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THIS IS A SMORGASBORD -a unique approach to easy, informal entertaining. The Swedes, with admirable good sense, arrange their traditional buffet fare on the table in three sections, eating through from herring to meat balls in the sequence that centuries of experience have proved most enjoyable. This gastronomic convention, a great convenience if your American guests will play Swedish, is the opposite of the American approach to a groaning board. In the Swedish system each guest uses only one plate and one set of utensils throughout. The sterling silver shown above is Towle's serene new "Contour" pattern. As for what home economists call food presentation, a well-dressed smorgasbord should look as it tastes, eminently edible and dewy-fresh; decked with a discreet hand; each detail as neatly ordered to the eye as a magic realist painting; each morsel a clean, clear, distinctive taste to the tongue.
The First Course consists of a variety of herring, hot dilled potatoes, cheese, bread, butter, the whole washed down with little glasses of ice-cold aquavit. The most attractive way to serve the herring is in ranks of opened cans, each provided with a small fork. You might have a choice of:
Sill en Dill (herring done in dill)
Sill en Vin-Sas (herring in wine sauce)
Inlagd Sill (pickled herring)
Bockling (sardines)
Ansjovis
Served near to the cheese board are butter, Swedish crispbread, whole grain rye bread or pumpernickel and paler, delicate, slightly sweet Limpa. The cheeses are cheddarlike Bund Ost, cumin flavored Cumin Ost, and brown, honeyed Norwegian Gjetost.
The Second Course consists of the cold meat and fish dishes and salads. Included here are cold ham, lingon-berries, salami, smoked eel, smoked salmon wreathed in dill, cold shrimp cooked in the shell with dill and black peppercorns, cucumber salad, liver pate, jellied veal loaf, beet and herring salad, vegtable salad, headcheese. This section of the meal can be indefinitely elaborated, one thinks of the marbled mosaics, the jellied delights, the baronial roasts that are specialties on the Swedish American Line. The course is often accompanied by more little glasses of aquavit and always by beer, we show Piel’s beer here.
The Third Course of the Smorgasbord consists of hot dishes brought in at the last moment or kept hot on chafing dishes or table stoves. There are usually only two or three of these hot satisfactions, the best of all. I think, is Swedish meat balls in brown nutmeg sauce, if served the hottest. Then there are melting, enormous, typical Swedish brown beans, so unlike the New England baked variety. If you are ambitious, you may produce a traditional Swedish omelette or a cheese custard. My third favorite hot dish is a Swedish plat (small fish fillets rolled around anchovies) called Strommings-glada. It should be done with the itinerant and special herring that swim fashionably in summer from Stockholm to Salsjobanden. It can be done instead with fresh U.S.A. sardines or smelts, the result is delectable.
This is, indeed, a meal. It needs only the best, strongest coffee as a closer. But you may add a dessert such as a dish of mixed cut-up fruit or a Danish or Swedish apple cake (Swedish Kondis in New York bakes these).
Further Notes: Swedish Foods Inc.. 125 Broad Street, New York City, is the finn that supplied most of the fortyfour items that composed the wonderful smorgasbord served before the Swedish dinner given this winter by the Wine and Food Society of Baltimore. This firm also puts up small smorgasbord boxes in various sizes for cocktail snacks or whole dinners. The recipe for Stromming referred to above, as well as dozens of other easy, delicious Swedish dishes, are described and illustrated in a slim, charming volume that is the best translated work to date on the subject. It is called Swedish Food, is published by Esseltes Goteborgsindustrier, A.B., and is available at either Bellows and Company or Bonniers.
The table is laid buffet-style with Towle sterling silver. From Bonniers come the wooden trays, crystal aquavit and beer glasses, the various pottery. china or glass platters and bowls, the typically Nordic birchwood plates and servers. The salt and pepper mills and the shining, ovenproof, copper casseroles are sold at the Gourmet's Bazaar of Bellows and Company, as is the attractive copper table stove with brass lobster legs, at the extreme right of the picture. With the exception of the ready-cooked Virginia half-ham from Bellows, all the food was prepared by Nyborg and Nelson, an old-style Swedish food shop at 841 Third Avenue, New York City. -----Mary Frost Mabon
The First Course consists of a variety of herring, hot dilled potatoes, cheese, bread, butter, the whole washed down with little glasses of ice-cold aquavit. The most attractive way to serve the herring is in ranks of opened cans, each provided with a small fork. You might have a choice of:
Sill en Dill (herring done in dill)
Sill en Vin-Sas (herring in wine sauce)
Inlagd Sill (pickled herring)
Bockling (sardines)
Ansjovis
Served near to the cheese board are butter, Swedish crispbread, whole grain rye bread or pumpernickel and paler, delicate, slightly sweet Limpa. The cheeses are cheddarlike Bund Ost, cumin flavored Cumin Ost, and brown, honeyed Norwegian Gjetost.
The Second Course consists of the cold meat and fish dishes and salads. Included here are cold ham, lingon-berries, salami, smoked eel, smoked salmon wreathed in dill, cold shrimp cooked in the shell with dill and black peppercorns, cucumber salad, liver pate, jellied veal loaf, beet and herring salad, vegtable salad, headcheese. This section of the meal can be indefinitely elaborated, one thinks of the marbled mosaics, the jellied delights, the baronial roasts that are specialties on the Swedish American Line. The course is often accompanied by more little glasses of aquavit and always by beer, we show Piel’s beer here.
The Third Course of the Smorgasbord consists of hot dishes brought in at the last moment or kept hot on chafing dishes or table stoves. There are usually only two or three of these hot satisfactions, the best of all. I think, is Swedish meat balls in brown nutmeg sauce, if served the hottest. Then there are melting, enormous, typical Swedish brown beans, so unlike the New England baked variety. If you are ambitious, you may produce a traditional Swedish omelette or a cheese custard. My third favorite hot dish is a Swedish plat (small fish fillets rolled around anchovies) called Strommings-glada. It should be done with the itinerant and special herring that swim fashionably in summer from Stockholm to Salsjobanden. It can be done instead with fresh U.S.A. sardines or smelts, the result is delectable.
This is, indeed, a meal. It needs only the best, strongest coffee as a closer. But you may add a dessert such as a dish of mixed cut-up fruit or a Danish or Swedish apple cake (Swedish Kondis in New York bakes these).
Further Notes: Swedish Foods Inc.. 125 Broad Street, New York City, is the finn that supplied most of the fortyfour items that composed the wonderful smorgasbord served before the Swedish dinner given this winter by the Wine and Food Society of Baltimore. This firm also puts up small smorgasbord boxes in various sizes for cocktail snacks or whole dinners. The recipe for Stromming referred to above, as well as dozens of other easy, delicious Swedish dishes, are described and illustrated in a slim, charming volume that is the best translated work to date on the subject. It is called Swedish Food, is published by Esseltes Goteborgsindustrier, A.B., and is available at either Bellows and Company or Bonniers.
The table is laid buffet-style with Towle sterling silver. From Bonniers come the wooden trays, crystal aquavit and beer glasses, the various pottery. china or glass platters and bowls, the typically Nordic birchwood plates and servers. The salt and pepper mills and the shining, ovenproof, copper casseroles are sold at the Gourmet's Bazaar of Bellows and Company, as is the attractive copper table stove with brass lobster legs, at the extreme right of the picture. With the exception of the ready-cooked Virginia half-ham from Bellows, all the food was prepared by Nyborg and Nelson, an old-style Swedish food shop at 841 Third Avenue, New York City. -----Mary Frost Mabon
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