[Sca-cooks] Pickled Fish, Pumpernickel Rye, Advice??

[Judith L. Smith Adams]

Huette von Ahrens <ahrenshav at yahoo.com> wrote:     >>Huette wrote:
  ...I know that it tasted different, I just can't figure out how. Probably it was the love that she put into it... >>
   
  IMHO, you have correctly identified the mystery ingredient, and that your mother and grandmother would be very pleased to hear so...
  
>>They [rollmops] are salt herring that have been soaked in clean water for several days and then rolled with mustard, onion, chopped pickles, and carrot and pickled in a spiced vinegar in the fridge for about a week. They are very tasty.>>
   
  Oh, yum...  pickled fish AND pickled vegetables AND mustard... Soaking but no lye bath, so no lye bath smells and no gelatinous texture, just the rather delightful slithery-smooth surface and chewy-tender bite of the pickled herring...

>> Being on the Baltic, herring is a staple. And the area had been under Swedish rule off and on for a period of time before Frederick the Great came along. So, it wouldn't surprise me that there was some cross cultural transfers... I am wondering if the Swedes learned to love pumpernickel during those years. 
Huette>>

  Maybe so... Hmm... Isn't it a pumpnickel, or at least a rye, that goes under smorgasbord sandwiches?  I'm thinking those are Swedish, or as much Swedish as Danish?  And is that pumpernickel the same as the black, dense, square, pressed-grain texture, very thinly sliced stuff one gets to this day in Germany?  (I was offered it for breakfast with sausages and cheeses in Southern Germany some years ago... Yum, the sausages and cheese, if not the raw-grain flavored bread.  I'd met the bread - which is as far from Wonder Bread as it is possible to get - on a backpacking trip in my teens with the Lutheran youth group, but that's another thread...)  
   
  Anyway, THAT pumpernickel is not only memorable, it keeps indefinitely... tastes like something that keeps indefinitely... but the keeping quality would have been valued in period...  and become an acquired taste, like lefse and lutefisk...  
   
  My grandmother's "Norwegian Pumpernickel Rye" bread is the only traditional recipe of hers that came to me. Rye breads of various kinds were/are all over the North... in Siberia, my daughter acquired a taste for a hard-shell, tough, dense bread that comes as a long, flattened and rounded rectangle and can be kept through the winter...  I'm not too sure Grandma's recipe came from Norway... For four loaves, it uses four cakes yeast, melted shortening or butter, a LOT of molasses and/or honey, sugar, AND brown sugar (!), and only 2 cups of rye flour to 10 of white, plus caraway seed and orange peel.  (Makes fantastic toast.)   This combo is usually called Swedish limpa...  
   
  I bring up Grandma's bread 'cause I've wanted to ask all you experienced types for advice on how to recreate my grandmother's loaf.  For years, she brought us a loaf every time she came to the house.  They were baked in standard loaf pans, were rather dense-textured and hadn't risen especially high.  When I've made the bread, it comes out over-sweetened, fluffy, risen high...  Very tasty, but NOT the bread that Grandma used to bake...  
   
  Ideas??
   
  Thank you!
  Judith

		
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