If there is one meal that summarizes most of the eating Martha and I did in Sweden, it would have to be the one we ate at Rolf’s Kök (pronounced “shook”), just north of central Stockholm. No fancy restaurant, Rolf’s was one of many restaurants downtown focusing on husmanskost, everyday Swedish cooking. Husmanskost restaurants generally have a set menu of one or two choices that varies depending on the day of the week (and varies seasonally), as well as a few à la carte items. In our (brief) experience, the two choices were both “meat” (including fish) and “potatoes”. I’ve heard the American Midwest described as a meat and potatoes culture, but the Swedes take this to a whole new level.

We went to Rolf’s Kök on a Monday in late August, giving us the choice between “Lukewarm Poached Salmon with Cucumber, Fennel and Dill Mayonnaise” or “Isterband (Fermented Lard Sausage — post forthcoming), Mustard Creamed Potatoes and Beetroot”, preceded in either case by a bowl of Cauliflower Soup. I ordered the salmon, Martha the isterband.

After our menus were taken away our server delivered a tower of crisp rolls of bread impaled on a spike. I’m pretty sure this arrangement would have been met with many a personal injury lawsuit if it were attempted in the U.S.A., but Sweden is a less litigious place and anyway Martha and I somehow managed to remove our rolls without receiving the stigmata. The bread was accompanied by twin whipped butters and a third container full of tiny ziggurats of sea salt.

The rolls looked so good that they practically demanded to be eaten right away, but Martha and I somehow managed to resist long enough for the cauliflower soup to come to the table — a good thing, too, since bread was the perfect implement to sop up every last bite of cauliflower cream. Europeans have a better developed art of vegetable purée than we do in the United States. Give a European a vegetable — just about any vegetable — and they’ll serve it back to you as a creamy-textured soup that tastes like the vegetable in question, but with subtle flavors that suggest greater artifice than simply tossing cream, broth and cauliflower into a blender.

I’ve said that our meal at Rolf’s was a typical example of the kind of food we were eating in Sweden, and indeed salmon with potatoes and dill mayonnaise is something you can get just about any-where and time) throughout the country. But to call the salmon brought to me at Rolf’s Kök average really doesn’t give the restaurant enough credit: this was a really exceptional example of the Swedish favorite. Lukewarm (exactly the word our waitress used to describe the dish in her impeccable English) is not a word that carries positive connotations for me, especially when used to describe food, but it was just right for this fish — you can’t really taste anything when it’s piping hot.

The sausage Martha ordered was described as ‘tangy’ which indeed it was. At the time we assumed this was from lemon zest or some acidic ingredient but later found out that the tangy sourness of isterband  is caused by Lactobacillus, active during the four or more days when the sausage is aged at just below room temperature. Isterband is not cured; it is moist like a fresh sausage. It’s just not quite fresh. This was one of the most interesting things we ate in Sweden.

That’s how it was with Rolf’s Kök: typical but especially well-executed Swedish food. The restaurant also stood out for us in a way unrelated to the food: this meal was the first time, after three days in Stockholm dining out twice per day, that we experienced real table service, where our order was actually taken while we were sitting at a table, looking at a menu book. Up to that point, the norm had been counter ordering, with our food either picked up at a central point our brought out by a server announcing the name in inscrutable-to-us Swedish or, better, our order number, which our two semesters of Swedish classes at the American Swedish Institute a few years ago barely allowed us to parse. Of course, the level of service we encountered  might have had something to do with the types of restaurants we were eating at — Martha and I try to be frugal within reason when traveling. But it’s not like we were eating exclusively at coffee shops, which is about the only place, in Minneapolis at least, where you have to put up with counter based ordering. It seemed to be a cultural preference for the Swedes, and it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint: one central place to post the menu, take the orders, handle the cash. But I always feel a little on the spot when ordering at a counter: trying to read a giant chalkboard menu, a line of hungry and decided diners behind me — and being next-to-clueless about the language the menu is written in only exacerbates my anxiety issues. In light of this and the other stresses of travel, being seated and handed a menu at Rolf’s Kök was a relief.

