After a recent food tour around Scåne, Sweden’s southern-most region, we were inspired to cook a dish using traditional Swedish flavours, a Swedish salmon pudding. Salmon is, or rather can very easily be, an everyday occurrence in Swedish households to which this recipe is a nod of tradition. A more detailed trip of the tour around Scåne can be found here.

Contrary to its name, this is not a pudding in the UK sense, but a savoury dish made of layers of salmon, potato, onion and dill, baked in a creamy sauce. The recipe will comfortably serve 6 people. Being such a rich dish made with copious amounts of butter, cream and a lot of salmon, we found this is a recipe best cooked during winter.

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 45 – 50 minutes baking

Ingredients:

• 1 kg potatoes
• 300g salmon fillet
• 300g smoked salmon (we used trimmings)
• 3 large onions
• 25g dill
• 150g butter
• 600ml single cream
• 6 eggs
• 1 lemon – zest

Recipe:

1. Peel and thinly slice the potatoes, using a mandolin if you have one for consistent thickness, if not just take your time about aiming for ¼cm thick. 
2. Blanche the sliced potatoes in boiling water for a couple of minutes, just until they’ve softened but do not fall apart. Drain and set aside.
3. Peel and slice the onion, then fry in the butter until the onion softens and just starts to catch a bit of colour. 
4. At this point it is worthwhile pre-heating the oven to 200ºC.
5. Meanwhile de-skin your salmon fillets and slice up the salmon as thinly as possible. Finely chop the dill, and now your constituent parts of the pudding are ready to be assembled. 
6. Layer up in a large (32cm) rectangular baking dish, starting with a layer of potato then a layer of each type of salmon, a sprinkle of dill, then onions. Repeat and top with a final layer of potatoes. 
7. Whisk together the eggs and cream, and finely grate in the zest of a lemon. Add a couple of twists of freshly ground black pepper and good pinch of salt. Give a further final whisk and then gently pour all over the layered potatoes and salmon, which should just fill up to the top of the baking dish. 
8. Cook in the oven for 45 – 50 minutes or until the top of the dish is becoming golden. Serve with a fronds of fresh dill and a drizzle of rapeseed oil.