Beautiful Food

[akirlu]

I can't even begin to guess what made me notice just now that the Swedish word for cabbage rolls -- Kåldolmar -- seems suspiciously related to the Greek word dolmas/dolmades. "Cabbage dolmas" is what it breaks down to mean. But naturally I googled for verification, and rather than that found a lovely little food blog by a Swedish woman named Anne: Anne's Food. Ravishing photographs. And just yesterday she pubbed a recipe for Swedish cabbage rolls, which includes the same observation about dolmas. Funny old world. I was wondering what I should do with the leftover ground pork and beef from my first experiment with egg rolls the other night.

Comments

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

I love tracing the geography of food. We often host a Russian party at New Year, and it's fascinating reading "Russian" cookbooks and being able to see the Persian influence coming into the South, and following that along to Northern India, then going back out again up into the Baltic States and across to Scotland. How someone has added dill and garlic to something, and someone further up the line has taken the red pepper out, and replaced the pomegranate with bog-berries.

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

Related trivia: The Romanian "national dish" (if there is such a thing) is "sarmale" (sahr-MAHL-ay), stuffed cabbage rolls that are very close to the Swedish version in Anne's blog (nice find!) but sour, instead. They are traditionally made with sauerkraut leaves (pickled whole cabbage) and take an inordinate amount of borscht base and lemon juice to keep that way. We bake them in a large pot, with layers of leaves smeared with tomato paste. They freeze well, keep forever, and are delicious topped with a bit of sour cream and served with warm, soft polenta.

Being half-Greek, I also get the grape leaves version, only we do those stuffed with meat as well (not just lemony rice).

[mrhedgehog.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. I thought we got kåldolmar from Turkey? After Karl XII was there? So maybe it's not so strange.