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The Nordics and the Baltic · Volume 24, The Swedish Crown, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Reindeer North

Kräftor i Dill och Öl

Sweden

Kräftor i dill och öl, crayfish boiled with dill and beer: a generous mound of whole boiled crayfish piled high, their shells a deep coral red, tangled dill crowns and fronds threaded through the pile.

Illustration

Time
Hands on 20 minutes · Waiting 8 hours

The party tradition and the ecological crisis are two separate stories: "kräftskiva" only enters print in 1931, while the crayfish plague that all but destroyed Sweden's native crayfish arrived from Finland in 1907. The North American signal crayfish, introduced from the 1960s as a supposedly plague-resistant replacement, turned out to be a carrier rather than a cure, and is, by a real historical irony, the same species now dominating Britain's own invaded rivers. See the History in Layers.

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 20 minutes, plus overnight resting.

Ingredients

  • 1 kg live crayfish
  • 2.5 litres water
  • 1 dl (100 ml) coarse salt
  • 1 tbsp caster sugar
  • 10 dill crowns (flowering heads) with stalks
  • 330 ml beer

Method

  1. Rinse the crayfish in cold water and check they are still alive.
  2. Bring the water, salt, sugar, dill and beer to the boil, then simmer the brine for 10 minutes.
  3. Add the crayfish to the vigorously boiling liquid, cover, and boil 5 to 10 minutes (larger crayfish nearer 10 minutes, smaller nearer 8).
  4. Let the cooking liquid cool completely with the crayfish still in it.
  5. Refrigerate, crayfish and liquid together, overnight, so the flavour continues to develop.
  6. Serve cold, piled high, with bread, cheese and aquavit, dill fronds scattered over.

What a modern chef changes

The brine given a Nordic-fermented backbone, and the shell given a last few seconds it never traditionally got.

Rung 4

Method

  1. Stir a spoonful of home-built barley garum into the finished, cooled brine before the overnight rest, for a deeper savoury undertone beneath the dill, the same koji-and-barley logic this chapter's technique ladder sets out, applied to a boil rather than a cure.
  2. Give the drained, room-temperature crayfish a few seconds of direct flame on a very hot grill just before serving, shell-side down, for a light char that a straight boil never achieves, exactly Ekstedt's own "seconds of fire" principle borrowed here by analogy.
  3. Grow your own dill to flowering, or substitute a generous quantity of fresh dill sprigs plus a spoonful of dill seed, since true dill crowns are not commercially sold in the UK the way they are across Sweden every August.
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