Salted Herring and the Priest of Rättvik

    When I was visiting my friends Maren and Lasse in Sweden one year, Maren and I made a week's excursion to the heart of Sweden, the landscape called Dalarna, home of the famous carved Dalarna horse and, for many years, an important farming district of Sweden.

For centuries the Swedish farmers would take their cattle to a summer pasture, where the girls herding them lived in a little village called a fåbod. Maren and I lodged in a little house in a former fåbod village at the north end of the long north-south lake called Siljan. Our house overlooked the lake. I slept in a cupboard bed painted with Swedish folk-design hearts and flowers with a curtain to draw for privacy. In the morning we heard clanking cowbells on the hill above the house, but the cows must have been grazing there only to add atmosphere because the fåbod tradition had died away in the mid-twentieth century. The economic backbone of this village was now tourist dollars. At the end of the week, though, at the southern end of Siljan, Maren and I found a fåbod still in operation, though also mostly for the sake of tourism. When we read in a brochure that this village, Ljusbodarna, offered a traditional Swedish glödsill, a herring dinner, on Sunday evenings and that this Sunday would be the last glödsill of the season, we decided to go, even though we steeled ourselves for a tourist's fake experience.

    We got more reality than we expected. The twentieth century disappeared as soon as we left our car in the gravel parking lot and entered the village. Seven or eight log buildings formed a large square around the yard, where a score of roughhewn tables sat. Next to one of these buildings, at a table above the creek, a man was scrubbing huge mounds of potatoes. Over open fires three large tubs were steaming with boiling water, and smoke rose from the chimney of an adjacent hut, where charcoal reddened in preparation for the salted herring. Maren and I wandered through the farm before dinner, following a printed map to find the yard with its two pigs, the spring house where the butter was kept, and the shed with its fetid bovines.

    By then it was dinner time, so we hurried back to the village. To our surprise, the previously empty yard now milled with people, all speaking, Maren told me, the Dalarna dialect. These were not tourists but local folks, chatting and laughing like old friends. They looked at home here, as though they came every year to this last glödsill of the year. They exuded a sense of festivity and anticipation.

    But the weather was cold and threatened rain, so while Maren held our place in line for the buffet, I ducked into a small house behind the buffet table to see if we could eat there.

    From the narrow entrance, I stepped into a small, low room with plank floors. A large hearth oven to the left of the doorway emitted warmth from a recent fire, and the room was rich with the warm smell of fresh knäckerbröd, the round Swedish hardtack. Dozens of knäckerbröd circles were swinging under the ceiling, strung through their center square holes on two long poles to cool and harden. I asked the four people sitting at the plank table if Maren and I could join them, and they said, "Yes, certainly, please."

    When I returned to the courtyard, a woman clad in native Dalarna dress—a heavy black skirt covered with a red apron with yellow and dark red stripes, a white blouse with a red-and-white-plaid cotton scarf clinging over the shoulders, a white cap with its broad front brim turned back over the head—was hustling in and out of another house with food for the buffet table. A young man with a broad face and a good smile, and a young girl with blond braids—the woman's son and daughter—were heaping the table with grilled salted herring, boiled potatoes, sour-cream-and-dill sauce, knäckerbröd, butter, and pitchers of juniper beer, a slightly opaque, amber drink, like cider, with a low alcohol content. Crockery plates, real glasses, and stainless steel cutlery stood at each end of the table. This spread was the traditional glödsill dinner.

    Once a week during the summer, Alice, the woman in Dalarna dress who managed this fåbod, hosted a glödsill for the tourists—and the last one, it seemed, for her neighbors. There was no electricity. The potatoes, herring, and bread were cooked as I had seen, and Alice had baked fifteen loaves of spice cake in a cast-iron wood-stove oven on a shelf in her little log house.

Swedish spice cake from my oven

    "It's the best baking," she told me, taking me inside. She bent over the oven to open the door of the firebox, giving me as she did a picture of Dalarna women of many centuries tending the fire for their spice cakes.

    Carrying plates heaped with grilled herring, potatoes, sour cream-dill sauce, and buttered knäckerbröd, Maren and I entered the house with the hearth oven and sat it its table next to two other couples. We all introduced ourselves, the Swedes switching immediately to English in deference to me. The tall, white-haired, lively-looking man across the table, 91 years old, had been the priest of the beautiful, historical church in Rättvik that Maren and I had visited the day before. His wife, big and bold in a white coat that buttoned at the side of her chest, was 86, but still she managed to dredge from half a century ago enough English to talk to me.

