Match of the week

Herring and aquavit

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on December 15 2016 at 12:21

This week’s match of the week - herring and aquavit - was paired for me - appropriately enough - by the restaurant Aquavit which has just opened an outpost in London.

It’s not a groundbreaking match - I've recommended it before - but it was done particularly well.

I’d already been for breakfast, which I can highly recommend and had decided on the strength of that to meet up for an early dinner with a couple of food writer friends with whom I’d been on a trip to Scandinavia last year.

We’d spent a memorable evening at a totally unpronounceable herring restaurant called Bakklandet Skydsstasjon and had developed a bit of a thing about herrings.

Aquavit’s menu, which includes four different preparations - three as part of a herring selection - was the perfect opportunity to revisit our herring fetish, along with a few ice-cold shots of aquavit in beautiful little frozen glasses. I *tried* - OK I drank - two different kinds the Aalborg Dild (dill) and Aalborg Taffel (caraway), both delicious though I can’t say that one matched the herring better than the other.

It must have been along the right lines as on the menu they pair both the Matje herring (with potato, sour cream and egg yolk) and the herring selection which consists of Brantevik (dill pickled) herring and herring with mustard and curry sauces with O.P.Original which is flavoured with caraway, anise and fennel.

In Scandinavia aquavit would generally be accompanied by a glass of lager as a chaser as at this meal in Copenhagen I enjoyed a few years ago but I must confess I prefer sipping it on its own. A fun way to entertain friends in the new year.

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