Spring and Easter Dishes

Danish Caviar and Filthy Eggs

Nine Cabbage

lumpsucker

lumpsucker caviar on blinis

It is not real spring until the first serving of lump-sucker eggs arrives at the kitchen table with a scent from the fresh salten sea. The fish which delivers this special popular spring dish is  ugly  - and it is incredible that it is able to bring that good tastiness to a dish. The meat of the fish is clotted, but the eggs are delicious. The lumpsucker eggs, Denmark's Pink Caviar and Easter go well together. The egg is one of the Easter's strong symbols. 

Lumpsucker caviar is often served upon freshly baked blinis and mixed with creme fraiche and red onion. The fine pink caviar can also be served in a cut avocado, decorated with creme fraiche and chervil. To serve the caviar  together with meat is a refined contrast between sea and land. Green asparagus with lumpsucker caviar is another fine Easter dish.

Skidne Æg with Mustard Sauce

Mother Hen and Easter chickens

Another traditional old Danish Easter dish is Skidne Æg (actually meaning Filthy Eggs!); they are boiled eggs served in a mustard sauce (fish mustard), decorated with cress, a simple and good dish on the Easter brunch table. Skidne æg tastes especially good together with smoked ham and a good porse-snaps.That's a real spring and Easter dish.

Nine Cabbage:

Easter food was marked by eggs and by the healthy and green food. In old descriptions are told that you had to eat an apple on Easter Morning - on an empty stomach. And the apple might be followed by a snaps! The snaps-apple had to counteract illness like backache and alike in the year to come. 

Nine Cabbage. Among the traditional Easter dishes was the popular nine-cabbage, a cabbage soup made from nine various cabbages. This healthy soup was eaten on Maunday Thursday - also good for the health. If you eat "nine cabbage" it might heal different disabilities in the year to come like headache, stomach pain and back pain. If there was not enough cabbage to choose from, then it was okay to use other green food, like nettle-leaves etc.  

Porridge and Eggs. Rye flour-porridge is mentioned as a dish on Good Friday -and Skidne æg ( Filthy eggs) on Easter Sunday or Easter Saturday.  Easter Saturday was also named Skidtlørdag or Skiden lørdag (Filthy Saturday), because it was the washing day. Another name Stumpelørdag ( short Saturday) showed that the day was too short for all the things people had to do before the Easter Sunday. Today Skidne æg is a common course, and as a counterpart to the Christmas-traditions many families have an Easter-Lunch, where egg-dishes and roast lamb are commonly represented.