Hi fellow fans of Francis Lam!  In case you were wondering, the Swedish article in question can be found here.

And for those of you who haven't seen, I'm on the front page of Salon Food today!  Here's the article.  There will be a follow-up recipe.

Did I just lose my authenticity cred for citing Martin Yan?  I don't care. I'M GOING ROGUE.

I'm watching Ballerina and falling in love.  You know, I wonder if the reason there are always so many octogenarians in the audience for opera and ballet is not that they are artforms for people with money, but that as you get older, you like to see the accomplishment that follows years, sometimes decades of training, accomplishments you know you will no longer be able to achieve in your lifetime.

I'm watching these gorgeous ballerinas bending like reeds, and I know that their fate would never have been possible for me.  I mourn the rigidity of my thirty-something body, but also the inflexibility of my future, the narrowing of my paths.  It's saudade, a sweet sorrow.

Johan's apartment was a little Swedish haven in the heart of downtown Manhattan -- all white walls, extremely sparse and airy.  But he was using these overturned crates as coffee tables out in the living room that looked impossibly familiar, so familiar they made my heart ring.  Could they be?  They couldn't be, could they?  I pointed them out to him.

ME: Those look like farmer's market crates.

JOHAN: Yeah, that's where I got them.

ME: From who?  Do you remember?

JOHAN: Yeah, from a guy on the, let's see...west side of the market, in the middle.  He sold them to me, I think they were $15, maybe $20 each.

Which means they absolutely had to be from the Paffenroths of Paffenroth Gardens at the Union Square Greenmarket.  My first job in New York was helping the Paffenroths sell vegetables at their stand.  Not only were they my first employer in New York, but they're also like my east coast parents.  Isn't it crazy that Johan was using some of the Paffenroths' crates as decoration in his house?  Maybe that's not crazy to anyone but me, but it was CRAZY to me.

I heard Ilse Crawford speak about emotional design over the summer.  She said that having a piece with history in your home brings life to a space in a way that no new object can.  She showed  slides of Mathias Dahlgren's restaurant in Stockholm's Grand Hotel, which I had been to, and talked about the 300-year-old tables with uneven legs.  The souls of meals past etched deep in the heart of the wood can have an effect on the meals eaten on them today.

Of course, I understood in theory.  But before this weekend, I've never had an interior object resonate with me so intensely before.  Here were these familiar crates in an unfamiliar downtown Scandinavian loft, among white cabinets and in front of a flat screen TV.  Here, they were clean, worn, weathered and beautiful objets that echoed the slightly uneven planks of the loft's painted floor.  They have a story of their own, but they also figure strongly in my personal history.

I spent my first few years in New York lifting, loading and emptying those wooden crates at the Greenmarket.  I know their exact width and weight in my arms.  I know the way the slats feel when they're moist with water and caked with the black dirt of Orange County.  I know how three can stack perfectly together in a little latticed package, and I know the particular clacking sound they make when they're stacked together at the end of the day. 

I've seen them packed with dewy red radishes at 6am, the green leaves cushioned in the center of two red stripes.  I've seen them full of beet tops and carrot greens and hacked onion stalks, ready to be put on the truck and carted back to the farm for compost.  I've sat on many of those crates to eat my egg sandwich after the rush of morning customers was gone; I've rested my tired feet on them, waiting for the tents to be put away for the evening.

Alex has told me that he's sold the crates to people in the past for $20, enough to cover the cost of the materials.  But he talks about selling those crates with the same bemused tone that he has when he talks about people buying purslane, which he grew up thinking was a weed, a nuisance.  But it was with some pride that he told me, and I told Johan, that crates with the initials PP carved into them (which one of Johan's has) were made by Alex's grandfather, Peter Paffenroth, and might be 100 years old.
 
There's something thrilling about the idea that these very simple objects, just nails and wood, which may have passed through my own hands, are finding new life in a totally unrelated place. And yet it's also ashes to ashes -- those crates have survived Peter Paffenroth, but who knows how long they'll have a place in Johan's home.  It was a wonderful wink and smile from my own past.  And now I want to tell Ilse Crawford, hey, I totally get it.

Lina put me in charge of the Janssons frestelse (left), a duty which I took very seriously.  It can be a challenge to make a dish you've never tasted -- how will you know if you got it right?  In that situation, the only way to go is to follow the recipe as close to the letter as possible.  But I ran into trouble hunting down Swedish anchovies.



On the left, we have standard Spanish anchovies cured in salt and preserved in olive oil.  On the right, you see Swedish "anchovies", which are not anchovies as we know them, but sprats.  They're cured in a sweet/salty water-based brine that tastes of Swedish spices -- allspice, clove, that kind of thing.  Absolutely not the same thing.

