The Swedish head waiter's sauce: sweet mustard beaten with vinegar, oil, and a great deal of dill for gravlax
Origin: Sweden
From the journey of Mustard.
Hovmästarsås means head waiter's sauce, and it is also called simply gravlaxsås, because there is only one thing it is for. Gravlax is salmon cured in salt, sugar, and dill, and the name records a method older than refrigeration: grav is a grave, and the fish was once buried in the sand above the tideline to ferment lightly under pressure. The modern version is a straightforward salt and sugar cure, and what comes out is soft, fatty, sweet at the edges, and in need of something sharp enough to stand against it without sliding off. That is a precise set of requirements and the sauce meets all of them. Sweet Swedish mustard supplies sharpness and sugar at once; vinegar adds acid; oil gives body; and the mucilage in the mustard seed emulsifies the whole thing into a thick, stable, spoonable sauce without any egg at all. It is a mayonnaise in behaviour without being one in composition, and mustard is the only reason it holds. Dill is not a garnish here either. It goes in by the handful, chopped fine, and the finished sauce should be visibly green-flecked and taste as much of dill as of mustard. Swedish mustard is coarse, dark, and noticeably sweeter than French, closer in style to the Bavarian, and the sweetness is assumed by the recipe. Made with Dijon the sauce is thin and sour and needs considerably more sugar to come right. It appears on the smörgåsbord, at Midsummer, at Christmas, and at every formal Swedish lunch that begins with fish, and a bowl of it is set on the table with the salmon rather than spooned over in the kitchen.
It keeps for a week refrigerated and thickens as it stands; loosen with a teaspoon of water or vinegar. It will separate slightly on standing, which is normal, and a brisk stir brings it back. Swedish mustard is sold by Scandinavian grocers and by IKEA. Substituting Dijon alone gives a sauce that is sharp rather than sweet and misses the point; if that is all you have, use it and increase the sugar to three tablespoons. Beyond gravlax it is served with cold poached salmon, with herring, with Janssons frestelse, and with new potatoes. A spoonful into a potato salad is very good. For the salmon itself: cure a side, skin on, for 48 hours under weights in 1 part salt to 1 part sugar with a large bunch of dill and a tablespoon of crushed white peppercorns, turning once, then scrape clean and slice thinly on the diagonal.
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