Icelandic cooking, recipes and food

This is a nice dish. I imagine the sauce would be quite good with other dark, gamy meats, like wild duck,  wild goose or possibly wild boar. To serve 6: 6 lamb's or sheep's hearts 100 g flour butter for frying salt and pepper 6 well ripe plums (it doesn't say which kind, but the photo with the recipe shows red plums with yellow flesh - BTW, don't expect to see any such thing when the dish is cooked, since the luscious plum wedges shown in the image are a fiction of food photography) 1 large yellow onion, chopped 100 ml sweet white wine meat broth (e.g. lamb, chicken or vegetable) or water 2 tbsp cornstarch (or potato starch, or Maizena sauce thickener) First, here's how I had to compromise on the recipe: The week before I made it, I saw at least three varieties of plums in every food shop I entered and they always seemed to be so ripe as to be on the verge of becoming liquid inside their skins. The day I actually went to buy them all I could find were r...

This is a nice recipe for lamb's or sheep's hearts. Hearts from an adult sheep will need slightly longer cooking than lamb hearts. To serve 4. 4 lamb or sheep hearts Marinade: 100 ml table vinegar 2 sprigs fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried) 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped 3 laurel leaves salt and pepper For cooking: 100 g butter 100 g smoked bacon, finely chopped 10-15 shallots, sliced 1-2 tbsp flour 400-500 ml red wine 100-200 ml water salt and pepper 200 g whole small mushrooms, sautéed Cut the fat off the hearts, flush them well under running cold water and cut lengthwise into four parts each. Make the marinade and marinade the heart pieces for 4-6 hours. (I found 4 hours sufficient, but 6 will give a more intense flavour). Melt the butter in a Dutch oven or deep frying pan. Remove the hearts from the marinade and brown in the butter. Add bacon and onions. Sprinkle the sifted flour into the pan and let it soak up the butter. Add red wine and water, stir t...

I love liver with bacon. I haven't tried this recipe, but I plan to. 750 g liver 100 bacon 1 tsp salt 1/3 tsp pepper 1/6 tsp ginger 1/6 tsp ground cloves 60 g cooking fat 400 ml boiling cooking liquid 150 ml cream 40 g flour 200 ml cold water Clean the liver and cut into thin slices. Mix together the flour, salt and spices and roll the liver slices in it to coat. Lay a rasher of bacon on each liver slice and roll up the slices. Tie together with cotton string. Heat the cooking fat ion a pan and brown the liver slices in it. Add the milk and water and cook for 15-20 minutes. Thicken the sauce with the flour (make a paste with a little cold water to avoid clumping). Cook the sauce for a couple of minutes, then add the cream. I imagine this would be nice with mashed potatoes, redcurrant jelly and a salad.

5-6 sheep's hearts (or 4-5 pig's hearts) 10-12 prunes (stoneless) 600-700 ml mixture of equal proportions water and milk 50 g butter 50 g flour salt and pepper sauce colouring Chop up the prunes and stuff the hearts with them. Sew closed. Melt the butter in a pan and brown the hearts in it. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, add the milk/water mixture and cook for 1-2 hours. Remove the hearts from the cooking liquid. Make a paste of the flour and a little bit of cold water. Bring the cooking liquid to the boil and stir in the flour paste to make a sauce. Add sauce colouring if desired. Cut the hearts into slices, and serve with the sauce on the side.

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...

Blood sausage is an ancient dish and can be found in many countries where domestic animals are kept and there are no taboos against eating blood. This is the Icelandic version. Slátur is the collective name for blood sausage and liver sausage , and also for the necessary ingredients. "To take slátur " means to buy the ingredients and make the sausages, and in fact Icelandic supermarkets sell boxes with blood, livers, suet and stomachs (sometimes also the salt, cereals, thread and needles) in the autumn when the summer lambs are slaughtered. 2 litres sheep's blood 1 litre water 50 g coarse salt 1 kilo rye flour 200 g flour 400 g oatmeal 2 - 2 1/2 kilos sheep's suet Some people add raisins or chopped Iceland moss to the stuffing. If using Iceland moss, use correspondingly less rye flour and a little more water in the stuffing. If using raisins, use correspondingly less suet. Cut each stomach into 4-5 pieces suitable for stuffing, or use bags of sausage skin or even pla...

500 g kidneys - sheep, veal or pork flour mixed with salt, pepper and paprika to taste 50 g butter or frying fat 2 onions, finely chopped 3-4 carrots, sliced 250 g tomatoes Clean the kidneys and cut each into 4 parts. Coat with spice-flour mixture. Brown in the butter/fat in a saucepan with the onions and carrots. Blanch and skin the tomatoes and add towards the end of the browning time. Add enough water so that it barely covers the ingredients. Simmer over low heat until the kidneys are tender. At the end, thicken the sauce with some flour paste and add a little cream if desired, to make a smoother sauce. Serve with potatoes. This dish is also good with mushrooms.

Slaughter season is in full swing in Iceland. This means that besides lowered prices for fresh unfrozen lamb, mutton and horse meat, you can also get fresh offal, which is not only cheap, but also nutritious and often quite yummy. While it is generally possible to get these products fresh year round now, it is more usual to find them frozen and when fresh they tend to cost more off season because there is less supply. This is also the only time of the year when you can get fresh sheep's blood to make blood sausages. In the next week or so I am going to revisit some offal recipes I have published here in the past, but I am going to start with a recipe I haven't published before: Fried sheep's hearts . 2-3 sheep's hearts, or 1-2 pig's hearts 1 bunch parsley 1 tbs butter or margarine 50 g margarine or butter 1 tsp salt 300 ml water or milk 2 tbs flour 100 ml cold water Wash the hearts well under cold running water until there is no blood left in them. Soak in cold wate...