reduce, as it was a little thin. Had I access to fresh or frozen lingonberry I may have also made the jam for this myself (a recipe is on page 34) but, as it turns out, I could source the jam pre-made but not the berries. Probably more surprising that I could get the jam than that I couldn’t get the berries.
For those who are asking how Finnish meatballs differ from Swedish meatballs, despite the book stating “This is so Finnish”, the differences appear slight - it seems the Finnish variant is more likely to contain allspice as a flavouring but is otherwise very similar. Obviously that’s fine, food doesn’t respect borders and dishes repeat in neighbouring (or even distant) countries with only slight variation all the time. But I thought it worth mentioning.
The accompaniment recommended is simply boiled potatoes but I decided to be inauthentic and give Hasselback potatoes (page 58) a punt alongside them. I must admit I never thought of these as particularly Nordic but it turns out they were invented in the 1950s in Sweden and the name comes from the restaurant where they were first made. So I was wrong on that one, the more you know.
For those that aren’t familiar with this method of potato preparation a Hasselback is similar to a roast potato sans the parboiling step and with deep incisions along the potato to create more surface area - done well they’re rather aesthetically pleasing and look a bit like blinds.
Skipping ahead a bit I could have done better with these but had to adjust the recipe for reasons of timing. Broadly my incisions were spaced out further and were shallower than the recipe suggested and I think that did make them less pretty and more clumsy looking than they could have been. The internet has many pictures of Hasselbacks with wider spacing than mine though so I’m far from the worst offender!
Two other changes were also ones of practicality - I added more fat (olive oil and butter) to make basting the potatoes easier and I also extended the cooking time a little to further brown some of the paler potatoes. I also omitted sage leaves from the recipe as I couldn’t find any when I looked.
European Peasant Cookery
As a side I picked minced fish dumplings/fiskeboller from Norway (page 32) and, for reasons that will become clear later, pivoted later to minced fish cakes/fiskekaker (page 33) which is a near identical recipe until the last few steps. In terms of adjustments I used a blender (referred to, rather archaically, as a liquidiser in the recipe) rather than a food processor in making the mix, which was slow going but far preferable to the manual option - a pestle and mortar!
For dessert I was tempted by the oddly named veiled country maiden/bondepige med slør (page 503), a fine entry in the list of oddly named European foods along with poor knights and toad in the hole. However as I decided that as I wanted to push myself to try new things I’d try some basic baking rather than cooking. So I opted for a Danish applecake/æblekage (page 480). I’m no expert on the topic so I wasn’t daft enough to try and adjust this myself right off the bat.
Cooking
Aware of the time pressures with my Polish cooking last time I decided to get a head start and prepare the meatballs in advance, getting the beef and pork ready along with the other ingredients:
I don’t give exact quantities here but observant readers may notice the meatballs require exactly one red onion.
Crusts were removed from the bread (they were soaking in milk so I probably should have done this first) and the ingredients were combined into balls. Despite the jar of jam being in shot this actually is just consumed with the finish product, it’s not actually inside the meatballs.
I should have made these smaller but they actually held together really nicely.
And all that’s left was to fry them in a mix of butter and olive oil. Presumably the olive oil isn’t one for the traditionalists (unless my ideas on Finland’s climate and what grows there are very off-base!) but technically the sauce that everyone associates with this kind of meatball isn’t either so in for a penny in for a pound. Also I have fairly limited patience for traditionalists and purists anyway and it was in the recipe.
At this point I decided to make the sour cream-based sauce, starting in the frying pan to collect the meat juices and finishing up in a saucepan (this process not pictured). They’d then be warmed up together the next day. Night passes.
The next day I decided to start on the fish dumplings first - the first step was to mince white fish, this happened to be haddock but the recipe didn’t specify any particular species. Sub-optimally I did this in a blender rather than a food processor for the age-old reason of having not used the food processor for a while and forgetting how to get the thing to start. This was actually a bit of a pain but got done eventually.
Neither beer mats nor single malts were required parts of the recipe. Also apologies for the dusty bar, black glass looks cool but is hard to keep looking at its best!