And it’s not like we had to pay a premium for the convenience, either. The prices at Rolf’s were comparable to the other places we had been dining. Our lunch cost 274 Swedish crowns, which the good people at Visa tell me is $47.51. This seems like a lot, but it was pretty hard to find a meal in Stockholm that cost much less. If they could all have been as good as Rolf’s Kök, we would have been well pleased.

As I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a Saint Patrick’s day post for this blog that wasn’t corned beef and cabbage — because I had to post something, right? — I kept coming back to bangers and mash. I’ve never been to the Emerald Isle, and while like many Americans I boast of substantial Irish heritage — real or imagined — unfortunately the recipes of the homeland did not make their way down the generations to me — I guess there are only so many ways to prepare blighted potato. Bereft of any reference from travel or tradition, I turned to the Internet.

It’s pretty easy to find recipes for bangers and mash with a search; after all, it’s just sausages with mashed potatoes and maybe some onion gravy. But my searches also revealed a disturbing truth: while there were cursory references to “Irish” bangers and mash, the dish was mostly called “British pub grub”. The British?! No! How could we celebrate Saint Patrick’s day eating the food of the hated oppressors, the colonizers? The blood of my ancestors boiled at these revelations as my blogger gut sank knowing I didn’t have a post for Saint Patrick’s day.

But further research and reflection calmed the rage and doubt. After all, many recipes did refer to the dish as a British and Irish favourite. Many authors seemed to suggest that the dish emerged some time around World War I — 1919 to be precise, which is when the first reference to sausage as bangers is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary. This also happens to be the year the Irish Republic declared its independence from those hated British, the year in which the Irish war for independence began. Could those recently invented bangers have been the thing that emboldened the Irish patriots to cast off the yoke of servitude?

Like most food origin stories, the 1919 creation of bangers and mash shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It’s useful from a linguistic perspective, representing the beginning of the use of the word bangers, heretofore a word for dynamite, to refer to sausages, but thinking culinarily, do you really think it took humans until the 20th century to realize that sausages and mashed potatoes are a delicious combination? More likely, this dish has been enjoyed anywhere people share a love for sausage and potatoes, and on that score Ireland certainly qualifies. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Bangers

There’s no canonical sausage for this dish; the spirit of it is to use whatever sausage is available locally that you like. In my research, Cumberland sausage often came up as popular in the British version of the dish. I found a recipe on the highly trustworthy sausagemaking.org from none other than forum user “sausagemaker” himself, who claimed to be Cumbrian. I was just excited to find a British sausage recipe with no sage in it.

Sausage:

• 60% pork shoulder (346 g)
• 15% pork belly (232 g)
• 7.5% breadcrumbs (58 g)
• 15% water (116 g)
• 2.5% spice mixture (19 g)

Spice Mixture

• 72% salt (13.9 g)
• 13.5% black pepper (2.6 g)
• 4.5% nutmeg (.9 g)
• 4.5% mace (.9 g)
• 4.5% coriander (.9 g)

Follow standard sausage-making procedure: dice the meats and freeze them for 30 minutes, then grind them once through the coarse plate. Mix in the spices and grind again. Mix in the rest of the sausage ingredients.

Cumberland sausage is unique in that it is not twisted into links, but rather is sold by the inch from a large coil. This makes for some fun times in the frying pan, let me tell you.

To cook the stuffed sausage, I first poached it for twenty minutes in 150ºF water (following this ridiculous recipe) before browning it in a skillet.

Mash

Boil a few russet potatoes in their skins. Pass through a ricer and fold in warm milk and butter until just smooth.

Onion Gravy

• One large onion, sliced thin
• 3 T butter
• 3 T flour
• 1.5 cups beef stock
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Melt the butter in a skillet and add the onion. Caramelize over medium-low heat. Stir in the flour. Gradually stir in the beef stock and bring to a simmer. Add salt and pepper to taste.

To serve the whole dish, nestle pieces of cooked sausage in a mound of mashed potatoes and spoon on a healthy portion of gravy.

In one of my first posts on this blog I declared my love for harissa, the spicy North African red pepper spread. Since then I have strayed a bit: our jar of harissa run out, I began to flirt with other spicy red pastes – I was not immune the the trendy allure of sriracha. But when Martha made hlelem recently, I was reminded of my former love. With sausage on the brain lately, a freshly-opened jar of harissa had me thinking one thing: merguez.

