Our Julbord classics

Exploring the historical roots of today’s Christmas table, back to the Viking and early Middle Ages, onward to the postmodern industrial Christmas food.

The food on the Christmas table differs from others in the year. Where others require variety and change—such as dinner parties or New Year’s Eve dinners—the Christmas feast is best when repeated. Christmas food plays almost the same role as the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” where the miserly old Scrooge meets the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet-to-Come. In the same way, a Christmas table is a nod to what has been as much as it is a clear indication of what is now and what will be all over again next year. The Christmas table is time embodied, one’s own life and memories. In an earlier ranking made by Demoskop and the food industry, the following favorites were found on Swedes’ Christmas tables:

1. Christmas ham 2. Jansson’s Frestelse 3. Pickled herrings 4. Salmon of different kinds 5. Meatballs 6. Julmust, the special Christmas soda 7. Glögg, the spiced mulled wine 8. Rice porridge 9. Julost (a mild Christmas cheese with the classic red cover) 10. Prinskorv (small cocktail sausages)

Not much has changed since—or before.

Early Christmas dishes

Of the 10 dishes above, two were already present a thousand years ago: the cheese (favorite #9) and the porridge (favorite #8, we covered at length just prior to Christmas 2021). Both are older than that and probably existed already in the agricultural Stone Age. Cheese was prepared during the summer’s milking of cows and goats then had to be in storage and turned over. The porridge came from different types of grain and was everyday food, but on festive occasions, white grains were often cooked in cream or milk to get a really white porridge, as the white color symbolized hope in Christ.

In the Middle Ages, people began preparing fish with lye to get a particularly fine white meat—from ling, for instance. The resulting lutefisk has since been a significant Christmas fish. The rice pudding was cooked during the high and late Middle Ages as an exclusivity to the elite since the rice grain was an imported luxury. But it didn’t become the commonly appearing porridge until the 19th century.

There is one dish left from the earliest times that is no longer a favorite on most tables: fresh, thick and fried ribs. Fresh food was festive food and the pork sides of the butchered Christmas pig were eaten for Christmas while the hams were salted and dried for later consumption. Butter and bread are still on today’s menu.

Early on there was a medieval, strong, freshly brewed beer, although it was originally of the ale type since lager beer was first brewed in the 19th century. The Viking Age festive ale or mead was still enjoyed until the 18th century but it was later completely replaced by beer and stronger spirits. We find the Christmas head cheeses on the medieval festive table, but they were probably earlier than that of the Swedish version, sylta (often made with jellied brawn), which has both Old Swedish and Old Saxon roots. The different kinds of sylta are my own Christmas favorites.

Feasts of the 17th and 18th centuries

Two of the favorites are still a living tradition: pickled herrings (favorite #3) and glögg, the sweet and spicy mulled wine (favorite #7). The flavors of the glögg and in some herrings was created by imported spices from the East Indies—cinnamon, pepper, cloves, cardamom—what we today call Christmas spices. The spicy pickled herring, unlike everyday salty herring, was already in a drier version on the late medieval festive table but only in wealthy circles because the spices came from the other side of the world. When the spices became cheaper in the 18th century, many people began to use them in all their dishes.

Spiced pickled herrings were also served on the bourgeoisie’s aquavit table, a precursor to the smörgåsbord and thus also a predecessor to the Christmas table. Both herring and glögg contain sugar which was also an ingredient for the wellto-do during this time ... and if you want to find examples of Christmas sweets from a noble home at the time of Sweden as a great power, just take a look at today’s Christmas candy table—you find the same things as in the mid 17th century: oranges, marzipan, almonds, hazelnuts, confectionery, ginger snaps, klenäter (a fried pastry), sherry, Malaga wine, dried figs and equally dry dates. It is actually a bit strange that even today we eat so much dry, salted and smoked preserved food for Christmas, when we are used to otherwise having fresh asparagus, fresh figs and fresh tomatoes all year round. But the stored and preserved food has the advantage that it carries old stories about Christmas better than fresh food does.

Late 19th century

Much of today’s Christmas dinner comes from the age of industrialization and national romance in the late 1800s. Home decor was a great interest among the bourgeoisie at the time and Christmas became more about decorating. Many of the impressions of Christmas came from Germany and its decoration industry. The Christmas tree was appearing, more and more festooned with candles. New technology made the colors of Christmas a distinct red and green, and colorful Christmas cards were sent with pictures of the new red Santa, often signed by artist Jenny Nyström.

At home Swedes sang new Christmas songs such as Alice Tegnér’s “Nu så är det jul igen, jultomten myser” (Now it’s Christmas again, Santa Claus is cozying up) from 1899, based on a poem by Zacharias Topelius. In the same national-romantic spirit, Skansen and the Nordic Museum were founded and Christmas turned into a folksy expression in an otherwise vanishing agrarian society.

At the end of the 19th century, the bourgeois Christmas table consisted of what was clearly a multi-part meal, an introduction to the smörgåsbord. A Christmas menu by Swedish author August Strindberg (1849-1912) was found, and in an early 20th century note to his housekeeper he requests to have the following Christmas dinner, designed for five guests:

1: mo Smörgåsbord (lavish) 2: do Swedish sauerkraut soup and broth 3: tio Fish after the season 4: to Bird ditto with roast potatoes and the like. 5: to Butter cream cake with jam (non bread cake)

But at the same time as Strindberg’s classic Christmas meal, there was also a new dish on its way into the Christmas celebration, a dish that would soon take over the place of honor on the Christmas table: the cured, salted Christmas ham (favorite #1).