Cream was added during processing and then seasonings (ie nutmeg) and an absurdly small amount of mashed potato stirred in afterwards. This mix was incredibly light, something relevant later, but was left aside for now.
I think the pestle and mortar were brought out in case the blender didn’t work and I had to mince the fish in the super old school way!
But of course I don’t have to portray my cooking chronologically, so later is now!
The cooking method was a simple case of boiling water, balling the dumplings up, dumping them in and waiting until they rise. Unfortunately the recipe just didn’t work, a first for that book, and the very light mix was an indication of that. The dumplings were so delicate that the motion of the boiling water broke them apart and formed a fishy scum instead of delicious dumplings.
After trying a couple it was time for plan B! I hadn’t time to adjust the mix further to thicken it up so I had to work with what I had. The dumplings recipe was one of three in a row in the book using essentially the same mix - a baked fish pudding, the fish dumplings and fishcakes. The former would work but sounded the least inspiring so I pivoted to making them into fishcakes.
In real time a lot of things were happening at once when this photo was taken so even by my standards this cooking surface has got a bit messy!
Truth be told the mix was so delicate that even this was challenging - some of the fishcakes did come out intact but most of what I got was (admittedly tasty) scraps of fried, spiced fish. In the background you can also see the meatballs waiting for reheating and the start of a sauce for the fish - essentially cream (in this case a mix of ordinary and sour cream) brought to the boil and then heated with prawns.
Definitely immediately after this and certainly not a few hours before I peeled and cut some potatoes (I think King Edward potatoes) like so, covering them with butter:
These aren’t cinnamon potatoes. That’s for next time.
And by waving my magic wand at around 180 degrees they became these:
You can tell I’m telling a systematic fib about the chronology of this because you can see the pan the fishcakes were cooked in on the edge of this shot.
At this point the meatballs finally got reheated and the sauce for the fish completed. I was a bit worried about how the meatball sauce was still a bit thin so I removed the meatballs after a while to give the sauce a bit more time for reduction, as I’d said earlier.
And it’s all done. With the sort-of fishcakes skulking ashamedly on the edge of the shot.
Also pictured, leftover Christmas sweets and stuff I forgot to clear off the table.
Once again a top down shot of the food.
It is also traditional to eat food of a tray with dogs on in Finland.
With this food I wasn’t too happy with the presentation, truth be told. Obviously the fishcakes didn’t hold together and their sauce inherently doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing, so not much to be done there, but I do think smaller, more regular meatballs and thinner, more frequent slices on the potatoes would have gone a long way to making it look as good as it could. Also the photo was too dark and lightening it up made the meatballs look disconcertingly shiny.
I’d also intended to steam some green beans along with the food but forgot, which is a shame as I think it’d have both made the food look a lot better and integrated well with the rest of the meal. Still, this isn’t Instagram and looking good is just a nice bonus when it happens from my perspective.
However taste-wise this actually panned out very well. The fishcakes and their sauce were both pretty unremarkable in themselves but complemented each other to become far more than the sum of their parts. The meatballs and their sauce tasted fantastic. The potatoes were below the standard I’d set myself for roasties but as these are a new method of preparation for me they were certainly good enough on their own terms. The green beans were cooked with the leftovers and I found they did indeed complement the food.
However I haven’t talked about the cake yet. Ostensibly meant for dessert this actually ended up being more an afternoon snack - as I found myself with less to do for the cooking than expected in the earlier parts of the day and I finished the cake long before finishing up the savouries.
Before starting this I’d like to stress that this is the first cake I’ve made since I was a child and the first from scratch - my prior experience of baking is twenty years in the past from a kit with Dennis the Menace on the cover! However my partner was able to help out with advice (on how things should look for example) so although I was just following the recipe I wasn’t flying completely solo.
Anyway - raw ingredients. Mostly pretty clear what they are but the bowl at the front contains almond, cinnamon and sugar (for the topping - the mix is fairly plain). I also used Bramley apples, which I assume is likely not what’s used in Denmark:
There’s a photo of potatoes in this shot, for the fans out there.