    The other couple, 60-ish, were also locals. They had a summer cottage not far from here, and the man, Tor, had grown up nearby, in Leksand, selling salted herring from a sledge as a boy. It was he who had drawn the map of the fåbod that Maren and I had followed on our walk, so, to his amusement, I asked for his autograph on my map. The Rättvik priest had married Tor and his wife—"many years ago," Tor's wife added.

    My dinner companions were eating heartily. "How do you like the herring?" they asked me.

    I said, politely, "It's good, but a little salty." (To say the least!) They laughed, pleased, like any native people who can accomplish, with the ease of birthright, tasks that foreigners find impossible. They told me to absorb the salt with the potatoes and to drink lots of juniper beer, slightly sour and tingly on the tongue.

    I was curious about the fireplace oven. Tor explained that the fire was built inside the long box and the bread baked directly on the hearth. The priest's wife, eager to satisfy my curiosity about old Sweden, pointed out that the curtained cupboard behind the table was a sort of bunk bed (like the one I had slept in earlier in the week). When I left my place at the table to investigate the cupboard, I found, hanging next to the bed, a valhorn, a musical instrument made from a cow's horn. The priest's wife saw me pick it up and said with a twinkle that it was very hard to play. I impressed her by managing first a sound, then a tone. She had no way of knowing, of course, that my hippie background had offered many opportunities to play conch shells with "mouthpieces" like that of the valhorn.

    "I'd love to find a valhorn to take to my son," I said, replacing the horn on its peg. "He makes musical instruments and would be so interested."

    "First you would have to find the cow and cut off her horn!" the priest's wife exclaimed.

    When we had finished our dinner, the girl with blond braids came in with china cups and a copper pot of coffee. She set these down and returned with a plate of sweet-smelling spice cake. After the cake and coffee, both very good, we all went outside, where people were still drinking coffee or lining up to say good-bye to their hosts.

    Tor and his wife and the priest and his wife, shook Alice's hand warmly. They hugged, said how good it had been, thanked Alice, promised to return—I couldn't understand the words, but I knew what they were. Then Maren and I said our good-byes and thank-yous, except I didn't know how to say what I really felt. How can you thank someone for opening to you the heart of a country? Here were the food, the clothes, and the beautiful old buildings of Sweden, but these things the tourists of the summer could also have had. What had been given me that night was the heart of the people themselves—their pleasure in this fåbod tradition and in eating with their friends around the tables of their ancestors the same foods those ancestors had enjoyed. I knew just how privileged I had been to be a part of the priest's small party when I noticed that the other guests were drinking coffee from ordinary coffee mugs served from an urn. Only the priest's party inside the "bread-oven house" had been given coffee in a copper coffee pot and had drunk that good coffee from beautiful china cups with ruffled lips and a rose motif.

Next week: "Dinner at Sweden's Best Restaurant"

Recipes from this post:

    Grilled salted herring

    Knäckerbröd

    Swedish spice cake

GRILLED SALTED HERRING WITH SOR-CREAM DILL SAUCE∫

The concept is simple: Grill the salted herring over a charcoal fire. Add chopped dill to sour cream. Serve with small boiled potatoes. Add no salt to anything.

KNACKERBROD

Ingredients

1 cup coarse rye meal

1 cup rye flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup milk

Preparation

Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Lightly flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Preheat oven to 300º.

To make

Sift the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter. Add the milk and stir till smooth. Turn onto a floured board and roll very thin. Prick with a fork. Cut the dough into circular pieces about 1 foot in diameter. With a thimble make a hole in the center of each piece. Place pieces on prepared baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes at 300 º. Slide baked knäckerbröd through a string to hang close to the ceiling to cool and harden.

SWEDISH "SOFT SPICE CAKE" (MJUK PEPPARKAKA)

Makes one 9"x5" loaf

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 cup sour cream

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 1/2 cups sifted flour

Preparation

Let butter soften./ Butter and flour a 9"x5" loaf pan. Preheat over to 350º.

To make

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix dry ingredients together and add them alternately with sour cream, beginning and ending with dry ingredients. Bake in the prepared loaf pan at 350º for 55-60 minutes.

Working at Mums

 (Note: This essay has no recipes attached because Mums closed long ago and I lost contact with any of the owners, so I had no way to ask for their recipes.)

    As I was passing through the crowd at a Christmas wine-tasting gala a few years ago, someone called my name with joyful recognition. I turned to look but didn't recognize the speaker until he said, "It's Merrill. From Mums."