A sausage popular in North Africa and Europe, merguez is usually made with lamb. This makes sense — there are a lot of pastoralists raising flocks of sheep in North Africa most of whom are Muslim — pork is neither practical nor permitted. But since I’m free of religious obligations or cultural sensitivity, pork was definitely an option and one too delicious to ignore. The argument could be made that a pork sausage is not really merguez, but I say as long as there’s harissa I’ll not worry about fine distinctions.

As I was searching the Internet for recipes, I was disappointed to see that many contain only a small amount of harissa: 3 tablespoons per 3# of meat, for example. To make up for this deficiency most recipes add other spices (cayenne, coriander, cumin, sumac, etc.). This might be traditional, but I didn’t see how adding additional spices would help; the flavor of the harissa ought to be flavor enough. My final recipe was:

• 1# 5 oz boneless pork shoulder
• 10 g garlic (3 cloves)
• 50 g harissa
• 15 g salt

If harissa is the only thing a sausage has to lean on in terms of flavor, the success of the recipe obviously depends on the quality of the harissa. Someday I will make my own harissa (and you can be sure you’ll be hearing about it here), but with a jar already open I used Mustapha’s. This is, after all, the harissa I fell in love with; I haven’t sampled other brands very widely.

I served the sausage with a cous cous-based taboulli.

For someone who basically refused the meal as a teenager, as an adult breakfast has captured a special place in my heart. Part of the reason for this must be my discovery that breakfast needn’t involve sickly sweet grains swimming in milk — I prefer butter and salt to jam and honey on the breakfast table. It might also have something to do with my only-three-years-ago decision to start eating eggs. Breakfast is the ovophobe’s worst enemy. But I don’t credit an adult love of omelets with my rediscovery of breakfast: that honor belongs to the breakfast sausage.

The only problem with breakfast sausage is finding a good one. Too often they have some funky off flavor, are too dry, or the texture is just off (we once had a package of links with the texture of hot dogs). Martha and I have made something of a quest of finding good breakfast sausages locally but so far haven’t found a keeper. But with my newfound sausage-making capabilities, a new possibility has opened up: I will make the perfect breakfast sausage.

I wish I could say this is the definitive recipe for breakfast sausage, the culmination of our quest. In truth its flavor was a little lacking. For one thing, the sausage was underseasoned — for once I needed a heavier hand with the salt. I also thought the fennel flavor should have been stronger and would have loved a little spice. Any maybe the garlic was a little strong (or, more likely, not strong enough). Let’s call Breakfast Sausage #1 a valuable learning experience that is hopefully a step toward the ideal sausage, be it Breakfast Sausage #2 or Breakfast Sausage #47.

Breakfast Sausage #1

• 2.5# pork shoulder (boneless)
• 92 g onion, minced
• 19 g garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 11 g fresh sage, minced
• 6.5 g fennel fronds, minced
• 12.7 g sea salt
• 3 g black pepper, coarsely ground
• Sausage casings

Cut the pork into ¾” cubes. Place on cookie sheet and freeze for 20 minutes, to firm the meat.

Spread onion, garlic, sage and fennel over meat chunks. Grind using coarse plate. Lightly toss ground meat mixture with salt and pepper to distribute evenly.

Stuff the sausage into casings (if you plan to case the whole recipe, you will need about 4′ of large casings). Leave enough room to twist smaller (3″) links. Twist, cook and serve.

Otto von Bismarck once famously compared legislation to sausage-making: either one was better left unseen. As even seemingly minor political questions in the United States become more and more contentious, Bismarck’s advice seems sage—at least when it comes to politics. What about sausage? Having never made sausage before, I couldn’t have told you. But I did spend my undergraduate career studying politics; if Bismarck’s comparison was apt then surely my knowledge of politics would make for easy sausage-making. As it turns out, the processes are remarkably similar.

Step 1: Ignore all the Experts

The world is filled with people who devote their lives to studying complex problems for no other reason than a desire to solve them. As a lawmaker, it’s absolutely paramount to ignore these people—after all, God chose you for office, not them. It goes the same with sausage; there are cookbooks in the local bookstore and library filled with sausage recipes: there are probably even some on my own bookshelf. The Internet gives me access to thousands of sausage recipes developed by competent cooks with years of experience making sausage. But what do they know? I went rogue and left the cookbooks on the shelves.

