Today’s Post: Scandinavian Easter Food
Since Easter is coming up at the end of this month, we wanted to share with you some Scandinavian Easter food staples. In Scandinavia, Easter is of course a religious holiday for some, but for many, it’s more of an opportunity to gather with family and friends to welcome springtime and eat a big meal together. There are some other fun traditions, like rolling Easter eggs and gækkebreve in Denmark, and we shared those with you in this blog post back in 2022. But, you may want to know more about traditional Scandinavian Easter food, so that’s what today’s post is all about. It’s not comprehensive by any means, as traditional foods vary depending on your region and family, but we hope you enjoy reading about the Easter foods we’ve included in this post.
Danish Easter Food: Smørrebrød
In Denmark, people typically celebrate with påskefrokost or Easter lunch. However, a holiday lunch in Denmark is not just a lunch, but rather a large meal where you eat lots of different food, and drink plenty of beer and snaps. Snaps is akvavit, a very strong alcoholic spirit, and Danes take shots of it as they eat their food throughout the meal. The påskefrokost spread is often very similar to the julefrokost (Christmas lunch) spread, including fish, meat, and vegetables, but can also differ slightly. For example, people like to eat eggs and lamb at Easter, while these are not as popular at the Christmas table. Most of all, Danes love to eat smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches) with different toppings at their big holiday lunches – click here to check out our recipe and explanation of Denmark’s national dish.
Swedish Easter Food: A Festival of Fish
Easter in Sweden is almost as popular as Christmas, and the spread, while similar to the Danish one, is very fish-focused. There’s egg salad with anchovies called gubbröra, pickled herring (a staple throughout Scandinavia), cured salmon or gravlax, and Jansson’s frestelse (Jansson’s temptation), a potato gratin dish made with onions and anchovies. Swedes also often enjoy lamb at their Easter table, along with a big Easter cake and some sweets to finish the meal.
This may sound similar to the Danish Easter dinner, and it is, but the following quote from an LA Times article best sums up the difference between the Swedes and the Danes when it comes to holiday dinners. “But though the Swedes eat their smorgasbord as a buffet with many small dishes, the Danes tend to do what they always do — put their food on bread. It is a law of nature that you cannot get Danes to eat a buffet without turning it into a veritable smørrebrød-feast, where every dish is eaten with a specific type of bread and specific trimmings” (source).
Norwegian Easter Food: Lots of Lamb
What about Norway? Well, following the Scandinavian Easter food traditions we’ve seen so far, Norwegians also eat fish and eggs, including rakfisk, a fermented trout dish eaten on flatbread with boiled potatoes, onion, and sour cream. But above all else, the staples of Norwegian Easter are lamb and oranges. Lamb is more self-explanatory, Jesus being the “lamb of God,” but the inclusion of oranges seems more random. It is said to have originated because oranges were at one point only available at Easter time, and it was almost like a welcoming of spring. Now, many people will make an orange cake for Easter, and Norwegians still eat over 20 million oranges over Easter weekend.
Scandinavian Easter Sweet Treats
While I’ve mentioned a few sweet treats in the sections above, there aren’t many desserts that are specifically traditional to Scandinavian Easter celebrations. Usually, people make a big show-stopping cake, maybe flavored with some citrus, and that will round out the big meal in a refreshing way. We have a recipe for a lemon bundt cake, which is our version of an Easter cake, and you can check it out here. Scandinavians do love sweets, so there are many different types of Easter candy available, much of it egg-shaped (of course). And if you’re serving egg-shaped candy, you could always make our recipe for Easter bread nests as a fun way to present the eggs. A third and final favorite of Scandinavia at Easter time, much like the rest of the world, is chocolate, which people will take with them on their hikes or long walks during the Easter holidays.
Thanks for reading!
We hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about Scandinavian Easter food and how Easter is celebrated in Scandinavia. We’ve linked all the sources we used for today’s post below or in the post itself, so please feel free to do some further reading if you like. Do any of these foods sound like anything you’d like to try at your Easter lunch? What do you love to eat for Easter? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
Sources
https://www.ostogko.dk/de-bedste-opskrifter-til-paaskebordet/
https://nordicdiner.net/easter-cake-and-how-norwegians-spend-easter/
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/on-norwegian-easter-food-traditions/
https://www.oslo.com/blog/2019/04/09/norwegian-traditional-easter-food/
