Icelandic doughnut balls Ástarpungar

The name ástarpungar means “love balls.”
These are a delicious workaday kind of fried pastries that are still made weekly in some households. My paternal grandmother always has some ready for guests.

I really like these little doughnuts, especially warm with a glass of cold milk. Make them and everyone will love you for it ;-)

Ingredients:
4 cups flour
1 cup sugar
4 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
to taste: raisins

Method:
Mix the dry ingredients well in a bowl, add the rest and mix into a smooth batter. Batter should not be very thick. Unlike regular twisted doughnuts which are made with kneaded dough and need very high temperatures to fry properly, these doughnuts can be fried in a regular deep fryer. Use whatever frying fat you like best, heated to the highest temperature the deep fryer offers. Drop dollops of dough into the frying fat with two teaspoons and fish out when they have turned a dark brown colour. Drain on paper towels. Some people like to sprinkle icing sugar on them, but I prefer them plain. Can be eaten hot or cold and freeze well.

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Icelandic cocktail sauce Kokkteilsósa

Every nation has its favourite condiment to use with French fries. The British use vinegar and the Americans ketchup, but the favoured condiment in Iceland is cocktail cauce. This versatile pink goo is also good with deep-fried or broiled chicken, hot dogs, grilled sausages and fried fish.

I have watched in amusement as Icelanders abroad tried to make cocktail sauce from salad cream and ketchup because they could not imagine eating fries without it.

The most basic recipe calls for mayonnaise and ketchup, but this one is a little more refined ;-)

Take 200 gr. sour cream or 100 gr. sour cream and 100 gr. mayonnaise and stir until smooth. If you are using both mayo and cream, stir separately and then mix. This is important and will help you avoid lumps in the sauce.
Add approx. 3 tbs ketchup.
Finally, add 1/2-1 tsp sweet mustard.

convert measures

You can make cocktail sauce in a blender, in which case you just dump everything in at once and mix on high until smooth.

Notes:
-For simple cocktail sauce, use mayonnaise and add enough ketchup to turn it pink. Add a bit of cream to make it smoother.
-Try it in seafood/shrimp cocktail in place of seafood cocktail sauce.
-When using with fish, I usually mix in a little garlic to add bite to the sauce. Use either powdered or fresh garlic (finely chopped or crushed).
-To make my special hamburger sauce, make as above, using 50/50 mayo and sour cream or just light mayo. Add some finely chopped chives or mixed herbs. If the sauce seems too thick, thin with cream or milk.

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Lifrarpylsa Liver Sausage Icelandic “Haggis”

I made some liver sausage with a friend of mine yesterday. This is a popular Þorri food that is available year round in Iceland. It is the season for making liver and blood sausages right now.

There are many ways of preparing liver, and the following is one method of preparing a good, nutritious meal from lambs liver. This delicacy has relatives in various other countries. The most famous is do doubt the Scottish Haggis. This is an original traditional recipe. Below the instructions you will find a tip on how to make it lighter and healthier. Pork liver can be substituted for lambs liver, and beef suet for the mutton suet, but for genuineness, you need lambs liver and suet.

1 kg lambs liver
50-100 g flour
approx. 450 g rye flour
750 ml milk
150 g oatmeal
30 g salt
1 kg sheep suet
Sheeps stomachs/tripe (optional), large sausage skins, or cooking bags

Wash and clean the liver and remove all blood vessels and membranes. Mince the liver thoroughly into a paste. Mix with milk and salt and then rye flour, oatmeal and flour (best done using one’s hands). The mixture should be thick. Chop the suet, finely or coarsely, depending on your tastes, and mix with the liver paste. This mixture is traditionally sewn up into sheeps stomachs that have been cut down to size, but sausage skins or plastic bags that are suitable for cooking in can be substituted, and are much quicker. Fill the bags and close them well. One lifrarpylsa should be about the size of a mans clenched fist. They can be made larger or smaller, but the cooking time given is for this size.

Drop the sausages into boiling salted water and cook for 2-2 1/2 hours. Right after the sausages are dropped into the water, it is a good idea to prick them few times with a pin to prevent them from bursting. Turn over occasionally.

Health tip:
To make this healthier, halve the amount of suet you use in the recipe. To keep the paste thick, use 1/3 less milk to begin with, and if it needs more, add a little at a time until you reach the desired thickness.

