Gravlax Tartare on Spoons

Dice salmon into uniform small cubes for best texture. The tartare should be well-chilled. Crème fraîche is tangier than sour cream and preferred here. Salmon roe is more affordable than sturgeon caviar but equally beautiful. Assemble just before serving so spoons stay clean.

Gravlax is one of Scandinavia's oldest preserved foods and one of the few dishes whose name is literally a cooking instruction. The word comes from the Scandinavian gräva or grave, meaning "to dig" or "to cure fish" — tracing back through Old Norse to the Proto-Germanic word for a hole in the ground — and lax or laks, meaning salmon: "buried salmon." Wikipedia documents the oldest known textual reference in a Norwegian historical document, the Diplomatarium Norvegicum, from 1348, where gravlax appears as a nickname for a man named Óláfr, suggesting the food was already well known by that date. In the Middle Ages, Scandinavian fishermen salted salmon and buried it in the sand above the high-tide line, allowing it to ferment lightly in the cold, oxygen-poor earth. This original gravlax was a strongly flavoured, fermented product — far more pungent than what is eaten today, closer in character to the fermented herring known as surströmming. The introduction of larger quantities of salt, dill, and later sugar gradually transformed the fermented preparation into the clean, elegant cure we recognise now. House of Hegelund, drawing on Nordic food history sources, confirms that "the introduction of salt and dill, among other things, lead to the development of a much gentler dish." By 1847, the Swedish cookbook author Gustafwa Björklund was describing a recognisably modern version using saltpeter, sugar, and dill. Today gravlax is cured entirely in the refrigerator — no burial, no fermentation — and served thinly sliced with hovmästarsås, literally the "maitre d's sauce," a sweet-sharp blend of dill and mustard that has accompanied the dish in Sweden since at least the 17th century.