I picked up some Swedish potato sausage. What do I eat with it?
Hey, I was going to post the same thing! I got 3 lbs at Uli’s. Serving them with potatoes seems redundant. Lingonberries or whole-berry cranberries are a nice side, but what else?
These are sides offered by a nice Swedish restaurant where I’ve had Swedish potato sausages:
Mashed Potatoes
Boiled Potatoes
Mixed Rice
Candied Sweet Potatoes
Creamed Peas
Applesauce
Swedish Brown Beans
Sauerkraut
Pickled Beets
Mixed Steamed Vegetables
None of them exactly jump out at me, although homemade chunky applesauce is good.
Ok, I had to google since I’ve never had that sausage, but amongst the pictures of sausages as hot dogs <with potato salad on top?!> and kitties in christmas hats <maybe swedes eat cat sausage at christmas, I dunno…> I did find a link with a lot of recipes to use it IN…such as making potato cakes with it, or omelettes, casseroles…it might help if you have a lot to use.
http://www.familyoven.com/recipes/search?terms=Swedish%20Potato%20Sausage
Red Cabbage!
What on Earth is a Swedish potato sausage. It’s unknown in Sweden.
It’s a meat-and-potatoes sausage. A typical recipe can be found here. I’ve seen it across all sorts of Scandinavian cookbooks, so I don’t think it’s particularly Swedish, but that’s the country it’s most associated with here.
Ketchup is the traditional accompaniment around here. If you really want to get authentic, roast up a rutabaga on the side.
And here’s a poster in Sweden (scroll down to the middle of the page) claiming, although with some uncertainty, it exists there:
The Swedish name, so far as I can find, is potatiskorv, and apparently it’s more of a Swedish-American thing than a Swedish thing, according to this book:
The sausage itself is associated with Swedish Christmas dinner, at least by Swedish-Americans. I wonder if it’s just an older generation/regional sausage that was brought to America by immigrants, and then just mostly died out in the old country. Or perhaps it really is a Swedish-American invention. At any rate, it does seem to be strongly associated with the Swedish-American community, as this book title seems to suggest:
These sort of things happen all the time. I’m still confused by people talking about Swedish pancakes. All the pancakes I have seen here have either been American style or Crepes.
When my Swedish grandma made it she boiled quartered potatoes and carrot chunks, then we’d take the casings off the sausage and mash it all together and eat a big plate of mashed sausage and potatoes. It was awesome, though not very refined, I s’pose.
Great minds think alike, eh? 
I thought about lingonberries (and I have a jar or two), and also applesauce.
Spaetzle goes with anything.
As a Sweden, I’ll chime in with the rest regarding never heard of this dish =)
On the other hand, there are plenty of things with national denominations that people from the nation in question have never heard of, or don’t necessarily identify with. For Swedes, things like Swedish pancakes (which resemble sweet crêpes) and Swedish meatballs strike us as unremarkable (what’s so special about making a small meatball?), while for example Swedish Massage was invented by a Swedish expatriate in France.
French dressing, French fries, Russian dressing, French toast…the list goes on.
And then, of course, we have kålrot = Swedish turnip (or just Swede or rutabaga depending on your location).
I’ll guess that the usage came, as others have said about the sausages, from the large population of Scandinavian immigrants. In the U.S., ‘pancake’ has a certain meaning. Pancakes are thicker and heavier than crêpes. Sweet crêpes eaten in Europe, which I’ve seen and heard called ‘pancakes’, tend (IME) to be eaten with a squeeze of lemon juice and some powdered sugar. Pancakes in the U.S. tend to be eaten with butter and syrup (and somewhat often with peanut butter). This is not to imply that ‘all Americans eat pancakes one way, and Europeans eat “pancakes” another way’; just a broad observation. I’m guessing that ‘Swedish pancakes’ are called that in the U.S. because Scandinavian immigrants eat/ate them, and the name is to distinguish then from the thicker American kind.
Similarly, ‘meatlball’ in the U.S. generally refers to balls of meat made with Italian-style seasonings, and are usually eaten with pasta. ‘Swedish meatballs’ are probably called so to differentiate them from the ‘regular’ kind. We also eat sweet-and-sour meatballs, teriyaki meatballs, and BBQ meatballs, which are popular as party food.