Serving:
Eat hot with boiled or mashed potatoes, cold with porridge or skyr, or use as topping for bread.
Frying is a good way to use up leftover sausage. You can either brown slices of it in a frying pan with some sugar, or sprinkle some sugar on it before eating. Serve with mashed potatoes.

Liver sausage is often preserved in skyr-whey, along with other traditional foods, such as blood sausage, sheeps head jam and whale blubber. This pickling produces a sour flavour that is definitely an acquired taste. Food preserved in this way is traditionally eaten during the old month of Þorri, at festivals called Þorrablót.

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Svið sviðasulta – Icelandic singed sheeps heads brawn

Continuing with the Þorri food, here is a popular Þorri dish, one that is also widely eaten outside the Þorri season.

Sheeps head jam is a traditional meat product that can be found in any Icelandic supermarket. It is usually eaten fresh, but during the Þorri season you can also get whey-pickled head jam. There is also a pigs head version, svínasulta, which is spiced. This variety food is known as head-cheese or brawn in English.

Some recipes include gelatine, but it is generally not necessary if the cooking liquid is allowed to thicken during cooking (by not adding water unless it seems to be completely evaporating).

6 ea. sheeps heads, singed (see instructions below)
as needed water and salt

How to singe and otherwise prepare sheeps heads for cooking:
Take the fresh heads and singe them with fire until all the hair is burnt. Use a stiff brush to clean the heads under running cold water. Clean the area around the eyes and inside the ears especially well. Saw the heads in half lengthwise and remove the brains (less messy if you freeze them first). Cook them with the skin on.

Preparation:
Pack the heads into a cooking pot, sprinkle with coarse salt and add water. Its not necessary to let the water cover the heads completely. When the water boils, skim off the scum. Cook, covered, until the flesh begins to separate from the bones, 90-120 minutes at the least if the heads are meant for jam. Heads that will be eaten without further preparation generally need only 60 - 90 minutes cooking, and should only be cooked until the flesh is cooked through, but has not started to separate from the bones.

To make the jam:
When the heads are cooked, remove from the cooking liquid. Heads that will not be made into brawn are put on a platter and served right away, or allowed to cool and served cold. Heads that will be made into jam are taken and the meat cut off the bones and into coarse pieces. You can include the skin or leave it out as you wish. Put the pieces in a loaf pan and put a light weight on top. Allow to cool at room temperature and then put it in a refrigerator to set completely. To make more of the jam, include some of the cooking liquid in the mix. The cooking liquid will set better if singed sheeps legs are cooked with the heads.
When the brawn is set, it can be eaten fresh or preserved in whey.

Serving suggestion:
Sheeps heads are served either hot or cold. Either way, they are usually served with plain, boiled potatoes, rutabagas ( cooked with the heads) and white sauce. I hear lemon-sauce is also good with sheeps heads.

Brawn, fresh or preserved, is usually served buffet-style with several other kinds of variety meats, fish, bread and potatoes. Thinly sliced fresh brawn can be used as a topping for bread or a filling for sandwiches. My personal favourite is fresh brawn with potato salad.

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Icelandic cookbooks in English Cool Dishes and Cool Cuisine

There are a number of Icelandic cookbooks available in English, most of them published in Iceland and aimed at the tourist market. Most are printed on heavy, glossy paper and some have gorgeous colour photographs in them, both of which makes them expensive. Buying one for the equivalent of 50 US Dollars or more and then discovering it isnt what you were looking for is an expensive mistake. Therefore I decided to review as many of them as I could get my hands on, to make it a little easier to decide which one to invest in.

Not all of the Icelandic cookbooks in the book stores are available from the library. I will stick to the ones I could get from the library, as I have been able to read them all the way through.

First up are Cool Cuisine and Cool Dishes, which is a baby version of the former. They were written by Icelandic food writer Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir, with photographs by Gísli Egill Hrafnsson and published by Vaka-Helgafell in 2004.







These books combine gorgeous food photography with Icelandic recipes, most of which are traditional, although some are more traditional than others. By that I mean that there are recipes in the books that go back over a century, side by side with recipes that are less than 20 years old. A few are new, inspired by Icelandic raw materials.

