Unique Christmas Dinner Around The World

In the U.S., Christmas dinner has a pretty reliable menu: roast ham, beef or turkey, potatoes, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce, plus some fruit

pies and sugar cookies for dessert. But come to the table outside of North America and you’ll likely find a very different spread. As Christianity

spread across the globe, different cultures integrated Christmas into their existing traditions to create some unique holiday dishes. Check them out.

Mattak and kiviak: raw blubber and fermented birds (Greenland)

Greenlanders mark the day with traditional Inuit dishes rarely seen outside the arctic. Mattak (pictured here) is raw whale skin (usually

Bowhead, though beluga and narwhal are also used) diced or serrated before serving. Kiviak isn’t served totally raw, but its method of

preparation is also unusual. First, a seal skin is hollowed out to make room for something like 500 auks, a seabird that looks similar to a small

penguin. The auks, feathers and all, are stuffed into the seal’s body, which is then sewn up and sealed with grease. After seven months of

fermentation, the birds are removed and served up straight from the seal for a very special feast. (Click that last link for a very unappetizing

photo, but don’t say we didn’t warn you). Image: Flickr, Lisa Risager

Lamb is a pretty common protein, eaten in cultures from Greece to Australia to the United States. But in Norway, a special holiday dish skips the

usual shank or rack of ribs and instead serves up the animal’s head. Smalahove is a whole sheep’s head, salted and dried, smoked, boiled or

steamed as a holiday dish. The skin and fleece are always removed, but some leave the brains inside to cook before frying or eating with a

spoon. As with a few dishes on this list, smalahove was historically eaten by the poor, who couldn’t afford to waste their meat, but has over time

become known as a delicacy and sought out by tourists. Image: Wikimedia Commons The blanz

This dish is a potato gratin made with pickled anchovies and named after a Swedish opera singer. No, wait — it’s made with another fish, called

sprats, and the name was made up by a woman and the chef she hired for a society dinner, who decided to name an impromptu dish after a

popular film. Consensus seems to be that the original recipe called for sprats, but the Swedish word for that, “anjovis” was mistranslated as

“anchovies” by English-speaking cooks; a search for the recipe these days will include anchovies, sprats or small herrings pretty interchangeably.

An easy enough explanation, and far less confusing than the matter of how the dish got its name. Either way, “Jansson’s temptation” has

become a Christmas favorite for Swedes and amateur Swedish cooks around the world. Image: Flickr, Stefan Engstrom

Article Source: Kaitlyn Jakola