My flat in the UK, a new temporary post-doc-studies accommodating asset, is furnished, which includes pots and pans and things in the kitchen. Most of these are new or at least clean. Only the oven, split into a baking and a grilling compartment, has seen way too many moons and could apparently not be cleaned any more. I am looking forward to a 19th century-style ur-British day of coal mining one day. For now, I’m happy to consider here the various things I am renting.

First, there is the scooper. This is a bent slotted spoon made from heat-resistant black plastic, apparently, or hopefully, used for scooping up sausages from their greasy bath. The plumber, who came after a week to fix a leaking tap, forgot his keys behind the wooden panel in front of the bathtub and used the scooper to retrieve them. There are two identical scoopers in my kitchen: one is for the plumber and one for the sausages. But seriously, who would even need one scooper and what’s wrong with a pair of regular tongs for grabbing keys and sausages, one could ask. So that is part one: superfluous gadgets.

Let’s proceed to part two: non-functioning gadgets. I have anyway had my time with whisks. The one I used most of the time (stainless steel; a few rather stiff wires) has no hook on top, and the fiddly screw-n-bent-wire thing I inserted into the mystical hole at the place where a hook should be keeps unscrewing and unbent-wiring itself, which drives me bananas. The effectiveness of this bit of kitchenware got later outsmarted by Robin’s whisk, which has more, and more flexible, wires and no hook, and hence drives me bananas too, but at least makes foam and whips cream or mayonnaise; that is, performs its duties. Now, my rented British whisk. How many? Eight? – strands of fat black bent plastic that clunk around in the mayonnaise bowl like a toddler on a three wheeler. It generates heat (in my wrist and eventually: head) and noise but no mayonnaise. No milk foam for my coffee either, in fact nothing at all. You still hear the designer’s voice above the hapless clattering and splashing: “let them try this and we’ll see if they still succeed!” The up-side: it is very easy to clean eight strands of thick plastic. This will make it easy to wipe the dust off my whisk when I move on.

Then, there is the category of booby-trap gadgets. Like the (black, plastic) scraper thingy. Apart from the color, it looks like any kind of slotted spatula. The silly thing about it is that it is too thick to function as a proper spatula while it is, for no apparent reason, made of flexible matter.

The rook wings (fiddly and messy as they are anyway) that I had fried in nut-brown butter, turned, fried some more and finally filled up with a dash of dry white wine, ended up stuck to the bottom of the frying pan (this was the first time that anything I cooked in brown butter ended up sticking to the pan. I should have listed that frying pan above). I inserted the scraper thingy between the pan surface and the rook crust, but it was too thick to enter properly and made a holy mess of about a third of my dinner: half-soft bones, bits of flesh, translucent onion dice and beautiful brown butter all goo-ed together. Turned around to get a keener angle of attack, the scraper did in fact properly catch the rooky edge. Then it flexed and Splat! A healthy scoop full of wine, butter, onions and rook debris was released across the stove and sent cupboard-wards where it took a good time to wipe off. I am sure that if someone would care to refine this effect, she would end up with some spectacular cooking techniques: turning an omelet while sending it diagonally through a large restaurant kitchen, for example, or serving meatballs across a schoolyard. But this is my little rented kitchen with too many to-be-wiped surfaces much too close together! I am going to buy a real spatula.

Kitchen tools still appear to be made by a bunch of wrathful men sitting behind their drawing boards, sketching (in the assumption that they are punishing housewives, like 35 years ago) their misogynous reflexes out of their systems. Or perhaps they think that the wonders they create are meant to be lined up beside the fridge for mere decoration. Why black, then?

Somewhere in my archives there is a recipe with Savoy cabbage and salmon. I am sneakily not giving the link. Otherwise people would never have to leaf through my accumulated postings which would be sad.

I keep being interested in the possibilities of savoy cabbage -  it should be a marvelous vegetable, the queen of leaf cabbages. We might, for example, attempt to braise the cut-up cabbage in white wine and give it a creamy lift at the end. We’ll likely end up with a soggy and squishy heap that tastes quite nice but looks like what, when I was little, the farmers gave to the pig. Alternatively, we might try out some kitchen-wiz oven treatment with shredded savoy and minced lamb, which could result in dried-out, brown and bitter strands between the sizzling fragments of meat.