I had to stalk the Swedish anchovy for a day and a half before I found some.  Let no one say I lack persistence:

> 6 train to Wall St.
> IKEA ferry to Red Hook
@ IKEA - Find out they ran out of anchovies an hour before I got there
> IKEA Shuttle to Jay St.
> F train and walk to Eagle Provisions in Park Slope
@ Eagle Provisions - Closed for the night.  DOH!
> Walk home to Sunset Park, where I eat my disappointment in the form of half a roll of Göteborg Singoalla cookies, which I had purchased from IKEA
> Wake up the next morning, play hooky from work to hunt for anchovies, walk back to Eagle
@ Eagle Provisions - no anchovies
> Take the bus to Bierkraft
@ Bierkraft - not open until noon
> Walk to Union Market
@ Union Market - no anchovies
> Walk to Blue Apron Foods
@ Blue Apron Foods - no anchovies. Counter guy suggests Russ & Daughters, though my friend Emil tweeted in reply to my frantic request for advice that they have none this year
> Walk to Brooklyn Larder
@ Brooklyn Larder - they don't open for another half hour, but the guy who answers the door says there are no Swedish anchovies
> 2 to the 1 to Christopher St.
@ Gourmet Garage - no anchovies
@ Murray's - no anchovies
@ The Lobster Place - no anchovies
@ Citarella - no anchovies
> Cab to Gramercy to pick up some keys from my friend Sarah R.
@ Sunflower Diner - we have grapefruit and tea, Sarah suggests I try Schaller & Weber.
> Call Schaller & Weber:

ME: Do you have Swedish anchovies?

GUY: Of course we got Swedish ham.

ME: Not Swedish ham. Swedish ANCHOVIES.

GUY: Hold on.  [Muffled voice] Do we have Swedish anchovies?  ANCHOVIES.  Yeah? [Back into the mouthpiece] Yeah, we got 'em.

ME: Hmph. Alright, thanks.

> With great skepticism, take the 6 train up to 86th St., walk to 86th and 2nd.
@ Schaller & Weber - SUCCESS!  Stacks of anchovies in the refrigerator case, as well as all kinds of Swedish foods.   
> Take 6 train to the N train all the way home, where I reward my hard work with the other half roll of Singoalla cookies.

Here's another recipe adapted from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking (Husmanskonst).  Theories on the dish's etymology vary, but the basic recipe is onions, julienned potatoes, cream and Swedish anchovies.  I was intimidated by the amount of anchovy called for in his recipe, since nobody else seemed to include as much as he.  Even with half the anchovies, the dish tasted plenty saline to me. 

The anchovy liquor and sauteed onions add a unique sweetness to the dish -- again, this is a bit of a level 2 Swedish dish.  It's not for everyone, but I quite liked how the rich cream and gentle sweetness cut the umami sprat flavor.  Also, pretty nifty, you can do as I did and cook it 3/4 of the way through, cool and refrigerate, then travel on the subway with it to your destination, top up with a little cream and bake at 400 for 20 minutes until heated through, finishing with the broiler to brown the top.



 
Jansson's Temptation (Janssons frestelse)
Adapted loosely from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking

4 medium yellow onions
5 large Yukon Gold potatoes
Butter
2 tins of Swedish anchovies
2 cups of heavy cream
salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Peel onions.  Use mandoline to slice onions thinly.  Melt a knob of butter in a pan.  Saute the onions slowly over medium heat until golden brown.
   
3. Peel potatoes.  Use mandoline to julienne the potatoes.
4. When onions have cooked down and are golden brown, add the potatoes, cream and anchovy liquor to the pan.  Taste and season with pepper and a bit of salt if needed.  Stir and let cook over low heat for 5 minutes.
5. Butter a large oval casserole.  Line the bottom of the casserole with half of the potato onion mixture.  Put half of your anchovies on top of the potatoes.  Cover with the remaining potato mixture.  Top with the other half of the anchovies.
6. Bake for 45 minutes until golden brown on top and bubbly.  Alternatively, bake for 30 minutes, then cool and refrigerate, covered in foil.  When ready to serve, bake uncovered in 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, finishing under the broiler at the end to brown the top.  Serve as classic fixin' with meatballs for Christmas Eve dinner.

