Gravlax Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Gravlax is raw salmon rubbed with salt and sugar, layered with dill, pressed under a light weight and left to stand for a night or a few days. Nothing is cooked and nothing ferments. As the salt and sugar draw out moisture the flesh firms and turns silky, sweet against the salt and scented with dill. It is sliced thin and served as a first course.

The salmon belongs to the north, a fish of local seas and rivers, and salt and dill had long sat in the same kitchens. What joins them in the cure is sugar, along with the saltpeter rubbed in beside it. Once sugar stood on ordinary household shelves, a cook could work it freely into a whole fish, and this balance of sweet and salt became something a home kitchen could turn out.

Rubbing a fish with salt, sugar and saltpeter and pressing it is a method that enters Swedish cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century. Kokbok för husmödrar, a cookbook for housewives published in Stockholm in 1847, is said to give a preparation in which saltpeter and sugar are rubbed into the fish, though that account comes down at second hand and the fish chapter of the book itself has yet to be read. The oldest wording that can be followed to the page belongs to 1879, when Hagdahl's Kok-konsten set down "Grafvad Strömming," herring cured the same way.

Recipe 334 of the household cookbook Iduns kokbok, printed in 1911, sets the dish down for twelve people. Cut a salmon of three or four kilos across at the middle, take out the backbone and wipe it with a cloth wrung out in cold water. Mix thirty grams of finely pounded salt and two grams of saltpeter with ten grams of granulated sugar, scatter it over the fish and rub it lightly in. Lay on coarsely ground white pepper and a bunch of dill, put the cut sides together, press the fish between two chopping boards under a light weight and leave it overnight; that is all. It is then sliced five millimetres thick and served with oil, vinegar, sugar, French mustard, salt and pepper. A single night in a home kitchen was enough, and the quantity given, twelve servings, shows where the fish was going: to a table with company at it. Printed as a preserve for the household, the dish would go on to be known as one of the delicacies laid out on a smörgåsbord.

The name is the old part. Gravlax joins the North Germanic grava or gräva, "to dig, to bury," to lax, "salmon": buried salmon. In the Norwegian charter collection Diplomatarium Norvegicum, under the year 1348, a man is entered with Gravlax as his byname. A byname works only if everyone already knows what it refers to, so buried salmon needed no explaining to the people who used the word. In Swedish it turns up in the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1752; in English writing it waits until 1935.

What the name described bears little resemblance to what now reaches the plate. Fishermen in the north buried salmon in the sand above the high-tide line, or in the ground, salted it lightly and let it sour in the cold. In the chilled earth the fish fermented, took on acidity and kept. No sugar went into it. This was how a household with no means of chilling fish made its catch last, and it is the layer that lies beneath gravlax rather than gravlax itself.

Is the medieval salmon in the sand, then, the same thing as today's sweet dill cure? What carried over was the name and the line of descent; the method was replaced. The Swedish Academy's dictionary, in the volume published in 1929, set out two senses under one entry. In the first, a Norrland dialect usage, a fish is lightly salted and left to sour, originally buried in the ground. In the second, a culinary usage, a fish, salmon above all, is cut up, rubbed with salt and usually with sugar and saltpeter, and pressed. The oldest example the dictionary gives for that second sense is the herring dish in Hagdahl's Kok-konsten of 1879.

In recipe 334 of Iduns kokbok, printed in 1911, nothing is left of the burying and nothing of the wait for the fish to sour. Salt, saltpeter and sugar go on, dill goes between, a weight goes on top for one night, and the dish is finished. The name came down from the buried salmon of the Middle Ages; the thing it names was remade as the sweet-salt cure of the cookbooks. What is called gravlax today is the remade one.