There are two easy paths towards better savoy cabbage: blanching and butter. Blanching makes the leaves soft and pliable – this enables you to wrap stuff in them. Butter is not even my first choice with other cabbages, but here, let me tell you, there is no way around it. Today I also got bits of fish involved in my experiment, but, you guessed it, minced veal or other niceties will do just as well, with some adjustments and a bit of luck.

So we will need the butter, some bits of fine, white fish, a few savoy cabbage leaves, preferably big but not dark green ones, onion, salt, quite much coarsely ground black pepper, the juice of half a lemon, and butter: we had five cabbage-y packages today and I used about six tablespoons of butter. Obviously the number of leaves and the amount of fish, and hence the amount of butter, depend on how many are eating. For a topping, grated Parmiggiano is fine.

I cut flat the middle rib along the convex side of each cabbage leaf. I also pre-heat the oven on medium-high. The cutting requires a sharp knife and a bit of fiddling: we don’t want the leaves to split. While doing this, a pan with plenty of water begins to boil.

Leaves rinsed and waiting, I begin melting the butter in a smaller pan, taking care that it doesn’t get brown, but just begins to foam. If this happens on medium-low heat, I have just time to peel and chop one onion. When the foam settles, I slip the onion dice into the butter.  Now the water boils; I add salt and the cabbage leaves, one by one, pushing them under the surface with a wooden spoon, and boil on high for about 4 minutes.

I stir the onions and check that they are cooking slowly but steadily without browning – then I drain the cabbage. I pour half of the onion-butter in a large, square oven dish. I then squeeze the lemon, grind the pepper and cut the cleaned fillets of fish into chunks small enough to be able to wrap a cabbage leaf around each of them.

Now I sprinkle each cabbage inside with salt and pepper, put a bit of fish in the middle, add a little more salt and pepper and a careful dash of lemon juice, fold a tight, small package and deposit it, opening down, in the buttery bath of the waiting oven dish. Soon there is a whole assembly of green, square-ish parcels. I pour the rest of the butter strategically on top of each parcel – this prevents the cabbage from getting parched. Into the oven goes everything, and I can relax for about 20 minutes and grate the Parmesan, which goes on top of the parcels five minutes before the end.

The advantages of this procedure are many: we end up with a rich, buttery taste to enhance the cabbage, a peppery turn which manifests itself more in aroma than in bite, a lean filling and a beautiful touch of lemon to balance the massive surroundings, and an overall nicely al-dente texture (this reads as if I would be able to sell car cleaners in shopping malls. I am not). I think white rice is better with this than potatoes. And some tomato salad is fine, too.

The beautiful city of Marstrand is located at the Swedish west coast a few miles north of Göteborg. You reach it if you drive off the E6 highway at Kungälv, turning west and following the signs. Be prepared for over-wide and unsteadily-driven campers in the summer and inconsiderate moose in the winter. The picturesque old part of the little village is located on the Marstrandsön, an island that can be reached by a ferry.

We run into a colleague of mine on the ferry, who just bought a house here. Our subsequent restaurant hunt is based on his well-meant recommendations. This works very well indeed regarding the Café Berg’s located at the northern section of Hamngatan. Fortified with reasonable Cappuccinos and some nice sweet apple-filled bits of bakery, we conquer the island until, eventually hungry, we begin heading towards his second recommendation, Lasse-Maja’s krog just across from where the ferry arrives.

Lasse-Maja’s website is not quite complete at the moment, but it sports some impressive art-photography of the menu, which changes every day according to the products available on the market. We’re talking here mostly about fish, so this devotion to freshness is an excellent sign. We can also read the following: Lasse-Maja’s chef Richard Waje guarantees top quality in everything including the ingredients and the service. In other words: the guest has every right to have the highest expectations.

This is one of those restaurants where you don’t just plunk down on the nearest chair but wait neatly until someone takes care of you. So we wait. First there is nobody present. Eventually, a young man enters and vanishes behind the bar. He then turns on his heels and walks out again. Returning, he gets busy opening half a box of traditional Rosé bottles from Provence. After a while he somehow catches my eye and asks from across the counter whether we would like to follow him out to the terrace. Since the restaurant is empty and calm, but also dark, we agree. Following him as he balances his pink alcoholic load, we enter the inner courtyard terrace where our Cicerone leaves us standing and runs away with his bottles. We now realize that the terrace is mainly occupied by a large group of youngsters, and that their conversation is unfavorably reflected back down by a sun roof, creating considerable noise. We consequently decide that it would be nicer to sit inside in any case.