--


 
For future ref, should you ever be in need of Swedish ingredients for Christmas, save yourself some grief and try Schaller & Weber first.  Fine selection of Abba herring, source for German 25% vinegar, which can be substituted when diluted with one part water for Swedish ättiksprit spirit vinegar (which is 12% acidity).  I like the rather alarming warning at the bottom of the label:

I've never had lussekatter, traditional Christmas Swedish saffron buns, so I had no idea if I had made them right or not.  Luckily, there was a translated recipe in the December Saveur, which came from an Allt om Mat editor, so I knew the recipe would be straightforward and trustworthy.



These buns are very mildly flavored and not very sweet.  They reminded me of Hawaiian bread (do you know what I'm talking about?) which I adored as a kid.  But it didn't really go with dinner -- I suspect it should be a fika treat, something to nosh with coffee either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, before dinner.  It's definitely not a dessert.
 
I tried to follow the recipe closely -- the only deviation I made was to soak the raisins in amaretto overnight -- I love a boozy raisin.

They really need to be baked and eaten day of -- they go stale quite quickly.  But the leftovers made a pretty lovely bread pudding with the addition of almond paste, cardamom, custard, and more raisins.

Lussekatter
adapted from December 2009 Saveur

2 1/4 oz. packages active dry yeast
2 cups whole milk, heated till finger-warm (110 degrees)
2 tsp. saffron, lightly crushed
3/4 cup plus 1 tsp. sugar
6 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp. kosher salt
3 eggs
12 Tbsp. unsalted butter, room temp and cut into 1/2" cubes
64 raisins soaked overnight in 1/3 c. amaretto liquer

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, mix together yeast, milk, saffron, and 1 tsp.sugar.  Let sit until foamy, about 10 minutes.  Stir in remaining sugar, flour, salt and 2 eggs.  Mix on low until dough forms and gathers around the paddle.  (I don't have a stand mixer, so I just did this by hand.)
2. Replace paddle with dough hook and add butter.  Knead on medium-high speed until dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, 8 minutes. 
   
3. Grease a large bowl with butter.  Transfer dough to the greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap.  Let sit in a warm place until double in size, about 1 hour.
4. Divide dough into 32 pieces and roll each piece into an 8" long rope.  Form each rope into an S-shape and then roll each end into a tight spiral.  Place buns 2" apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.




5. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Uncover the dough pieces and place a raisin at the center of each of the spirals. 
   
6. Lightly beat remaining egg with 1 Tbsp. water and brush each bun with egg. 
   


7. Bake until buns are golden brown and cooked through, 16 minutes.  Cool for at least 10 minutes.  Serve with strong brewed coffee for fika.

Lussekatter Bread Pudding

Okay, there is no tradition of lussekatter bread pudding in Sweden, as far as I know, but it's a nice way to use up some of those stale buns, and it's quite pretty to boot.  I used some leftover frozen almond paste butter with cardamom, so I'm just going to give you an approximate recipe and you can trust your judgment for the amounts to add.



1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Take 6 stale lussekatter.



2. Slice into 1" pieces.

3. Heat 2 cups of milk with a knob of butter, some grated almond paste and a bit of ground cardamom over low heat until hot but not boiling.

4.  In a large bowl, beat 2 eggs and 1 egg yolk with 1/3 cup of sugar.  While whisking vigorously, pour in a bit of the hot milk mixture.  Once well beaten, add more of the hot milk mixture until it's all well mixed. Add a splash of vanilla extract and, if desired, a splash of amaretto.

5.  Add cut-up lussekatter and some soaked raisins, let the bread soak for a few minutes. 

6. Butter a small 5" x 9" casserole.  Pour soaked bread custard into casserole.  Bake for 30 minutes until top is crisp and golden brown and custard is cooked through.  Serve warm.  Or eat cold from the fridge.  I'm not judging if you're not judging.

My parents are in Thailand now, so I wound up having orphan Swedish Christmas with some NYC stragglers.  One person got stranded here after his flight was canceled because of the weekend blizzard, one person was finishing closing on a new apartment, and a few, like me, were staycationing for no particular reason.  Given the travel nightmares abounding -- major delays, swine flu, explosive-rigged terrorist -- I can't say I'm sorry about it.

Besides, I'd been hoping to do Swedish Christmas since I left Stockholm.  My Swedish friend Lina and her friend Johan hosted and we made the julbord (Christmas table) of my Ingmar Bergman fantasies.  We even watched the beginning of Fanny and Alexander, the part before it descends into domestic violence nightmare.  Tjohoo! 


Lina and Johan in the kitchen.

I adore Lina's singular sartorial sense.  She's near six feet tall with short, asymmetrical blond hair and she's always the most interestingly dressed person in the room.  On Christmas night, she wore a single shoulder length earring with little tufts of recycled fur and a metal mesh belt in the shape of a snake clamping down on its tail. She was dressed in the colors she had painted her apartment walls, which she referred to as her "favorite ice cream flavors. The bedroom is Haagen Dazs vanilla and the kitchen is Haagen Dazs coffee."


