Old Time Favourite

When the husband is away, I have a few dishes up my sleeve, tucked down in the freezer, that I love but he can barely stand the smell of. My number one came out the other day, and I have really been longing for it, as he has been home unusually much since Christmas. Ok, it´s nice when he comes back, too.

I am talking about that Swedish standard: blood pudding, made with pig´s blood, lard, milk, and rye. Love it or loath it, hardly anyone is indifferent to this speciality. When I was little, my mother used to combine it with fried liver, not on one plate, but serving the kids and herself pudding, and my father liver, as each team could not stand the other´s dish. I was on both teams, at different times, but nowadays I´m all for the pudding. Actually, that´s probably a question of availability. I can´t remember last time I saw fresh liver in the meat section at the supermarket. You probably have to order it to get it, these days. Pudding, however, is sold in large quantities. Unfortunately, my favourite kind is not made anymore (it had more texture than the regular ones), so I stick to local produce, in this case Hugosons.

Yorkshire pub pudding: red onions, tomatoes, and bacon.

You can find it in the UK as well, where it is called black pudding. Blodpalt is a dumpling eaten here in the north, made with reindeer or ox blood; I have never tasted it and should really try, but in some other company than immediate family, obviously.

I just make it simple: fry it and serve with lingonberry jam, or home-made rowanberry jam, which I happened to have. It is often also served with bacon, American (crispy, or "cremated" as the English say) or European, which is salty, smoky, fatty, but more substantially meaty (what Swedes would call stekt sidfläsk). In school, we would sometimes get a kind of lingonberry sallad, with cabbage mixed in, which was horrid, so I´m not going there!

I drink milk with it - naturally. I´m Swedish, after all.