The waiter catches my eye again and by ways of gestures we agree that we will wait inside for him to return and find us a table. To make this short, it never happens: we place ourselves on a bench opposite the counter and wait. Our Rosé dude enters and fiddles around with some or another bit of gadgetry. A girl emerges from the kitchen, picks at her fingernails, looking bored and vanishes again. A gentleman whose wife remains seated at the window toward the street comes walking and demands with a loud voice whether he would soon be able to place his order. We try to seat ourselves tentatively at some table where we remain for a while. Some tourists enter noisily, step up to the counter, retrieve a bunch of menus (by magic, no doubt) and vanish out in the yard. Nobody catches our eye now. We then leave Lasse-Maja’s krog.

I am sad to report that if Richard Waje believes that the service of his establishment is as good as his kitchen seems to be (according to my friend’s judgment), he is fooling himself in a most gigantic and tragic manner. True, it is reassuring to know that he is willing and able to select fresh fish on the market. In the choice of his personnel, however, he seems to be substantially less sure-handed. In Mr. Waje’s place I would advise Mrs. Pick Her Fingernails and Mr. Bottles Of Rosé to find their luck elsewhere and I would then try to get hold of some real waiters.

The city of Borås has a bad name in Sweden, for no real reasons. Yes, it rains a lot here, and the highway that goes right through the city does not allow for picturesque views. But the center of the town is calm and nice at daytime, not too large for a casual stroll and it offers good opportunities for hanging out and getting a decent meal.

Restaurants come and go at quite a quick pace in Borås, which often makes me sad: one would wish that all those enterprising chefs had a little more success convincing the Sjuhärad residents of the benefits of an international cuisine. A little color would truly make everyone happier.  A new large Indian restaurant opened only yesterday on Yxhammarsgatan; I want to wish them well.

The Greek taverna on Lilla Brogatan, on the other hand, has been there for quite a while now. It is a nice, relatively large space with a few random Hellenic decorations and painted crumbling plaster walls and a fine view over a not too busy street and part of the pedestrian zone. The menu offers all the standard Greek preparations and the kitchen does a good job with them – the service is personal and absolutely impeccable. The quite large wine list contains mostly Greek wines which, in Sweden, is impressive in itself.

We ordered a selection of entrees and decided immediately that this would be the place for a Tapas party, no matter the non-Spanishness of the Taverna: the amount of food per monetary unit served here is about twice as much as in the Spanish restaurant up on Allégatan, and some of the selections are quite fancy. I have not yet tried the charcoal-grilled Kalamares filled with feta cheese, or the Ameletita, which the menu describes as “don’t ask” (grilled lamb’s testicles, in fact), but I did have the grilled octopus, which tasted fantastic, even though it was a little hard to chew (The Taverna’s knives are sharp, though). No matter! It was fun. The Dolmadakia, the Tsatsiki and all the salads are totally reasonably made, priced and presented.

My main course was grilled hamburger-beef-sausages in a delicious spicy sauce; Robin had a generous piece of lamb from the oven, which I couldn’t have made tastier and more tender at home.  The Taverna’s touch of home-cooking is a comforting thing in view of the often half-hearted upscale pretensions of so many Swedish downtown evening restaurants. And the food is ever as good: we registered no single disappointment during the whole evening, which ended with two kinds of coffee: the greek coffee was full in taste and not all too sweet, and the “regular” cup was a close cousin of the best one of the past month, of which more in other post.

Not mentioned in the menu are the copious amounts of tomatoes and lettuce that accompany any of the main courses. When ordering first courses, you might as well stick to the fancier kinds and leave it at that, there will be salad enough later on. Also, in spite of my earlier praise, “Greek salad”, in Greece, would mean chunks of green pepper, cucumber and tomato, slices of white soft mild onions, quite a lot of feta cheese and olives, plus pepper, salt and bottles of oil and vinegar at the table. If everything is fresh, you’ll need nothing else. But in this country, one has to put up with shreds of soggy iceberg lettuce and wedges of the most pungent onions on the market – both can truly be forgotten. If you pass Borås on the R 40 at dinner time, drive off towards the center, search for Grekiska Tavernan, but order no sallads.