Janssons frestelse on the left, prinskorv in the pan next to it.


Herring, consumed with snaps.  Skål!

The Swedish palate favors sweet and pickled flavors, far east spices like cardamom and saffron, fishy little fish like herring and anchovy, zero garlic and buckets of butter and cream.  As with all cuisines, you can rank the foods' level of accessibility, universally-lovable cinnamon buns being Level 1, bulging, natives-only cans of surströmming being about level 10.

So our julbord's Level 1 dishes included:
Classic köttbullar (meatballs) with rårörda lingon (stirred lingonberry preserve), pressgurka (pressed cucumber) and cream sauce
Lussekatter (Swedish saffron buns)
Prinskorv (little cocktail sausages)
Ham
Gravad lax (cured salmon) with dill on rye bread
Glögg (mulled wine)
Eggnog
Various cheeses
Pepparkakor (gingerbread thins)
Apple pie with vanilla ice cream (Paj, as it's spelled, is actually quite Swedish)

Level 2 dishes were:
Janssons frestelse (Jansson's temptation), a julienned potato, onion, cream and anchovy dish that sounds weird but is less weird than it sounds
Sweet pickled beets
Sill (herring) plate with curried herring, cream herring, matjes herring, mustard herring and dill herring, with boiled potato, knäckebröd (hard bread) and Västerbotten cheese
Snaps (aquavit)



Johan's meatballs were superb, and it was instructive to watch a native expert's technique.  He rolls the meatballs a little larger than I have -- about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, making sure to push any errant pieces of onion into the meatball so they don't break apart.  A generous amount of butter goes into the nonstick pan to melt down.  Then, before he places the very round meatballs in the pan, he jiggles the plate they're on a bit to make sure they roll around easily.  Then into the pan they go, enough to almost cover the entire pan in a single layer. Johan immediately gives them a good shake to make sure they roll and brown all around.  None of them fell apart.  Genius!  Another key -- LOTS and LOTS of white pepper.  

Dinner was such a lovely affair, about ten of us sitting in white chairs around an all white table, two caterpillars of tea lights flickering against elegant conical glasses filled with syrupy frozen snaps.  I led Helan går, since that's the only drinking song I know, and Lina and Johan each contributed a few from memory.  (One of them translated to something having four legs, something having three legs, and a cock having no legs but it can stand on its own?)  Am feeling a bit nostalgic for Sverige, du gamla, du fria.

Recipes forthcoming!

Dear Hollywood types who made Made of Honor, which I am ashamed to admit I have been watching on Netflix streaming:

1. Any guy driving through Times Square in a convertible looks like an idiot and a complete douchebag -- who would ever want to cross town like that to get to the Met?
2. Nobody would let you stroll through the sculpture room at the Met with two cups of coffee.
3.  Nobody at the Met would ever let a non-employee roll in to a painting restoration with two cups of coffee.
4. If it's 3am in Scotland, it's not daylight out in New York. 
   
5. That Figaro place is in L.A. You are not allowed to pass that off as New York.  And I don't even know where that antiques mall is supposed to be.

And I haven't even finished the first half hour.  I don't think I can keep going.

Please do not use this city to up the cool factor of your movie if you're just going to paint a totally fake portrait of it.

I <3 NY,
Ganda

I have an orange blossom candle which I've placed on my radiator.  Whenever the heat is on, it releases the slow, lazy smell of desert blooms -- the Orient, powdery and sweet. 

In my dreams, I invite the women of Marjane Satrapi's family over.  They sip strong tea from a samovar, perhaps in glass cups hugged by metal filigree.  The steam rises in double brushstrokes from their thin cups.  I sit on the floor at their feet, knees together, ankles tucked next to one hip. 

I serve these cakes. They are the secret held behind Ilsa Lund's plush lips when Rick Blaine corners her at the bazaar.  They are a pink silk nightgown trimmed with cream lace, pinned to a clothesline.  They are the sillage of an arch-browed woman in seamed stockings, the thin embroidered lines like the continuation of her spine down into the tips of her heels.  They are the inner courtyard of a tiled blue palace, a rose garden where a teenage girl fans her long, wild hair in the grass for a sun bath.

Persian Tea Cakes

The base of this cake is Smitten Kitchen's yellow cake recipe, which I am officially obsessed with.  With cardamom, rosewater, orange and pistachio, they are impossibly feminine and perfumey and delicate. They're perfect with a strong cup of tea.  I used foil cupcake cups, but you could easily use a greased cupcake tin and pop 'em out before icing for prettier presentation. I am in love with them, and I can't wait to show them off again.

