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, onion, and an oven. The 1911 edition of the cookbook Iduns kokbok already has, under the name "anchovy gratin," a dish of anchovies soaked in milk, thinly sliced raw potato and finely chopped red onion laid in layers, topped with butter and breadcrumbs and baked for about 45 minutes. The milk is only for soaking the anchovies and is never poured over the dish. It is layered and baked just as today's dish is; what sets it apart is that no cream is poured in. 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, and it is often brought up as the source of the name. But the name turns up 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. Still, the gap in time alone is not enough to rule the story out.

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 appeared; they remain folk etymologies.

Rather than a person, some point to 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 anecdote is said to come from the 1989 edition of the Swedish gastronomic academy's calendar. Yet nothing has settled whether the film or the baritone Pelle Janzon is the true source. What is certain is that a gratin of raw potato, anchovies and red onion, layered and baked though without cream, was already in a cookbook in 1911, and the name was given to that dish afterward. Who the Jansson behind the name was remains unknown.