With parts of Scandinavia so far north that the dark days of winter are endless, its no wonder that the region has rich December holiday traditions. While some of the old Norse Yule symbology made its way into Christmas around the world, other customs remain specific and regional.
St. Lucia Day is a particularly iconic Swedish holiday that commences the Christmas season. A friend of mine, Baltimore performer Lucia Treasure, recently made a facebook post explaining the holiday:
“A pre-Christian Swedish tradition, it is held on December 13th, or the solstice in the old calendar. The meaning of Lucia is light, and so the Swedish celebrate a folk hero who brought food to the poor in the winter as the small point of light on the darkest day of the year. Later, it was co-opted by Christians as their religion spread into the north, and Lucia was martyred in story so they could keep their traditions. Just as Christmas, originally a celebration of winter solstice, was also enfolded into a celebration of the birth of Jesus.”
Baltimore Sun, 1963
From there, the season continues with an array of foods and customs. I recently attended a party and tried some glögg & saffron buns, plus an array of more familiar-to-me favorites like gingerbread cookies (“pepparkakor”) and gravlax.
I searched my recipe database for ‘Swedish’ to come up with some options of what to bring. There are Swedish meatballs of course, but where’s the excitement in that?; “Swedish Cookies” from Somerset County; “Swedish Roll,” from 1906 (which was basically a Swiss roll filled with currants); or a “Swedish Salad” recipe pasted into Olivia Conkling’s personal recipe book from the Maryland Historical Society special collections.
This option intrigued me but I didn’t have time to make it to MDHS so I searched some old newspapers. Conkling’s books were full of clippings from all kinds of sources. She was a granddaughter of one of the owners of the famous Kirk Silver company. She married William Higgins Conkling of Davenport, OH, a bank president who had started his career in business as a coffee importer.
The cookbook may have also been handled or contributed to by their daughter Mary Olivia Conkling Ladd (1874-1953). The items clipped into these books are varied and interesting and I’ll explore them in greater depth later.
Anyway… so that is my tenuous connection to this recipe, which was printed in a multitude of regional newspapers in the early 1890s. The ingredient quantities are very vague, but I assumed this would be some muddled inauthentic 19th-century recipe anyway so I followed my instinct.
A more elaborate Swedish Salad recipe in the Wisconsin Post-Crescent, 1927
When I brought the salad to the party I was told that it turned out to be pretty authentic and incidentally something enjoyed around Christmastime.
I’ve noticed that some dishes which are enjoyed in the “old world” sometimes become more holiday-associated in America. Holidays are after all a time of family and heritage and seeking out just the right ingredients.
One Swedish custom I will be passing up on this Christmas is the ramped-up cleaning that, according to the Baltimore Sun in 1934, was customary. Every copper utensil “must glisten like gold,” curtains and linens must be cleaned, and chair seats wiped down, wrote Worthington Holiday. “There is a superstition that departed ones return to inspect the houses on Christmas Eve and woe be unto the housewife who is careless and does not please them.”
Dearly departed: I love you and miss you, but you’ll have to excuse the pet hair. God Jul!
Recipe:
