I've found another great blog--semiswede! The author is Maia Brindley Nilsson, a fairly recent (2008) American immigrant to Sweden, where she is a "featured monthly writer for The Local, the Swedish news in English."
Swedish food was the stuff of my Catholic childhood lived in exile among mostly Scandinavian Lutherans--many of whom had cooks!! Imagine my delight when I spotted this headline among Nilsson's recent articles: "Ten soul-satisfying Swedish comfort foods"!!! And on the list? One of my all-time favorites--yellow pea soup!! Here's what Nilsson says:
"Ärtsoppa or yellow pea soup has been a Thursday tradition in Sweden since the Middle Ages when Sweden was largely Catholic and Friday was a day of fasting. Filling up on the hearty pork-filled soup was intended to get you through the next day’s fast.
Today the tradition is still going strong as evidenced by the profusion of plastic-cased tubes of pea soup in supermarkets year-round. If you really want to warm up you can chase it with a little warm punsch which became a popular addition to the pea soup tradition during the 1800s."
(You used to be able to get canned yellow pea soup wherever Habitant soup was sold. In the US, that would be close to the Canadian border, as Habitant was made in Montreal (I think--the label was partly in French, I remember that).
Habitant yellow pea soup is available here.... and it's good stuff!
ReplyDeleteah yes....in my youth i would have used this as yet another reason to visit Toronto. But now, especially since I am conscious of things like baggage weight, etc., I shall have to content myself with finding some of those whole round yellow dried peas and making my own! However, I'm happy to do this, now that i have discovered online that the real mccoy (Habitant from Canada) has LARD in it. Dodged a bullet there. If I cook it with a small pork roast i will get the flavor but i won't be mainlining lard! ha. that's why it tasted so good when I was a kid. EVERYTHING tasted better that was made with lard--like pie crust! but it killed people off faster. and so on. do you know that there's some religion or country (religious country) that has EIGHT seasons instead of four? we're now in "winter spring"....figures!
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