    Immediately I felt a flood of gratitude.

    Mums was a restaurant in Ashland in the mid-'70s. More than that, it was an atmosphere, a gathering place, a wild, hippie kind of thing popular for its good food creatively prepared and for the four men whose restaurant it was: Bobby, Ed, Frank, and Merrill. Frank lived at Houkola, the commune where I had come to live after being released from the mental ward at Rogue Valley Hospital, where I had been incarcerated with schizophrenia. (See www.dianacoogle.blogspot.com, June 15 and 29, 2017,  for two posts about Houkola.)

    "You were very strange," Merrill said that evening as we talked about those days.

    Mariposa, one of the women at Houkola, had told me the same thing: that when I first came to the commune, she thought I was the strangest woman she had ever met. That strangeness was partly because of the schizophrenia, which, Carl Jung has said, is a shattering of the personality, and partly because of the Prolyxin, the drug I was taking that acted as a psychic strait jacket. As if in symbolic response to its function, it locked my head to my shoulders. The only way I could turn my head was to turn my torso. It was painful for me to be like that, though more emotionally painful than physically. Inside I was saying, "I'm not like this! I'm not like this!"

    But what was I like? I was strange, even to myself, as I tried, piece by piece, to recollect my shattered personality, to remember who I was. I was still a mother to my toddler son, but he was living with his father most of the time, at that time, so what did that mean? I used to enjoy sewing, but what was there to sew now? I used to depend on my intelligence as part of my identity, but was I still intelligent? I wasn't sure.

    Houkola had close ties to Mums both because Frank worked there and because we were friends with the other owner-cooks, too. Whenever any of us was in town, we ate there or dropped in to help. Many of the Houkola folks waited tables, prepared food, or washed dishes on a more or less regular basis. No one worked for pay. They volunteered their time because they appreciated Mums and wanted to help.

    During the time I was struggling to overcome the effects of schizophrenia, someone suggested I, too, work at Mums.

    Oh, but I couldn't do that! They wouldn't want me. I couldn't cook for someone else. I couldn't wait tables. For strangers?!

    The idea wouldn't go away. I knew it would be good for me to work at Mums—if I could—so one day I gathered enough courage to ask the guys at Mums if I could work there. They never hesitated. They simply said, "Yes, of course." Even though I was a bit strange.

    So I started work. Ed showed me how to chop vegetables with my thumb knuckle against the edge of the knife blade. Frank showed me how to crack garlic skins with a whack of the knife. I worked carefully and silently. All around me Merrill, Frank, Ed, and Bobby were laughing, talking, working to exhaustion. They were happy, energetic, creative: Bobby, the visionary; Frank, the comic; Ed, the most steady and, in many ways, the one I was closest to; Merrill, the one I could have loved if circumstances had been different. They talked to me normally and easily. They were friendly and curious but not intrusive. I began waiting tables, relating to strangers. I began to remember who I was.

    I will be forever grateful to Mums. Merrill, Frank, Bobby, and Ed weren't acting like therapists, and the work I was doing was necessary work, but what they did for me was worth ten thousand of what I did for them. My work was unpaid, but I was being paid beyond measure. Just by being who they were and responding to me exactly as I was at the moment, they allowed me the space in which to become whole again. They were my healers. And it is for the healers we hold the most gratitude.

A Gift to Appreciate

    We like to think, when we are making a gift—a doll for a child, for instance, or a rope hammock or a handmade journal—that the tedious hours spent at the craft will be rewarded with cries of genuine delight. Such was not the case with grape catsup, a tedious, time-consuming, and messy concoction to make that didn't immediately elicit an appreciative response form friends and family. Recipients of this gift inevitably wrinkled their noses and asked, "What's grape catsup?" 

    Hiding my disappointment at their lack of appreciation, I would explain patiently, "It's a condiment, like a chutney. Think cranberry sauce." I reminded my friends that catsup was really called tomato catsup and was only one variety, the kind made from tomatoes, and that tomatoes, too, were a fruit. This condiment was catsup made from grapes. So why were my friends so skeptical? But I endured their rude response to my gift because I knew that, after they had tried their grape catsup, they would come running with praise.

    Such was the case. My friends, so dubious at first, quickly became grape catsup converts, asking for the recipe one after the other.