Swedish meatballs played an important role in 1948’s I Remember Mama, about a Norwegian-American family.
My mom made this every Christmas eve. We were 2 boys, 3 girls and a dad. It was our “family” traditional swedish supper.
The meal had:
2-3 lbs of ring swedish sausage (made by our local butcher)
cooked candied dark red kidney beans
swedish meatballs
gravy made from drippings of the browning of the meat for the meatballs
boiled buttered red potatoes
lingonberries (sometimes substituted for cranberry sauce)
We also had a dessert plate with assorted cookies- pepperkaker. spritz, gingerbread and caraway.
Some may say this is a bland meal and that may be true now a days but back in the early 70’s living in the country it was a hearty meal and would make any child sleepy on Christmas Eve. A good thing!
Merry Christmas!
Building a bit on this, I have it in my Finnish cookbook as perunamakkara. Like the Swedish version, these are pork sausages with potatoes as stretcher/filler, much in the way you would use oats or rice in the same manner in other types of sausage (like kishka, or boudin or whatnot.)
When it comes to a “true” potato sausage, you really can’t beat the Lithuanians and their vedarai. It’s pretty much 100% potato, save for some spices, and sometimes a bit of bacon for flavor. It is often served with a buttery bacon and sour cream sauce. I swear, I don’t think there’s a country that likes potatoes more than Lithuanians, Irish included. Last time I was at a Lithuanian restaurant, I ordered the Lithuanian plate, which contained about four or five main dishes, pretty much all of them with a heavy potato base. If you’re a fan of potatoes, sour cream, and bacon hie thyself to a Lithuanian restuarant.
Korv is how my family always spelled it. (Sounds like curve - to me at least.) According to some of our Swedish relatives, it was a traditional 19th Century Christmas dish in rural areas. We described the dinners we had every year on Christmas Eve (tradition started by my mother’s parents who emigrated from rural Sweden to the US in the first years of the 20th Century) and the rels said no one had eaten that kind of meal in Sweden for over 100 years.
(All spellings are suspect and may be missing diacritical marks {EDIT during composition} I just did some internet translation so it may be better now)
Julen gröt (Christmas rice porridge - sounded like ‘yula grit’ to me) with cinnamon sugar and milk. Takes tens of hours to cook, slowly adding milk to the rice as it swells.
Gamla Gubbe (“gooba” - saffron bread “old men”) at each place setting; we called them gubba men which seems to mean men men. (I have recently heard that Gamla Gubbe has connotations of “Dirty Old Man” or pervert, which is puzzling as a Christmas decoration.) When my mother was tasked to make the gubbe one year, my grandmother took one look at the result and said, “Those gubbes are all cripples.”
Breads, Goteborg sausage, Svea Ost, Kumin Ost (farmers’ cheeses, with and without caraway seeds), knakebrot (like Ry-Krisp), several kinds of mustard (slotts/slöts/??sp??-senap - which seems to mean either castle mustard or closed mustard depending on how you spell it
Several kinds of herring, one of which was graslok sill (which seems to mean chives herring). We never had lutfisk, for which I am grateful.
Korv (potato sausage with finely ground beef and/or pork 1 to 1.25 inches {25-30mm} in diameter) (korv seems to mean simply ‘sausage’) - it explodes while boiling unless you prick it hundreds of times with needles before it goes in the boiling water (a fun project for the younger members of the family. The needles must be very sharp to avoid tearing the casing - which will also cause it to explode. It takes a fine discernment to pick a range of ages which can do the job safely yet will not get too enthusiastic and begin stabbing each other.)
Meatballs (very like the ones you can get at Ikea) in sauce
Bruna Bönor (brown beans) in sauce
Lingonberry preserves with almost everything (kind of like cranberry jelly at Thanksgiving)
(several other things which I can’t seem to remember at the moment; I was usually full after the breads, meats, cheeses and herring)
BTW, I never liked Korv! Really bland.
At any rate, these are the things that I associate with Swedish potato sausage, having been obliged to have at least a taste every December 24th from 1943 to about 1963 when I left home. Thanks for the memories.