Step 2: Misunderstand the Situation

The background for this sausage-making session is this: last winter, my friend Shawn decided to become a vegetarian. Consequently, his freezer full of game—provided by his avid hunter stepfather—was of no use to him. And so one cold winter in the parking lot of Stub & Herb’s, Shawn provided us with a foam cooler full of mostly unlabeled frozen bags that he identified as duck, venison and goose—unfortunately I neglected to carefully remember which was which.

After the better part of a year dipping into this bounty for feasts of wild game, I was down to one large bag of unidentified meat. Pulling it out of the freezer I was pretty sure I remembered that this bag contained goose, but as days of gradual thawing in the refrigerator passed I became less confident. When sausage day came I had to rely on the same thing so many of our elected officials use every day: research? Hah, who has the time? I went with my gut. Looking at the deep red color, I took a deep whiff of the meat and decided with confidence that this was, without a doubt, venison.

Two weeks later I can say with equal confidence that the meat was definitely goose.

Step 3: Break it into Manageable Parts

The issues brought before our congresses are often hopelessly immense, affecting great segments of society. Faced with such a situation, many of us would be paralyzed: how can we change things when so many people will be hurt, even if many more benefit? But rather than freeze in the face of the immensity of their task, our august leaders know the best way to tackle a complex issue is to break it into smaller, easier-to-understand titles, sections, subtitles, subsections, addenda, clauses and footnotes. Or, when making sausage, cut the meat into manageable 1″ chunks. Putting them in the freezer for thirty minutes helps firm them.

Step 4: Add a lot of Extra Stuff

One and a half pounds of half-frozen chunks of mystery meat hardly sounds appetizing, nor are, in most cases, bills brought before Congress in their original form particularly palatable. Luckily, it’s easy to add in enough enticements to make even the worst stinker of a bill passable, or the lowest grade of soon-to-rot meat into a delicious hot dog. Passing a bill to cut Medicare benefits? Throw in a rider to insure children—everybody loves kids! Funding the military? Might as well build an ethanol plant back home; it’s a lot of money either way. Sausage-making is a little more constrained here since the adjuncts have to somehow go with the meat you are using, rather than just tossing in any old thing. For my goose (that I thought was venison) I added 44 grams of garlic and onion, 8 grams of black pepper, 3 grams of juniper berries and 15 grams of salt (NB: this sausage was over-seasoned, in the future I’ll cut some of the pepper and juniper).

Incidentally if I had added some pork it not only would have improved the sausage it would also have made the metaphor behind the post all the more fitting.

Step 5:  Mangle it Beyond Recognition

With the ingredients assembled, all that remains is to introduce your bill to the various committees, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees, caucuses, interest groups and lobbyists who will happily amend, rewrite and otherwise modify it. The process in sausage-making is much simpler—toss everything in a meat grinder running at full tilt—but achieves the same result.

This was certainly the step that Bismarck had in mind when he warned against observing these processes; in either case it ain’t pretty.

Step 6: Package It

All that grinding and chopping is sure to leave you with a mess and more than a little blood on your hands. The same is true in sausage-making. Few would be excited to eat the loose-meat slop that exits the grinder—what’s needed is a little salesmanship. Enter the sausage-casing: a way to take all those sundry bits and package them into an appealing cylinder that will plump as it cooks. Although it is important when filling sausage casing to leave enough space to be able to twist off the links, when attempting to pass legislation it is most important that the text be printed on as few pages as possible, lest your opponents gain a valuable prop.

Step 7: Ram it Down their Throats

The sausages are stuffed, the pages are all written and the votes taken, the only thing that remains is to foist your work on an unsuspecting public or, to borrow a phrase from some of our more enlightened contemporary political philosophers, to “ram it down their throats.” Of course, if you’ve done a good job obscuring the whole sausage-making process from your diners’ eyes, this will be less necessary as they’ll be allured by the aromas and ignorant of all the necessary gore. This is easy enough to achieve in a home kitchen—just have your guests arrive well after the meat grinder is cleaned up and put away.