Christmas is beginning to be happily behind us, and after tomorrow's Boxing Day meal the digesting of the Christmas food can begin. Just before Christmas Eve I promised to devote these days to rosolli, the beetroot salad of the Finnish Christmas table, to ham and to mustard, and the promise has been kept.
Delicacies have a way of starting to vanish into hungry mouths well before they ever reach the festive table. This year one thief was caught red-handed at the turkey. My brother was sitting at the kitchen counter with the knife already in the turkey's side, and the ham was on its own platter next to it. In my own opinion both ham and turkey taste by far the best when you go and pick at them in secret while they are still warm. This indisputable fact seems to have been left out of the serving suggestions of most recipes... It is then an art form of its own to manage the nibbling so that Mum does not notice the traces.
In other respects, too, Christmas went by in the traditional way, and the table held what matters most to me, a big bowl of rosolli mixed into whipped cream. This garishly pink herring salad has been served from the same green glass bowl at all 29 of the Christmas dinners I have eaten, and without it Christmas could not be complete. To me rosolli is more an institution than a recipe: a bucketful of boiled beetroot, onions, apples, boiled carrots, pickled gherkins and herring fillets is chopped small, mixed and chilled. Loosely whipped cream is stirred into a bowlful of rosolli just before serving, and the beetroot colours it in a moment. In many families, I am told, the cream is served separately as a dressing, but in ours it has always been mixed in.
The presents were welcome once again. The highlights were Lonely Planet's Australia from my little brother and, from my sister, cute Rachael's city guide and cookbook in one, $40 A Day: Best Eats in Town, along with a bagful of almost-Amish rubbadub bought in Philly, that is, a spice mix to be rubbed into the surface of meat. Rachael Ray is a hugely popular TV cook on the Food Network who, in her programme, eats her way through one city a day on forty dollars, and the book is based on the programme.
The cakes I baked for Christmas also went down well, and the baker liked them too. The picture shows them still untouched, the cherry cake piped with whipped cream, the carrot cake decorated with white chocolate snowflakes and, in front, Nigella's clementine cake in its baking parchment. I wrote about the clementine cake before Christmas. The cherry cake was meant to be a cranberry cake, but the cranberries managed to go mouldy first. Both the carrot cake and the cherry cake have already been photographed, and the blog posts are only waiting for a favourable moment to be written. Soon there will be plenty of suitable time on my hands, so more will follow!
