Are Those Anchovies in your Potatoes?
By Lindsay Sterling
My neighbor in Freeport, Maine, handed
me the phone number of a Swedish yacht-chef he knew from his job at the
boatyard. “Monica’s great,” he said, “Maybe she’ll teach you how to cook
something for your column!” Indeed, a couple days later Monica Eriksson arrived
at my house enthusiastic about showing me how to cook a favorite dish from home.
She is from Kungsbacka, a small
town on the West coast of Sweden that is a lot like Freeport, with pine trees,
summer guests, and a lot of islands. It’s also really cold for much of the
year, which is why she says people from Sweden like to travel so much. She herself
worked as a flight attendant based in Spain for 17 years, flying in and out of Africa,
Majorca, and the Canary Islands. When she moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she
brought all her cookbooks with her. “When I wanted to relax, I cooked. It was
therapeutic. It was fun to do different and new things. It’s fun to watch chefs
on TV make things that don’t always turn out right. It’s okay to make
mistakes.”
She found work as a yacht
stewardess and sailed from Isla Magarita (off the coast of Venezuela) to other
islands in the Caribbean. As a deck hand, she sailed to the Galápagos Islands,
Chile, and the Panama Canal. At one point, the crew was missing a cook. She stepped
in and so began her career as a yacht chef, throwing fancy dinner, breakfast,
and lunch parties for days and weeks on end.
Her favorite dish from Sweden was a
potato casserole known as “Temptation of Jansson.” To make it, she cut up
peeled potatoes like she was making French fries, layered them in a casserole dish
with buttery sautéed onions, anchovies, cream and breadcrumbs, and baked it for
45 minutes. The dish is often served as part of a traditional Swedish smörgåsbord, a table filled with a
array of specific foods including: three types of herring, gravlax (salmon
cured in salt, sugar, and dill), rye and whole grain bread, butter, a wheel of
cheese, sausages, sliced cold cuts, hardboiled eggs with caviar, Swedish
meatballs, pork ribs, pickled cucumbers, and pickled beets.
Swedish food, she admits, does tend
to be on the heavy side because of the cold climate. Her international traveling
has lead to a lighter style of everyday cooking. She likes a good fresh kale salad
with raisins, nuts, oil and vinegar, but at the same time she is absolutely
effervescent with fondness for Swedish food. She recalled home-foraged chanterelle
mushroom toasts, lingonberry preserve with potato and meat dumplings, pyttipanna (chopped potatoes and beef
with eggs and pickled beets), ginger bread, saffron buns, cardamom cake, and during
the holidays: Vinglögg
(wine mulled with orange rind, cinnamon, clove and cardamom).
The potato dish, Temptation of
Jansson, is a great new twist on mashed or scalloped potatoes that will come in
handy this winter. I’m going to serve it next with poached salmon and her kale
salad. Ever traveling, Monica hopes to retire one day in Ecuador so she can
shop at a fresh food market every day. I hope to see her there sometime.
Simply Scandinavian (19 Temple St, Portland, Maine M-Sat
10-6pm, 207-874-6768 or 888-534-9712) is receiving a new shipment of imported
foods in the coming weeks. Monica suggests: “The salt fish roe paste on
hardboiled eggs is excellent. Kalles caviar is the best brand.”
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2014