CAKES:
2 cups plus 2 tbsp. cake flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 stick unsalted butter, room temp
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, room temp
1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tbsp. rosewater
1 tsp. cardamom seeds, ground in mortar and pestle

ICING:
Juice of 1 orange
1 tsp. orange zest, grated AND chopped fine
2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 pinch salt
1/2 c. Turkish pistachios, chopped

EQUIPMENT:
22 cupcake foil cups
Baking sheet

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt together.  Set aside.
3. Beat butter and sugar together. 
   
4. Beat in one egg at a time on low speed, scraping down the sides of the bowl. 
   
5. Add buttermilk, vanilla, rosewater and cardamom.  Beat on low until blended.
   
6. Beat in dry ingredients, a third at a time, until just blended, scraping down the sides of the bowl.
7. Drop cupcake cups onto baking sheet.  Fill cups about 1/3 full.
8. Bake for 23-28 minutes until barely golden brown on top.  Cool completely.

For the icing:

1. Put powdered sugar, grated zest and salt into a bowl.  Add enough orange juice to make a thin, drizzle-able icing.
2. Ice the cupcakes with plenty of orange icing.  Top with chopped pistachios. 
   

--

I submitted these for my office's bake-off today.  Though they came in second place, two of the judges (one of whom was Jim Oseland, EIC of Saveur) said they gave it 10 out of 10, meaning the third judge was my downfall.  DAMMIT!  But, BUT, Jim Oseland said my cake and the olive oil cake (which just happened to be from a Saveur recipe) were his favorites (!).  So take that, pedestrian caramel oat chocolate chip WHATEVER in first place.  Harumph.

The town I grew up in was predominantly Catholic, and you'd have no doubt about that if you saw it during the holidays.

Right after Thanksgiving, La Puente would start lighting up like Vegas. Holiday enthusiasts all over the neighborhood would string giant colorful gumdrop lights from the eaves of their homes.  A few eager beavers might have a red-nosed reindeer lamp or a giant candy cane or an apple-bellied Santa on their green lawns. In later years, strings of icicle lights would drip from the rooftops -- the closest thing to a white Christmas we'd get to see in Southern California.  Plastic Maries and lambs and camels and bearded men in togas or whatever would come out of hibernation for their yearly display, patiently awaiting the arrival of the baby Jesus doll.  The Holy Ghost could feel confident about receiving a hero's welcome on almost any doorstep in my neighborhood.

On those dark December nights, you could spot our house from the other end of the street.  Candy-hued bulbs twinkled on every single house on the block -- every single house but ours.  Our house was like a black hole, a void, a spot as dark as sin at the end of an otherwise cheerfully lit street.  X marks the heretic spot.  This slot machine is out of order.  NO TRESPASSING -- Christmas spirit, that means YOU.  It was like the easiest game of Find the Heathen ever.  Whenever we rounded that corner, I'd sink a little lower into the back seat of our van.

"Pau, can we pleeeeeeeeeze have Christmas lights this year?  Pleeeeeeeeeeze?  We'll help you put them up!" my brother and I would beg.

"And who's going to take it down after Christmas then?" my parents would ask.

"You don't HAVE to take them down!  You can leave them up all year!  See, everybody else does that!"

They never relented.

But we got Christmas. Or something Christmasish.  We had to beg my father to bring our Christmas tree down from the garage rafters.  It was a balding plastic fir, probably purchased at Sears or Best in the late 70s, a perfect geometric cone you could practice equations on.  If we were lucky, we'd get it up the week before Christmas, a decade of tinsel still strangling the abrasive green needles.  It would stay up in the corner of the living room through Christmas, through New Year's, through all of January, and maybe by February my Pau would put it back in the garage.

I know we'll look back at the aughts and think, "God, salted caramel is SOOOOOO 2000s, isn't it?"  But I hope these Liddabit Sea Salt Caramels never go out of style.  It's a 2-inch bar of soft buttery goodness, shot through with the perfect amount of crunchy salt crystals and wrapped in a square of wax paper.  Best 75 cents you'll spend at the Chelsea Market.  I picked them up at Lucy's Whey, my friend Amy's fab newborn artisanal American cheese shop there. 

I also got a block of Prairie Breeze Cheddar from Iowa -- sweet, grassy and insanely good.  I am really looking forward to breakfast. 

--

NaBloPoMo is almost over, and thank god for that!  I need my sleeping time back.  I'm hoping to have something special to finish the month off tomorrow.  Check back!