Jansson's temptation Period COrigin theory CVerified

Jansson's temptation (Janssons frestelse) is a Swedish gratin of thinly sliced potato layered with anchovies (properly, salted sprats) and onion, covered with cream and baked in the oven. Salt, sweetness and the richness of cream melt together in a winter dish that has long been a home favorite at Christmas and Easter tables.

The foundation of the dish is the potato. The potato came from the New World, and it took time to settle into Sweden. It appeared in the Uppsala botanical garden in the mid-seventeenth century; the industrialist Alströmer and others tried growing it in the early eighteenth; and only in the later eighteenth century, after repeated famines, was it distributed nationwide and finally became a staple. Until the potato had settled into Swedish kitchens as daily food, this gratin had no way of coming into being.

Once the main ingredient had taken root, the rest is built from things long present in the Nordic home: salted fish, cream, onion, and an oven. Indeed, a dish of the same form—anchovies layered with potato and baked in cream—already appears in the 1911 edition of the cookbook Iduns kokbok. In other words, the dish as a form is older than the name "Jansson's temptation" by which it later became widely known. Not mistaking the moment a name was attached for the moment of the dish's making is the key to reading its history.

The name "Jansson's temptation" invites the imagination. Some "Jansson" who had sworn off indulgence, one pictures, broke his vow before this alluring gratin. And indeed several personal legends have been told about where the name came from.

One holds that it comes from the nineteenth-century baritone Pelle Janzon (1844–1889), famed for banquets where he served anchovy gratin. But the name spread as a dish name about forty years after his death, a wide gap in time, and the food writer Jens Linder regards the connection as uncertain; no independent contemporary record supports it either.

Another is a local tradition tying the name to the religious leader Erik Jansson, or to the Jansson family of the Dunker parish, said to have made the dish to stretch their food during the famine years of 1867–69. But these surface only in mid-twentieth-century local chronicles, again lack contemporary support, and do not fit the time the name spread; they remain folk etymologies.

So where did the name come from? What the Swedish language and folklore institute Isof and the gastronomic academy arrive at is the 1928 film of the same title, Janssons frestelse. Elvira Stigmark, a housewife in Östermalm, is said to have had her cook, Sofie Pauline Brogårde, call the dish—until then known as "anchovy gratin" (ansjovisgratäng)—by the film's title, and the name spread by word of mouth. The dish itself was already in the 1911 cookbook; the film simply lent that plate a stylish name after the fact. The personal legends are all appealing, but the name came from the silver screen.