I made the mix, this is where a lot of the mess from earlier shots ended up on the hob:
Did you know Kenwood is so called because the founder was called Ken Wood? No joke.
And after cutting out a lot of mixing time the cake is ready to go in. At this point I was a little concerned because there was barely enough mix to make the cake as the recipe suggested - with a layer of mix, a layer of apple, another layer of mix, more apple and finally cinnamon sugar with almond. The topping on the cake was meant to be rings of apple but as I don’t have a proper corer that wasn’t a goer and chopped up thin slices went on instead.
I also had way too much apple but I just stewed the rest. It’s likely the recipe was written with smaller apples in mind.
After the cooking and flipping out (which my partner did for me!) the base looks promising:
But the top isn’t quite what I’d want looks-wise:
Presumably this is the sugar at the top catching so if repeated some adjustments would have to be made.
However it actually ended up really rather good aside from that, a moist but not undercooked cake. It actually did work and as I’ve very low tolerance for dry cake it can’t have been too far off what it was meant to be. I had tea with it.
Once again, an untidy table in the background.
What I’d do differently
With the meatballs I’d already mentioned making them a little bit smaller but otherwise I’m largely content with them. With the potatoes I’ve also already mentioned wanting thinner, more and deeper cuts - that’d be a starting point for further adaptations as and when I make Hasselbacks again. I can see that there’s more room for improvement there beyond that re: evenness of cooking and likely switching fats to an animal fat, which tend to work better with roast potatoes. But I see that more as experimenting to improve them than correcting a major flaw.
With the fish dumplings/fishcakes it’s actually quite hard to know what to do to fix them, I think they need more potato and/or flour to help with consistency but they’re so far off the correct texture I struggle to know how much. I expect the baked fish pudding recipe with the same mix would work, though there’s a reason I didn’t make that in the first place.
Finally with the cake I’d probably use one fewer apple and cook for slightly longer on a lower heat to try and prevent the top from catching. Obviously I’m a tad anxious about that, being inexperienced with bakes, but it’s worth a crack if and when I revisit the recipe. I’d maybe invest in an actual corer to have the nice effect of rings of apple on the top as well.
Views on the book(s)
Falling Cloudberries is part-memoir and part-cookbook - the structure’s very much framed in terms of the author’s life and family history, with each chapter (literally at times) corresponding with periods of her life in different countries, with brief sections describing what the recipes mean to her between the recipes.
This is also a book I’ve had for a while, as said before I picked it up when I lived in Oxford - I think from Borders when that was still a shop that existed. So although I’ve cooked from it before that’d have been closer to 2010 than 2020 and I honestly can’t recall how whatever I cooked panned out.
This time I found that the outcomes of the recipes were very good but that some minor adjustments were needed to get them to work exactly as intended. So not one of those rare cookbooks where everything’s actually perfect if you follow it to the letter but still of a good standard.
Of course a major caveat in this is that I cooked solely from the Finnish section. There are also Greek, Cypriot and South African chapters (off the top of my head) and I cannot vouch for whether those recipes work! On the plus side it also means the book has quite a range of content.
The book is well presented, visually appealing and despite the framing the memoir aspects don’t overtake the recipes. Overall there’s enough memoir content to make the selection of recipes seem cohesive but not enough to crowd them out - this is very much a cookbook with some colour and context on the side.
Nevertheless I do think it leans slightly too much towards presentation over practicality at times. For example recipes are often accompanied by pictures that aren’t of the dish itself and sometimes this is the right call, a simple recipe from her grandmother warrants a picture of her grandmother. Other times it’s mildly irritating - the recipe for Hasselbacks contains a lot of text talking about how pretty they are and instead of a photo of a Hasselback the accompanying photo is (an admittedly nice) shot of raw potatoes at a market. Not ideal. (This page is visible in one of the cooking photos.)
It wouldn’t be my first port of call but overall it’d be a book I’d recommend. However there aren’t any cloudberries in the book and the front cover actually shows a cranberry sorbet. So obviously that disqualifies it from any praise whatsoever, 0/10 book, absolute rubbish!
None of these in the book, thereby provoking mock anger.