Anyone traveling in Sweden knows that highway restaurants, relatively scarce as they anyway are, are called things like McDonalds, Shell or Korvkiosk (sausage hut). Names like “Route 66″ or “Smakfullt” (the latter meaning both “full of flavor” and “tasteful”) do occur, too, but are the exception. Anyway, it is good to know about a few alternatives. This series of reviews will guide the innocent traveler towards some decent meals. I’ll tag these posts in Swedish – let’s see what happens.

It will, for example, be helpful to know that four minutes away from “Smakfullt”, which lies on the R 40 half an hour east of Göteborg, a bunch of enthusiastic people is trying to make a “Family restaurant” go round, with occasionally quite nice results. They need a real audience, however, and a critical one, too.

I am talking of La Familia Macsad which is situated in the in the southwest corner of the tallest building of the pulsating center of Bollebygd, aptly called Centrumhuset, (just beside the Trend-Makery, a boutique which has housed a stable collection of household Non-Necessaries for about a decade). Other highlights of Bollebygd’s center are a wine and beer store, a medical center and a parking lot with too narrow spaces.

La Familia has inherited the espresso machine of the previous owner who didn’t succeed in spite of his good coffee – that’s why we started going there. They have a fixed lunch menu which seems okay, and on some evenings they are open and offer dinner à la carte. The menu is vaguely but sympathetically Mediterranean with a South American touch and a slight Swedish accent. Some of the food is really good. It is clear that the Chef is not only a kind man but also a good cook.

In April, a Parmesan soup, for example (which isn’t on the menu at this very moment) was creamy and rich and served in a fancy modern bowl that amused me and heightened my expectations. Robin’s tortellini were well-cooked and presented in an attractive fashion. My beef on a plank combined the best bit of beef I had in a restarurant for a long time and a fancy pile of decorated and playfully singed mashed potatoes and some excellent, possibly even home-made sauce bearnaise. The one-matron-service is excellent: personal and quick.

When my kids were here to visit in July, we went again. In terms of service, we must have hit a bad day. Things moved slowly, orders weren’t understood properly and we sensed some unwillingness to clear the table and serve the next course. This was likely a seasonal issue: in mid-July almost nothing functions properly in Sweden.

But even the food was not quite such a success as on the previous visit, although the same chef was cooking. True, my Entrada with chili-garlic tiger shrimp was absolutely impeccably prepared, the shrimp juicy but not too raw and the dressing spicy but well-balanced. But Jessica’s mixed salad (not on the menu any more), although clean and fresh, had no element of fantasy or refinement in it. Robin’s Lasagna was only marginally less mushy than the microwaved lunch varieties served all over the country, and thus a disappointment. There is no other way to make successful Lasagna than to bake them in the oven: once. Re-heating doesn’t work with this dish.  It is a matter of fairness not to pretend that you offer “Lasagna”, when you really are planning to serve Piping hot Pulp to your guests.

The Plato Mexicano that Lukas and I tried, finally, was a joke. The menu presents it as a “mixed plate with various ingredients such as guacamole, corn, onion, tomato, sour cream, a sauce of ground veal and tomato salsa, served with cheese-filled fresh tortilla and nacho chips”. This description is accurate as far as it goes: the meat sauce was a standard spaghetti sauce, not bad, but not exceptional at all. Give me the hour it took our chef on that day to prepare our food, and I’ll make you something more “Mexican” with stuff out of my freezer. The guacamole was fine, but there was only a tablespoon of it. The salsa didn’t come out of a jar, which is good. But apparently our Chef’s spice cabinet was empty after preparing the shrimp, so essentially it was chopped canned tomatoes with a hint of onion.  Just for taking care of my pile of nacho chips, I’d have loved getting five minutes in that kitchen with a bunch of tomatoes, cilantro, cumin, lime juice, a bowl and a knife, but that’s not how restaurant kitchens work in these parts, letting the guests chop their own food. Between the heap of chips from the bag and another one of thawed corn, both further camouflaged  by anonymous strips and chunks of greenery, the featured cheese-filled tortilla looked sad and forlorn, and that’s how it tasted, too.

