Many would consider salmon a luxury food today, but it wasn’t always that way in Sweden. My grandfather, who was born in the north of Sweden 1911, wasn’t too impressed when grandmother Anna cooked salmon for him on their first date. She considered it her signature dish and was proud as punch, but she was from the far south, where salmon truly was considered a delicacy since it had to be transported to the south, and thus was expensive. But grandfather grew up in a family of millworkers in the north.

The millworkers were poor but had often large families, so in order to provide enough food for the families the children were sent out to fish and forage for berries by the rivers and in the woods. Grandfather had spent endless hours , sitting in wet clothes on the shores of the rivers, fishing. To him salmon tasted of poverty and being cold.

Laxpudding was never staple food for the poor, though, and these days it’s still eaten around holidays in many families. It’s an old dish, which has probably been eaten since potatoes started becoming more common, but it’s mentioned in writing in 1822 and has been listed in cookbooks ever since. This was never a dish for the poor, not because of the price of salmon but because of the proportionally high content of cream, eggs and butter, all of which were.