Icelandic cooking, recipes and food

I love liver pate, but I have never tried to make it, probably because you can get perfectly good liver pate in most supermarkets in Iceland. This sounds like a good recipe: 700 g liver 300 ml milk 2 cooked potatoes 1 tbs chopped, browned onion 3 eggs 100 g butter or 300 g fatty bacon 7 tbs flour salt and pepper dash of cardamom 1 fillet of spice-pickled herring (or about 10 anchovy fillets) Soak the liver in cold water for about 30 minutes. Remove the membranes and blood vessels. Chop coarsely and put through a grinder 4 times, with the herring/anchovies, onion, and bacon (if using). Add the potatoes for the last round of grinding. If you're using a food processor, dump everything above in at once and process into a smooth paste, using the chopping blades. Mix together the flour and spices and mix into the liver paste along with the cooled melted butter (if using). Add the eggs and mix well. Finally stir in the milk, little by little. Grease a pate mould and press the raw pate int...

This is a rather good Sunday dish. If you don't know how to de-bone a leg of lamb, either buy it de-boned or get your butcher to de-bone it for you. 1 leg of lamb (about 2 kg. before boning) 50 g prunes, stoneless 30 g dried apples 2 tsp. salt 3/4 tsp. pepper Soak the apple slices to soften. Rub half of the salt and pepper on the inside of the leg of lamb and stuff with the prunes and apple slices. Sew closed. Rub the remaining salt and pepper on the outside of the meat. Put meat into a greased oven pan and roast at 250°C for about 90 minutes, or until a meat thermometer inserted into the steak shows 160°C. Start by roasting for 10-20 minutes, then add water to cover the bottom of the pan, to a depth of about 1 cm. Baste the meat with the cooking liquid every 15 minutes or so. Top up the water when it starts to boil down. About 10-15 minutes before the steak is done, remove it from the oven, pour the cooking liquid into a saucepan, through a strainer. Put the steak bac...

Twice-baked bread keeps well and is good in all kinds of sweetened soups, like Sweet Soup , Crowberry Soup , and Cocoa Soup . 250 g flour OR 100 g bread or all-purpose flour and 100 g whole-wheat flour t tsp baking powder 1 tbs sugar 1/2 tsp ground cardamom 75 g butter or margarine 100-150 ml milk Sift together the flour, baking powder and cardamom and add the sugar. Add the softened butter or margarine and rub into the dry mix until the mixture is crumbly. Add the milk, no more than needed to make the dough stick together. Knead until smooth and roll up into sausage shapes. Cut into even-sized pieces and roll into balls. Arrange on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 180°C until light brown. Remove the buns from the oven and cool until they can be handled, then cut in half, put back on the cookie sheet and dry in the oven at a low temperature. Serve with the above-mentioned sweet soups or with coffee.

There is already one recipe for flatbread on this blog, but I came across another one that I thought would be interesting to post for comparison. The first recipe, which is the basic, traditional recipe, is just rye flour, salt and water, but this one is more elaborate, and would most likely have been made only in richer households, since it contains three types of flour, The use of a raising agent should also mean lighter bread. 200 g whole-wheat flour 200 g bread or all-purpose flour 200 g rye flour 4 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 450-500 ml milk Mix together all the dry ingredients. Bring the milk to the boil. Add the milk to the dry mix, stirring it in with a wooden spoon while it is too hot to touch and then knead it. When fully kneaded (smooth and even), divide into 10 pieces. Flatten and cut out into round pieces to fit the size of the skillet. Prick and bake on each side until the bread looks dry.

Someone e-mailed me not too long ago and asked for a recipe for salting mutton. This is the recipe in my mother‘s old cookbook. I haven‘t tested it, but am relying on my grandmother‘s advice for the information that was missing, such as the minimum brining time and how long it will stay preserved. The recipe contains saltpetre (potassium nitrate), the use of which has been mostly discontinued in Iceland due to health concerns. Saltpetre was used as an extra preservative and it also gives the food a characteristic pink hue. It may be safely left out, but the meat may not keep for quite as long as it would otherwise. The sugar tenderises the meat. Meat may be dry salted or brined. Dry salting is best for lean meat and brining for fatty meat. For 50 kg of meat (mutton, lamb, horse, beef, pork, etc.): Salting mixture: 3 kg salt (coarse pickling salt works best) 250 g sugar 2 litres water (30 g saltpetre) The meat should be cut into in serving-sized pieces (half-cutlets, steaks, etc.). It s...

Fresh cod roe becomes available in late winter, and is a lovely addition to the fresh seafood available year round. My mother would serve roe with cooked cod's liver, cooked cod or haddock, and potatoes, sometimes with melted sheep's tallow (with cracklings) or butter, and rye bread on the side. To cook the roes, drop them into boiling salted water and cook for 15 to 45 minutes, depending on their size. The roe is cooked when firm and of an even pale pink colour all the way through. Drain well and serve warm or cold. Cold roe can be sliced and used as a topping for bread. To cook cod liver, soak in cold water for about 30 minutes, to allow any nematodes to crawl out (this is why I do not eat fish liver). Remove the membrane from the liver, drop into heavily salted boiling water and cook for about 10 minutes. Some like to cook the liver, fish and roe together, but as the liver imparts a strong flavour to the cooking liquid, I recommend cooking it separately. If the roe is to be ...