(This cloudberry image is from Randi Hausken on the Wikimedia Commons - these fruit do grow in a few parts of the UK and are also called knotberries or averins. But they are endangered and most common in the Nordic countries - so naturally I don’t have my own photo!)
European Peasant Cookery is a very different style of cookbook. This is almost more of a reference book than a recipe book in some ways as it covers an absurd amount of content over its 500+ pages, genuinely attempting to cover most of Europe. Between its recipes instead of photographs it tends to have spiels on food history or reference material on thing such as species of fish. It’s very much focused on content with only minimal care for presentation - there’s no photos at all, which isn’t ideal but seems a necessary evil given its already huge length. A photo for each recipe could result in a thousand page book! If I were to sum it up I’d say it’s the kind of book that would give you a recipe for sausages and mash and start with the cuts of pork you’ll want to mince. And I know that because it contains precisely that recipe.
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A little bit of whimsy with the flamingo (not the song) talk but mostly business.
Most of these recipes seem to work well (the fish dumplings being literally the first one I’ve attempted that didn’t pan out at all) and the content covered is wide - the section on fish is subdivided by kinds of fish, as are sections on meat, game and poultry. There’s even a section for recipes based around flowers. It’s all very systematic and broad and I think it’s excellent.
However there are some definite, and sometimes serious, faults that I’d be remiss not to mention. The first is that there’s a kind of strange romanticism in some of the writing, which presents at best a strange clash with the otherwise practical air the book gives out and can be a tad self-indulgent. This style does, to be fair, extend to British recipes as well, so at least this strange “occidentalism” is even handed but it’s still strange when it crops up. See this section in a Spanish recipe for instance:
“From mid-June onwards, as soon as the spring rains are truly over, parties of women and children make day-long expeditions to favoured fields with buckets and stout sticks to gather the snail harvest. It is hard, hot, and prickly work, but the snails are so prized as a summer treat and their soup so valued for its curative powers, that there is never any shortage of helpers.”
Very occasionally this extends to the kind of generalisations on the basis of ethnicity that people from older generations sometimes hold, which are very problematic and very disconcerting for younger (as in below 60) readers - see this aside from a Romanian recipe:
“Wrapped like their charges in heavy fleeces, the hardy and stubbornly independent shephards - their lean Mongolian cheek bones betraying their Slav ancestry - lack for little. Unlike the rest of modern Romania their larders are always well-stocked...”
Yikes. Sailing very close to the wind with racism there. This was first published in the 1980s so the final sentence is understandable (though it’s confusing that it’s retained in reprints) but I’m not sure “Mongolian cheek bones” wasn’t exactly politically correct even then. Not that it’s the main point but it’s also incorrect in at least two ways (Romanians aren’t Slavs, Slavs aren’t descended from Mongols) so it seems an oddly pointless bit of stereotyping.
These bizarre tangents are in a minority of recipes, and other tangents are a bit more grounded (the introduction to the snail recipe for instance runs on for half a page but most of it is actually talking about different species of snail). Nevertheless these are flaws that are there and need acknowledged.
Another fault, perhaps more understandable, is that the coverage of Europe is patchy. Countries like France, Spain, Germany or the constituent nations of the UK have plenty of content but other areas, particularly in northeast Europe or the Caucasus, are missing entirely. The latter is particularly odd as Georgian food does actually get mentioned in the book - but no recipes appear.
This is understandable in context - this was first published when the Iron Curtain still existed so Russia not having much content and the Baltic and Caucasus states being absent altogether is understandable. But it is odd that there seems to be more content from Romania and Bulgaria, states that were quite rigid in their approach to communism, than the ex-Yugoslavia, which was one of the most relaxed communist countries.
Although I’m a tad hesitant to recommend something highly after spending so much time criticising the book I’ve genuinely found European Peasant Cookery one of the most useful cookbooks in my collection. Frankly I’d probably recommend it above anything else in it despite everything I’ve said. Granted, I doubt you’ll ever actually make 25kg of sauerkraut or your own black pudding from scratch but with literally hundreds of other recipes, most of which are more practical, you’ll find something useful in it.