OP: The Great Scandinavian Baking Book
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1988. Hardcover. Near Fine. First printing.
While she has around thirty cookbooks to her name, Beatrice Ojakangas was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame for The Great Scandinavian Baking Book (1988). Of Finnish descent and hailing from Minnesota, a part of the US densely settled by Scandinavians, Ojakangas is well equipped to be an ambassador for a cultural group who all “love coffee and bake all kinds of good things to go with it…”
The range of tasty delights here is thrilling for those well-versed in Scandinavian baking, or not. Catching our eye are:
- Tattarileipä—a Finnish sourdough flatbread made with buckwheat, potatoes, and buttermilk
- Vandbakkelskringle—sweet Norwegian pretzels made with a choux dough, filled with chopped almonds and raisins and finished with lemon icing
- Teboller—Danish currant buns
- Vinarterta Hnodud—a celebratory Icelandic torte of crisp layers of pastry alternating with berry and prune jams, frosted with whipped cream
- Skinkpastej—Swedish ham pie baked in puff pastry, served with mushroom sauce
Brief but informative headnotes add some welcome anecdotal history and context. Our copy is a Near Fine first printing with a price clipped, lightly shelfworn jacket.
