Large Fierce Mammal

Last evening Mrs. LFM and I did something that’s an annual tradition for some people, but we’ve never done before – I took her to the Christmas Day opening of a movie. Specifically, we viewed the 2011 incarnation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Clicking on the embedded link will take you to the official movie website where I was amused to find myself greeted with the English translation of a Swedish proverb, “What is hidden in snow, comes forth in the thaw.” While it sounds very deep and I can think of a number of applications for it, my amusement springs from suspicion that it was first given voice by a Swedish dog owner after surveying his garden one spring morning long ago.

This is another interpretation of the first in a three part series of crime/espionage novels written by the late Stieg Larsson – the Millenium Trilogy –  that was first put to film in what to our minds was a superior Swedish production released under the original literary title, Män som hatar kvinnor  (Men Who Hate Women)  in 2009, and in 2010 as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish with English subtitles. Both films were well acted and more or less equal in production quality, but speaking for ourselves, Mrs. LFM and I would much rather watch a film in its original language supported by subtitles than one that features, as in this case, British and American actors doing their lines in Swedish accents. By contrast, Stellan Skarsgård, who actually is Swedish, performed his lines without any native accent at all, sounding more American than anything else, and Englishman Daniel Craig didn’t even try.

All things considered though, this is a worthy way to spend three hours, and I will say that the 2011 version contains more elements of the amount of eating and drinking that appears regularly in the novels, pointing to Stieg Larsson being a man who enjoyed his food and drink, than the Swedish one. I first wrote of this literary phenomenon in my 20 September 2010 article, The Sandwich with the Dragon Tattoo which chronicles the LFM Kitchen’s interpretation and development of a particular open  faced sandwich featuring pickled herring in a mustard sauce with hard boiled egg and chives, that captured our interest as soon as we read its description in the novel. Clicking on the title of that article will take you there, and I will add that as soon as the bread is done baking, Mrs. LFM and I will be dining tonight on this very same delicacy.

It’s particularly timely to note that pickled herring features prominently in the winter cuisine of countries steeped in the skills of surviving harsh times, and not surprisingly, variations on the dish routinely appear in traditional Christmas time menus throughout northern Europe as well as in other countries with ancestral cultural ties to them. A little internet digging for Scandinavian and Polish Christmas vittles will inevitably turn up pickled herring recipes in no time, and from the LFM house to  yours, we’ll save you the time and offer you ours.

Bon appetit.