A couple years ago at my Dad’s during Christmas, his wife’s mother came and prepared several Swedish dishes, including pickled herring (ewww!) and an unknown bread-ish looking thing.
Well, it was sliced like bread, had a crumbly texture like bread, and had a somewhat grainy flavor too, but its appearance was very like head cheese. I didn’t ask what it was, and it didn’t taste very bad (had very little taste at all as a matter of fact,) but declined a second helping due to the cholesterol if it were indeed head cheese.
So, is there a swedish dish that looks coursely and unevenly marbled like head cheese, but otherwise seems similar to bread?
Did it look something like this ? In that case it was sylta . Traditional dish, but will probably die out with the older generations because generally people simply don’t fancy it.
(There are several kinds of ‘sylta’. The point of it seems to be to use the parts “left over” from the slaughter of a cow, calf or pig; actually what’s left after the cleaning the actual meat. That together with gelatin and all kinds of spice, makes up the ‘sylta’. Don’t eat it.)
A bit, Wakinyan. The grains were a bit bigger in my memory (although I could be mistaken,) and it had more of a brown color than a pink color, but altogether it seemed fairly similar. It just didn’t have a meaty taste at all to it, although now that I think about it, it did have somewhat of a cheesy/gelatiny texture to it, just not as much as actual cheese/gelatin.
Plus the name “sylta” seems familiar. I’ll assume unless I hear different that that was what I had. Not as bad tasting as its description but I wouldn’t go out of my way to have more of it.
Here is another picture of it (if it was indeed Sylta. I believe that today its not really “left overs”, but rather good meat. Could be wrong though.
I think its ok, but not great.
How can you NOT like pickled herring though? Thats like the best part of christmas! I love that stuff.