So what we learned that day is that La Familia’s menu needs a guest with a good intuition in order to avoid unnecessary disappointments. This is not quite what one expects from a restaurant that, like La Familia, offers food at the price level of a modern town restaurant. In exchange, there should at least be three things present: a quick and personal service (this was no problem on our first visit), a relaxed atmosphere (how about special tablecloths at dinnertime and a few homely accents, to make clear to everyone that there are actually people trying to enjoy their food while others perhaps only drink a beer or two at the bar?) and, finally, bigger portions without any cheaty fill-up ingredients such as piles of chips and corn with almost no sauce. This is the only true criticism I have about the general policy of La Familia in Bollebygd: the size of the portions does not always match the ambitious price. The steak costs 169 Swedish crowns or almost 24 dollars; it is good, as I wrote, but tiny. The Tortellini come in at 105 crowns ($14.70), for which one might at least expect a plate full. The shrimp entry, finally, fetches a feisty 89 crowns ($12.50), which is unreasonable for four tiger shrimp, no matter how nicely prepared.

And oh yes: apparently, someone at some Swedish restaurant school introduced the concept of decorative squiggles of red balsamico vinaigrette around any sort of food arrangement. You find these squiggles all over Sweden, in almost any modern restaurant. This newbie-chef mass movement is disgusting: what has Lasagna, even mushy Lasagna, to do with red vinaigrette? What does a delicious Parmesan soup benefit from random red squiggles around the edges of the bowl? If I enter a restaurant, I want to eat, and not be forced to dig around the edges of some decoration that could ruin the taste of an otherwise good meal. My recommendations to the chef in Bollebygd: build on to your strengths, which are plentiful, and on your kindness, but please do occasionally open a cookbook to learn something new, and above all: eliminate the shortcuts and spare us the thawed corn. You’ll be fine. Bollebygd is growing rapidly.

Bremen in May means asparagus. Every morning, my mom jumps on her bike and returns a little later with kilos of the stuff, right from the farm. We recently ate asparagus for a whole week, every day. This makes me relaxed enough for a candid report about my asparagus life at home in Bollebygd.

For the past few months, I have been monitoring the Bolle’s green asparagus, which, according to the mailing address clearly printed at the side of the packages, is imported from Italy. Italians are rightfully proud of their fabulous vegetables, and just as proud ought to be the Bolle’s veggie boss, when she can offer quite fresh Italian asparagus for a reasonable price. And yes, sometimes it was fresh, and we were happy (sometimes, some of it was not fresh at all). But not a single time, according to the ever-changing labels with which the shop announces the price of the day and the country of origin, did Bolle’s green asparagus actually come from Italy, no matter what the packages said. Have fun learning geography: Italian asparagus comes from Spain, it comes from Turkey, Hungary, Chile and, yes, El Salvador.

Quirky label-making humor (for that must be it; it is unlikely that the person who makes them cannot read) is not the real danger here: like in the box with mushrooms, the peaches and wherever else you care to look closely, Bolle’s old Italian asparagus packages and their new Italian asparagus packages get merrily mixed together; grab the wrong package and the asparagus tips might well disintegrate into a smelly dark-green mush right where you stand in the shop. A true Italian foodie would have a day-long ranting fit of dismay about those – Bolle just keeps selling them.

And if you should be looking for alternatives, beware of the (genuinely) Greek white asparagus. Stems of less than half a centimeter in diameter normally count as soup asparagus – they are sold here for a price that equals Class A in other parts of the world. Between Greece and Bollebygd, they shrink into quarter-centimeter-diameter sticks, even if the ends are stuck into a cute protective little bag of decorated soft plastic. If we take away the base-protecting plastic we see that the ends are not only shriveled and brown but also richly covered with (Greek, no doubt, but nevertheless) bright turquoise mold that extends well over a centimeter upward. Hunting for vegetables has again become a matter of survival.

So here I sit with a powerful urge to set things right for once and all. What could I do? Well, in a side tab on the Hemköp Bolle’s website, shop owner Lars Wiss invites the general public to send their comments in order to “help us get even better.” But what can I write to this otherwise kind and amiable man about their asparagus, that isn’t too impolite for a civilized exchange? You are not supposed to sell rotten food. You are not supposed to mix old and new food. You are required to label the origin of vegetables correctly. You’re supposed to show some pride about what you sell. Someone there should be able to figure these things out even without the kind aid of the general public.