    In spite of this success, however, there will be no more grape catsup from my kitchen. Separating grape seeds from pulp is unbelievably tedious. Just imagine the difficulty in removing the seeds from cherries, for instance. Then compare the size of cherry pits with the size of grape seeds, and you begin to get the picture. As I sat on the front stoop grinding grapes through my applesaucer, I vowed I would never make grape catsup again. If you have an easier method of removing seeds, such as enlisting a child to do the work, do seriously consider making grape catsup every summer. But if you don't have an easier method, make this condiment at least once. Unusual and delicious, grape catsup is definitely worth the trouble once in your life.

Next week's post: "Working at Mums"

Recipe from this post: Grape catsup

Grape Catsup

I did, obviously, make grape catsup again, in August 2019

Ingredients

5 pounds Concord grapes (These are most beautiful when picked off your own vines into a basket laced with the occasional broad-palmed grape leaf.)

1/2 cup water

5 cups sugar

2 cups vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup pickling spices

Preparation

Wash the forest debris off the grapes if your vine grows in a forest clearing, as mine does.

To make

Combine the grapes and water and bring them to a boil to soften. Put the softened grapes through a food mill, colander, or sieve to separate the seeds. Give yourself plenty of time. Recognize from the beginning that the process will take patience, and plan for it by putting on your favorite music or making your grape catsup on a gorgeous day for sitting on the front stoop with butterflies flitting past and a gentle breeze in the forest around you.

    Once the grapes are seeded and crushed, put the pulp into a large pot with the sugar, vinegar, and salt. Tie the pickling spices in a cheesecloth bag and add them to the pot. Simmer and stir until the mixture becomes thick. (To hasten thickening, you could add a bit of apple.) From time to time skim off the froth. Remove the pickling spices, and spoon or pour the catsup into hot, sterilized jars, seal, and process for 15 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

To eat

If you think about occasions when you eat cranberry sauce or chutney, you will come up with appropriate times to serve grape catsup. It is superb with turkey and chicken. I like it on rice. Don't spread it on bread—it's not a jam. It adds a complementary sweet-and-sour touch as an accompaniment to steamed vegetables (cabbage, green beans, spinach, broccoli), baked fowl, and pork chops. Experiment and enjoy.

Better than Smuckers

     When I returned home from several weeks in Sweden one year, I found long, luscious clusters of purple grapes dangling from the new arbor over my pantry roof. My grapevine, a transplant of a wild Concord grape, had produced volumes of grapes that smelled rich and sweet. When I went to bed at night, next to an open skylight directly over the pantry roof, the odor of sun-warmed grapes wafted into my dreams.

    My second night home, I awoke abruptly at a thump on the pantry roof. I stiffened, listening. Nothing moved. I leaned out the open skylight. Stealthily I picked up a long stick and poked it into the grape leaves. As I did, two lithe, dark forms exploded out from under the arbor, one leaping off the roof to the west, the other leaping downhill, to the south.

    Foxes!

    The next night I again woke up to a thump on the roof, this time accompanied by a strange breathing sound. This visitor was not a fox. I leaned out the skylight and shoved my stick into the leaves. Nothing. No movement, no sound. I started to poke into the leaves again when it occurred to me it might not be such a good idea to prod for an unknown animal. What if it were a skunk?

    I climbed down the ladder from my bedroom loft, went onto the front lawn, and shined a flashlight between the grape leaves covering the arbor and the pantry roof. Two red eyes stared at me over the end of a scrawny nose. 'Possum. 

    "Go!" I urged, poking at him with my stick. "Get out of there." He sat still, staring at me with red eyes. I poked again. He blinked. How do you run off a 'possum? I went back to bed. After a while, I heard him move slowly, with long pauses, off the roof. I have a suspicion he was eating grapes as he went.

    The next creature to welcome me home after my stint in the city had nothing to do with the grapes. One afternoon I was sitting on the built-in couch beside an open window, reading student papers, when I felt something ticklish around my bare feet. I thought vaguely it might have been my skirt, except there wasn't a breeze to move the cloth. I was engaged in my reading, and the tickling didn't go on, so I forgot about it. About fifteen minutes later, I stood and took a step. The snake that had been so cozily wound around my feet went skittering towards the wall. We looked at each other in mutual amazement, but he collected his wits first and slithered under the couch.

    There was no way for the snake to get outside unless he crossed to the back door or climbed the high steps to the adjacent room and out the open front door. But I didn't think a snake could figure out the cross-the-room maneuver, and snakes doin't climb steps, do they? Before I went to bed that night, I made him a little snake ladder out of pillows from the floor up to the couch and from the couch out the open window.