National romance’s interest in this salty ham was that it was perceived to symbolize history, but what it really did was match what the bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19th century considered the center piece of the festive table—a big steak carved in front of the guests. Today this is almost the only time we present a large chunk of meat in the middle of the table, and the guests themselves carve from it. The bourgeoisie made the ham even more bourgeois by putting a decorative spear in it, a so-called hatelette, or ham stick. In the old farming communities, however, they wanted to eat fresh food from the newly slaughtered pig for Christmas parties, not a cured ham that wouldn’t also be properly trimmed between the slaughter on December 13 and dinner on December 24. The ham was instead associated with the salty preserved food and was served during the following summer.

At the same time, the meatballs (favorite #5) started to become a Christmas accessory, even though it actually belonged to the summer and autumn smörgåsbord at the end of the 19th century. Originally, the meatballs were an elegant dish because making minced meat without a meat grinder was a job that required plenty of staff in the kitchen. With the invention of the meat grinder around 1895, meatballs gradually become a Christmas table staple, and with the launch of frozen meatballs in the 1960s they became a permanent part of every Christmas table.

The late 19th century Christmas drinks included the lager or Bavarian-type Christmas beer from the brewery industry. Gone were the home-brewed ales that dominated since at least the early Middle Ages.

Modern Christmas meal

Throughout the 1900s, the food industry’s various processed foods simplified the preparation for Christmas. Almost first out, as early as 1900, was the fish canning industry with anchovies and sardines, but the dairy industry had already had ready-made Christmas cheese. The drink “julmust” (favorite #6) saw the light of day in 1910 and had no historic relevance from earlier home production, but it has stood the test of time.

In the 1920s, the modern charcuterie industry developed, offering Christmas sausages, liver patés and “prinskorv” (favorite #10). These small sausages were found in the upper classes of society already in the 18th century and were then called “siskonkorv,” a term still used in Finland. But to break through to the smörgåsbord and later the Christmas table, the cheaper industrial version of prinskorv was required.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Christmas Eve meal changed from a three- or four-course meal to a single serving in the form of a large Christmas buffet where one eats from the cold side’s herrings and fish dishes, crosses over and ends with the hot food. At the same time, the difference between the summer and Christmas smörgåsbord disappears.

In the 1970s, the older Christmas dishes with boiled salted meat, fresh pork feet and pork sausages are joined by the summer smörgåsbord dishes such as smoked and salted salmon (favorite #4), “Jansson’s Frestelse” (favorite #2) and stuffed egg halves with shrimp. Jansson’s Temptation is an older dish known since at least the 1840s as anchovy gratin, but it belonged to the late night noshes at that time. A novelty on the late 1900s Christmas table were also raw vegetables such as fresh cucumber, tomatoes and iceberg lettuce.

What enables this shift of summer food to winter and the Christmas table is the industrial community with faster transport of vegetables from southern Europe, technically advanced salmon farms, deep freezing of shrimp, and chickens that lay eggs year-round. In this process, our smörgåsbord was created, making the foods of Christmas, Easter and Midsummer look the same.

The emergence of these standard celebrations to a great extent came in 1950-1970, when maids disappeared and working class women joined the bourgeois women. This was undoubtedly a golden opportunity in Sweden to reform the Christmas table and remove the homemade butcher’s food and replace it with much simpler party food. But instead, the food industry took over the homework with machine-made, old-

fashioned dishes that continued to build on the sense of origin and authenticity.

And here we are in the 2000s, when more vegetable dishes and dairy-based herrings have been added. Also new is the seafood, such as smoked shrimp and salads with crayfish tails. Another novelty is the offer to buy pre-packaged Christmas food bags with a standardized Christmas concept.

Postmodern industrial Christmas

A legitimate question is why some Christmas dishes remain while others disappear. It is likely that foods people think don’t carry Christmas values have been successfully replaced with dishes that are better carriers of the Christmas spirit. We often perceive spices as mood-makers more than the food itself, so when contemporary cooks dislike the older Christmas food but want to keep the Christmas feeling, they transfer the Christmas spices to new dishes, like carrot cake with saffron frosting, Christmas brownies with cardamom truffle or saffron and orange herring.

In our time, the consistency of the food has become an important factor together with the popularity of fresh, slightly crunchy al dente food items. This means older Christmas dishes (such as lutefisk, head cheeses, cooked pork feet and “dopp i grytan,” the practice of dipping bread into the salty broth of the Christmas ham) can be perceived as soggy or slimy and get omitted from the table.

What do these old Christmas dishes mean? Well, when someone has maintained something over several generations, it stands for continuity. But food can also be a reconnection to a lost relationship, a kind of recurrence of a family or family history. For some, a redesign of the Christmas table with old craft dishes may be a contribution to a contemporary debate about poor food quality but also a way to discover your origins.

Sometimes, maybe the Christmas table is all these things at the same time. One conclusion you can draw is that the Christmas table is constantly changing, but hiding among the brand new dishes are often the traditional ones, the crisp bread and Christmas cheese ... not unlike a gray old tomte that watches over the family to ensure that everything is safe and sound and all as it should be.

Richard Tellström

Dr. Richard Tellström is a researcher of Swedish food culture history and teacher at the Department of Ethnology at Stockholm University. Find out more at www.su.se or see Tellström’s blog at www.taffel.se