It may be a little lame to always claim that Sweden is twenty years behind with everything except internet access and safe cars, but what are you gonna do. Since the seventies, nature-minded wacky Western Germans have had access to long lists of food additives and their shorthand E-numbers. The consumer could go into the shops, look at the labels, compare with their lists and, for instance, say: this sausage contains food coloring, taste enhancers, saccharine, artificial aromas, potato flakes and milk powder. I’ll buy something else.

Now the trend has finally reached Sweden.  The past half-year’s really big new thing in our food (not even foodie) scene has been the discovery of non-food chemical additives in our daily grub. All this was triggered by the book Den Hemlige Kocken (The Secretive Chef) by Mats-Eric Nilsson, which made a true impact even on common households and people on the street. Why do we need all this stuff, everyone suddenly asks, why can’t a can of soup just contain soup, why are slices of bacon and salami stuffed with additives, why must any sort of candy be crammed with chemicals? As positive as this development may be, it is a little astonishing how late it comes: the small print of most Swedish foodstuffs actually does name the ingredients (not only their numbers), so everyone able to read microscopic print has been fully informed for years about what’s going on in our bellies.

I have seen some feeble counter-moves. For example, Metro, our free-of-charge morning-pest paper of trams and trains, featured an article by someone who wittily pointed out that the sorrows about global food distribution are more pressing than our new avoidance of additives. This person has not understood a thing. World food issues are certainly not influenced by any consumer’s idea that products that are being sold as food and paid for as food should contain ingredients that can reasonably and rationally be identified as food. Ideally, the two areas should not even truly be connected. World food issues are about the production and distribution of actual food. This is something else than the industry’s sneaky attempt to sell more stuff to perfectly not-hungry Westerners by adding chemicals that make their junk seem desirable.

Luckily a Metro journalist’s dim views on the mechanics of the world have little influence on the effect of the new interest. Food producers are changing their recipes. Stena Line is providing lists of ingredients at their buffet. There is even a new kind of sausage in the stores this summer, which contains mostly meat.

Even in otherwise really fabulous cookbooks, one can encounter any number of rather less fabulous never-do laws about the treatment of lean pork in the frying pan. In part, this may be caused by the watery no-good pork selling-practices in some countries. Put a large Dutch pork chop into a small skillet, and it will inevitably begin to boil in its own juices before the cooking fat has had a chance to get things under control. In such a case it is perhaps indeed better to slow-cook or braise it instead (or, in fact, to forget about it right away). But even in the North, with reasonable non-watered pork easily available, no standard professional cooking advice ever helped me to avoid a dry piece of pork. So I threw it all overboard and made this:

I started with a length of lean rib-chop-meat, bone removed (by magic, or perhaps by some Swedish backroom butcher who thought the meat was easier to sell that way). I made nice 1/3-inch-thick slices and put them flat on a plank in order to sprinkle them lightly with freshly-ground black pepper and salt. The first never-do here is the salt before the frying. Old-school meat frying lore tells you that the piece dries out in no time if you do this. Since my lean pan-fried pork always dries out anyway, this didn’t stop me.

I took my large cast-iron skillet and heated three tablespoons of olive oil and four tablespoons of butter slowly but thoroughly, adding chopped parsley and two gigantic leaves of fresh sage during the process. The fat is hot enough when the sage starts to curl and brown slightly around the edges. This is also the time when the butter begins to smell – well: Really Good. “Slowly but thoroughly” means, simply, that you will take special care not to over-heat the butter, while making sure that the skillet is hot all through nevertheless. A little patience goes a long way here.

In goes the meat, with some distance between the pieces, and a rich sizzle should be heard. So this is neither really hot frying, nor the slow half-braising method recommended for pork chops by the faint of heart. This is a healthy fry-me-now method, to be interrupted by one flip-around after about two minutes. About another minute on the other side, and the meat goes onto a waiting (during the winter season: pre-heated) plate.

