Swedish midsummer new potatoes boiled with dill crowns and turned in butter
Origin: Sweden
From the journey of Dill.
This barely qualifies as a recipe and it is one of the most important dishes in Sweden. Färskpotatis, the first new potatoes, arrive in June, and they arrive with midsommar, the midsummer celebration that is the closest thing Sweden has to a national day in practice. The potatoes are eaten with pickled herring, soured cream, chives, the first strawberries, and a good deal of schnapps, and they are the fixed centre of the meal. Almond potatoes, mandelpotatis, and the early Swedish varieties are sold with the soil still on them and the skins so thin they rub away under a thumb. The dill goes into the water rather than onto the plate, and it goes in as the whole crown: the flowering head with the seeds just set, which is at exactly the same stage in June that the potatoes are. This is a genuine seasonal coincidence rather than a culinary invention, and the whole of northern European cooking is built on such coincidences. The steam carries the dill's aromatics into the potatoes as they cook, so the flavour is inside them rather than on them. The butter matters as much. Swedish butter is cultured, faintly sour, and the standard treatment is simply to turn the drained hot potatoes in a knob of it with a scatter of chopped dill fronds, then leave them alone. What should be resisted is the urge to improve it. Garlic, lemon, black pepper, and any kind of oil all make it worse, and the dish depends on a small number of very good ingredients being left to speak for themselves.
Crown dill is the point of the dish. If it is out of season, use a very large bunch of leafy dill with the stalks left on plus 1 tbsp of dill seed tied in muslin, which gets much of the way there. Swedish cultured butter is worth buying for this. A cultured or lactic butter has the faint sourness the dish is built around, and ordinary sweet-cream butter tastes flatter here. Serve with pickled herring in all its forms, soured cream, chives, hard-boiled eggs, crispbread, and mature cheese. It is the midsummer table, and cold poached salmon or gravlax joins it if the occasion is a larger one. The leftovers, sliced and fried the next morning in butter until crisp at the edges with more dill, are arguably better than the original.
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