    That night, asleep in my bed under the rich aroma of ripening grapes, I dreamed of snakes, 'possums, and foxes, but there must have been a larger presence in those dreams, too, because I awoke with a different anxiety. I should pick the grapes. To let fruit rot on the vine is not only wasteful but could be dangerous. When the fruit is grapes and the vines lie on a roof, the danger is bears. Harvesting grapes is not an option but a safety factor, so that very day I delved into the harvest of volumes of grapes. Even after giving bunches to friends and pounds to a neighbor who makes wine, I still had enough hanging over the roof to fatten a bear for the winter. From those grapes I would make jelly. To keep me from growing as fat as a bear this winter, I would give grape jelly to friends for Christmas. 

    So I picked grapes, made juice, and turned juice into jelly. As the work went on and on, I began to wonder how much a jar of Smuckers costs.

    But I couldn't give my friends Smuckers for Christmas. Think what they would miss if they opened a jar of Smuckers.

    They would miss the rich odor of grapes in warm autumn air as I climbed the stepladder. They would miss the tangle of vines dangling over the pantry wall and the sunlight on the roof dimmed by the broad palms of the leaves. They would miss the push of my hands through the vines as I plucked long clusters of dusky dark grapes to lay in a flat basket with a rising mound of plump, Roman-feast grapes, shiny black under blue-dust outer coats, beautiful as a Chardin painting. They would miss the hovering fear, every night before harvest, of bears on the roof.

    Inside the house, they would miss the smooth roll of stemmed grapes through my fingers, like wet marbles, each one shiny with oozed juices. They would miss the transformation from smooth, distinguishable roundness to indistinguishable mass as I squashed grapes with my potato masher, and I was sorry they wouldn't be missing the eruption of grapes between my toes as I danced on my grapes to crush them, the way peasant girls do, but I don't have the vats. They would miss the transfer of colors from dark purple grapes with light green interiors to bright red juice instantly staining the cheesecloth bag blood-purple and from that color to the dark red-purple of jelly in the jar. They would miss the light pink foam skimmed from the juice on its first boiling, the frenzied rush of tiny bubbles rising volcanically to the top of the pot with a quiet sizz, my horrified gasp as the boiling mass poured over the top of the pot like hot lava, and the searing smell of burnt sugar as it hit the burner. They would miss the cool, smooth, hard touch of the new oak floor on my bare feet as I crossed from the stove to the sink with a steaming pot of pulp, and they would miss the pushing, the prodding, the squeezing on the cheesecloth bag to extract the juice. They would miss the clear-red stream of hot liquid jelly poured into jars, the bright purple-red splotches of spills staining my blue and white checkered kitchen towel, the intermittent snap of seals as the jars cooled, and the soft October sunlight aslant through the windows highlighting eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-seven jars of jelly cooling on the table.

    How could I give my friends Smuckers for Christmas when I could give them instead a jar of jelly with such a genie?

Next week's post: "A Gift to Appreciate"

Recipe from this post: Grape jelly

GRAPE JELLY

Ingredients

(These ingredients are given not for quantities but for proportions.)

4 cups of grapes, slightly underripe

1/2 cup of water, approximately

1 apple

3/4 to 1 cup sugar

Preparation

Wash from the grapes the debris of the woods that has fallen on them. Remove the stems from the grapes. Crush the grapes. Quarter but don't peel the apple.

To make the juice

Put the grapes in a large kettle along with the water and the quartered apple. Boil until grapes are soft and begin to lose their color (10 minutes or so). Strain through a jelly bag into a bowl. Let the grape juice drain into the bowl for several hours or overnight.

To make the jelly

Put the juice (don't try to work with more than 4 cups per batch; my 4 cups of grapes yielded 2 cups of juice) into a large enamel or stainless steel pan and simmer for five minutes. Skim off the froth. Add sugar, stirring until dissolved. Let the jelly boil till it reaches 8 degrees higher than the boiling point of water in your locality, at which point it should be nicely thickened.

Warm the candy thermometer before inserting it into the boiling jelly and place it where it isn't touching the bottom of the pan. If you have the misfortune, as I did, of breaking your thermometer during the jelly-making process by knocking it against the stove, you can still make successful jelly by cooking the juice with the sugar just long enough to bring it to the point of jelling. You can tell when that is by testing for the "sheeting stage" with a spoon. Begin to test the jelly 10 minutes after adding the sugar. Place a small amount of jelly on a spoon, cool it slightly, and let the jelly drop back into the pan from the side of the spoon. When the drop is no longer light and syrupy but thickens to form two large drops that come together and fall as a single drop, you'll know the jelly has reached the sheeting stage and should be removed from the heat.

    Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal the lids.