Now comes the cream sauce, and again, I’m doing everything backward. The fat in the pan has everything: fattiness, meat flavor, parsley, sage and pepper aroma and even a little bit of saltiness. It also isn’t too black (as it would be after a quick steak-fry), so I don’t want to discard it, but rather bind it – with the cream. In other words, no white wine yet for dissolving the cooking residue: the cream goes into the pan first. With the heat on medium high, I stir, test, correct saltiness and reduce the bubbling goo until it starts turning yellow-brown in places. Now it’s time for a good dash of dry white wine (we had something quite nice from Northern Italy today), followed by more bubbling and reducing. Since this sauce is really rich, I don’t have to reduce it very much and can pour it right on top of the chop-slices instead.

The result is neither Plain Old Dry, as the result of real quick-frying or broiling would have been, nor Dry And Tasteless, as any sort of slow braising (for instance in tomato-goo) would have made it, nor Fally-Aparty Fibrous, which is the ideal super-slow-and long barbecue result for fatty cuts like pork shoulder, but would always fail in a lean bit like the ones used here.

As we had it right now, the meat was perfect: firm but tender, tasty, surrounded by just the right amount of creamy sauce, accompanied by two beautiful, crunchy sage leaves and a few scoops of half-fried chopped fresh parsley. Preparation time 15 minutes.

One of the hardiest prejudices about sauerkraut cooking is that you only can use it with sausage or other heavy duty pork – nothing could be more wrong than this. Today I finally called my mom and asked how she did her oven dish with sauerkraut, fish and potato puree.

Why? Because I remember loving this dish from as long as I remember anything. And it is not my childish predilection for impossible food combinations that dictated this love: the original recipe comes from a hefty mid-fifties tome Seefisch – schmackhaft und pikant (sea-fish, tasty and savoury) by Rudolf Rösch. Its cover illustration depicts Fish and Ships. From the foreground, an unhappy vertical green Haddock stares at you with round, orange eyes, as if telling the reader: this is serious business.

I actually thought that the original recipe came out of Lilo Aureden’s little cookbook called Was Männern so gut schmeckt – what men find so tasty. I also thought that there was another book as well: Was Frauen so gut schmeckt. This is not so: the other book, I am told, is ‘what kids find so tasty’. They’re both from the housewife-y late fifties when men, in Bremen, were out building ships, cars and trams, and couldn’t tell a fridge from an oven. These books contain some of the yummiest recipes imaginable in any case.

The instructions I got over the phone left some room for improvisation. I proceeded to test the impact of this magical dish – with a few additions and corrections that I found appropriate – on Robin, a person with a decidedly non-krauty past. I think I am entitled to say that it was a success.

For three, you need around six medium-sized potatoes, a few cups of sauerkraut, 1/2 onion, at least 4 tablespoons of butter, a cup of grated Gouda-type mild cheese (or half a cup of grated parmiggiano), some milk, olive oil, a few nice fillets of any kind of lean, flaky textured fish, a bay leaf, two crushed juniper berries and a few sage leaves.

1) Heat some olive oil in a pan that is big enough to hold the kraut later. Chop half an onion and sauté the onion bits in the oil until translucent but not brown. Meanwhile, rinse the sauerkraut with cold water and drain. Add to the pan, stir, add a cup of water, the bay leaf and juniper and cover. Cook slowly for about an hour.

2) Meanwhile peel and boil the potatoes in water with some salt. Make a mash using the butter, some of the cooking water and some milk, check for salt. Mix in the grated cheese and set aside.

3) Check the fish fillets for bones.

Pre-heat the oven on 210C/410F. Check the sauerkraut for salt – most likely it is fine as it is. Take a wide oven dish and cover the bottom with sauerkraut. A layer of a cm/a third of an inch is the minimum. Distribute the fish evenly on top of the kraut. Sprinkle with some salt, oil and some dried sage. Cover all this evenly with the potato-cheese goo. Take a fork and ruffle the surface. Sprinkle quite liberally with olive oil.

Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes or until the crust gets golden brown.

And since we were using the oven anyway, Robin developed this Hot Salad:

You need zucchini, tomato, onion, all sliced very thinly;
crumbly goat cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano.

In a small open oven dish, layer the ingredients as follows:

zucchini-onion-salt-tomato-goat cheese-olive oil.
Repeat.
Sprinkle with pepper and oregano.

Bake in the pre-heated oven at 200C-392F until done, c. 20 minutes.

A salad, you ask? Yes!