You cant go wrong with these books as souvenirs for yourself or as gifts for a true food lover. Unlike some of the other Icelandic cookbooks I looked at, they are purely about the food, and are representative of what Icelanders really eat. You will not find fermented shark in there, nor sheeps heads or pressed sheeps testicles, but some of the old traditional food is in there, like smoked lamb (only how to cook it, not how to smoke it) blood pudding and halibut soup with prunes.

Cool Cuisine is 147 pages long and has some 92 recipes, more if you count separately the dishes that come with recipes for side dishes.

Cool Dishes is 72 pages and the recipes number 42. All the recipes in this book are found in the other, and all of what I would call the necessary recipes are in this one.

Verdict:
Of the Icelandic cookbooks I have been looking at, these two are definitely the best buys if you are looking for nice foodie coffee table books that are still useful as cookbooks.

Cost:
I checked the prices in the Penninn book store, which are representative of the prices you can expect to pay for these books. They may cost more in tourist shops.

As of the time of writing Cool Cuisine costs 2290 kr. and Cool Dishes costs 920 kr.

Practical information:
All the measurements in the books are in metric, including the teaspoons and tablespoons, and the temperatures are given in centigrade (Celcius).

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Icelandic blueberry bilberry soup Bláberjasúpa

Its almost blueberry season in Iceland, so here is a recipe to try.

What we call bláber (blueberries) in Iceland are actually the related bilberries. Either bilberries or blueberries can be used in this recipe.

Bilberries in the wild:


250 g blueberries or bilberries, fresh or frozen
1 + 3/4 litre water
approx. 150 g sugar
30 g potato starch or cornflour
100 m cold water

Drop the berries into boiling water and cook on low until they burst, 3-5 minutes. Mix together potato starch/cornflour and cold water into a smooth paste. Add sugar to the soup and stir until melted. Thicken with potato starch/cornflour mix. Serve and enjoy.

-Use more thickening mixture to make a blueberry pudding. Pour into a bowl before it stiffens and sprinkle sugar on top. Serve warm or cold with milk or cream (or half and half).

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Icelandic bread soup Brauðsúpa

Thriftiness is a strong trait in many older Icelanders, especially the generations that were born before World War II. Everything had to be used up, and throwing away edible leftovers was considered criminal. This thick soup is one way of using up bread leftovers and crusts.

Recipe serves 5.
200 g rye bread or assorted bread leftovers. Must be at least half rye bread.
1,25 l water
2 tbs raisins OR 4 prunes
1 tbs orange marmalade (optional)
6 slices lemon, OR orange/lemon zest or a cinnamon stick
2-3 tbs sugar
100 ml cream, whipped

(There is a link to a measurement converter on the right sidebar).

Soak the bread in the water overnight, or until the crusts are soft. Purée (use a blender if you have one) and cook on low for 1 hour. Add the raisins, lemon slices and sugar and cook for about 10 minutes more. Serve warm with whipped cream.

Recipe translated from Helga Sigurðardóttirs recipe book Matur & Drykkur", Mál og Menning, Reykjavík, 1986 (1947).

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Traditional Icelandic fish soup halibut soup Fiskisúpa lúðusúpa

This soup is among the oldest recorded Icelandic recipes. Its sweet-sour taste is unusual for fish-based soups.

Traditionally, the recipe is given for halibut, but you can also use salmon, trout, wolf-fish or lumpfish, or other fatty fish.

1 1/2 kg fresh fish with bones, cut into pieces to fit in the pan
1 1/2 litre water
2 tbs white vinegar
2 tsp salt
2 bay leaves

50 g flour
100 ml cold water

1/2 lemon
20 prunes
1-2 tbs sugar
200 ml water

potatoes
parsley

If the prunes are dry, soak them in water for an hour or so, or cook them in a little sugar-water with the zest of the 1/2 lemon until soft. Keep them whole.

Put water, salt, vinegar and bay leaves in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the fish. skim off the scum when the liquid boils again. cook the fish until it loosens from the bones. Strain the cooking liquid into another saucepan, leaving a little in the pan with the fish to keep it moist.

Mix together the flour and cold water into a smooth paste. Bring the strained cooking liquid to the boil and pour in the flour paste in a thin stream, stirring constantly. Cook for 5-10 minutes.

When the soup is fully cooked, add the lemon juice and prunes, and if they were cooked, the prune cooking liquid with them.

Arrange the fish on a serving dish and surround with boiled potatoes, sprinkled with chopped parsley. Serve on the side with the soup.

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