Getting Fruity in Scandinavia

How about a cookbook from another cuisine that this white bread midwestern ass is mostly unfamiliar with? Maybe something from part of the world cold enough that a midwestern mid-January won't seem as rough by comparison?

I don't really even have a good excuse to be unfamiliar, as Scandinavian cooking is home cooking to a lot of white bread midwesterners. Scandinavian Recipes is from the "Fellowship Circle" of Mount Olive Lutheran Church, Santa Monica, CA (1979), a group that seems to have hated fellowship and/or perhaps actually have been square, based on their love of scare quotes. (I didn't add them to "Fellowship Circle"!) (The introduction also thanks those who shared "their 'special recipes,'" which kind of made me imagine that all the recipes originally had marijuana in them or something. The "Fellowship Circle" really loved their misplaced quotation marks!)

Based on the book, it looks as if Scandinavians also really love fruit. There are so many recipes for chilled fruit soups that if I didn't know better, I would think Scandinavia was hot and needed cold soups to cool everyone down.

A few do offer the option of serving the fruit soup hot, though.

Hot soup gets thickened with f[l]our and cold soup gets lemon gelatin and grape juice or canned blueberries.

Hot side dishes get the fruity treatment too.

Sauerkraut and applesauce! They're both things that people seem to like with pork, so this probably sounds exciting to someone who... is not me.

Of course, for the recipes to be truly Scandinavian, some preserved fish needs to be in play.

For a plain day, use salted herring with potatoes, beets, apple, and onion.

If you want a fine salad, spring for the pickled herring and pickled beets to go with the apple and onion, and get rid of the potato filler.

Instead of the common mock chicken, the Scandinavians offer a mock duck, which is, of course, filled with yet more apples and prunes.

And this reminds me that I probably have at least some experience with Scandinavian cooking. The propensity to quietly slip sweet-and-sour accompaniments into foods that would look "normal" to an unsophisticated little girl in a small town tells me that our church must have had at least a few people of Scandinavian descent, and their potluck offerings were probably the ones that drove my parents to repeatedly remind me that "That's the worst thing I've ever tasted!" is not a socially-appropriate thing to say at a potluck.

So in short, yes, I have always been this charming, and even if I can't appreciate the recipes in the book, I still love the divider pages by Carol DeVrie, including this gnome riding a pig into the Meats chapter (and out of this post).