A few weeks ago Paul and I went out for the Julbord dinner at Chicago’s Tre Kronor restaurant. The Julbord – “Christmas table” in Swedish – is a traditional holiday buffet, served at Tre Kronor with a splash of Swedish caroling, led by a girl in a Santa Lucia crown of flaming candles, and lubricated by tiny glass mugs of glögg and shots of aquavit. I’ve been wanting to go for years, but it was derailed by covid for a few years; this winter is the first time they’ve put on the full dine-in feast since 2019. It has never been cheap, and like everything else it’s shot up in price this year, but there were still tickets available for the half-price dress rehearsal so we put on our pants and went.
It was, as advertised, a feast: gravlax, salmon, deviled eggs, beet and cucumber salads, paté, meatballs with lingonberry sauce, a potato/cream/anchovy dish called Jonsson’s Temptation that’s a direct line to a heart attack, lutefisk (gross), creamed spinach, smoked sausages, seven kinds of pickled herring … I haven’t even gotten to the desserts but you get the picture.
We forgot to bring any wine, all the other diners seemed to know each other, and the service and the singing were very much still in beta, but it was super fun. Mainly because, as you may have surmised, I can eat again.
I haven’t exactly been starving but the reduced menu of chemo, and the attendant mouth sores, fatigue, and nausea, have made the past months pretty boring here in our kitchen. Nothing spicy, nothing rich, nothing fried, nothing raw, nothing tasty.
But flavor is banished no more. This holiday season I am hungry, and I am eating: Venison stew, a plate of tempura, previously verboten raw milk cheese. A densely grained, almost-damp whole wheat loaf baked by an undergrad. A bowl of congee loaded with tilapia and ginger. Kale salad. Diner chili. Blueberry doughnuts and shrimp ceviche and Doritos and khao soi laced with coriander and lime and fire.
I’ve been cooking more than I have all year, perfecting my formula for back-of-the-refrigerator soup, and baking like I was thirteen. That year I was an obsessive, working my way through my mom’s recipe file to turn out cookies, cakes, and cream puffs. At Christmas I spent a week crafting lumpy buche de noel and forcing them on our extended family. This was the year before the eating disorder kicked in, and while I went on to cook and bake in various cafes as a teen and young adult, it was never again with the same unfettered zeal.
Just this past week, though, I’ve turned out a dozen loaves of spice cake bottom-heavy with applesauce and slathered with a cream cheese frosting riding the razor’s edge of tangy and sweet. I’ve pressed them on friends, along with, at times, an experimental shortbread flavored with black tea and lavender. Sorry to those who did not get these nuggets; half of them burned and we ate them as a public service.
On the counter right now are the fixings for gingersnaps, or maybe molasses cookies, and I bought three pounds of dark chocolate chips at the dollar store just before the storm, in case I was trapped inside for days and needed to make rum balls. I think I forgot how happy it makes me to cook, and even happier to eat, and happier still to share it with those who have made this past wild year as full of love as it has been with fear.
I hope you too have plenty to eat and are able to share it with people you love, however you celebrate the season. This morning Paul made eggs-in-the-hole and tonight we’re going out for sushi with Zoe and her family. I can’t think of a better way to mark this final week of 2022 than by erasing another forbidden food from the list with the help of friends.
With love,
Martha
It is definitely a luxury to have a feeling of ease, around food, especially around plenty of food. May you have all the ease! and all the tastiness.