Planning the Christmas Eve dinner is something I look forward to every year. I spend days writing and rewriting lists and brooding over which recipes to cook. Christmas Eve dinner is about family traditions, and my core recipes come from my mother and grandmother, but they are combined with my own, new rituals.
The main celebration in Scandinavia is on the evening of 24 December. We eat dinner, then we dance around the Christmas tree singing carols. Anybody who has seen Ingmar Bergman’s movie ‘Fanny and Alexander’ will know how seriously we take the dancing. Finally it’s time to open the presents, drink coffee and cognac, and eat all the tasty homemade cookies and chocolate.
In this chapter, I offer a selection of recipes that you can put together as a dinner, or as a buffet, but don’t feel restricted by this particular, quite traditional Christmas Eve menu, or feel you can only eat it on 24 December! In Scandinavia, we eat specific meals on Christmas Eve and the days following. Most of the recipes for our festive dishes are in the book, but it’s up to you to mix and match them, constructing your own menus for each different occasion.