Our daughter and her husband have arrived from Sweden. They brought some typical food that is essential for a Swedish Christmas dinner. For long we did not know if they were coming so we prepared ourselves for a traditional French Christmas dinner with champagne, oysters and Foies Gras, which is also “a bit of all right” as the Irish would say, but our old Swedish traditions are what we prefer at Christmas.

The big day in Sweden is Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day as it is in most of the world. We call it Jul not Christmas as our celebration at mid winter is much older than the Christian holiday. It was actually to get some discipline on the dangerous and ethnocentric Nordic people that the Catholic Church decided that we all should celebrate the birth of Jesus at mid-winter. Historically he was born at a different time of the year. In the Nordic countries we went on celebrating mid-winter with old pagan ceremonies even after we officially were Christian, to much irritation in Rome. Even if we now have forgotten our old pagan traditions, we still call it Jul, which is the same word as the English word Yule and is the old Scandinavian word that we have exported to English; another word is significantly enough “död” that means death.

 But back to the table.

In our family the day starts with hot porridge made of round rice, with sugar and cinnamon and milk. An old tradition is that you hide an almond in the porridge and the person who gets the almond will be married during the next year. We drink tea or coffee and most important a slice of dark bread with a thick slice of the Christmas ham (the ham might also be reminiscence from the pagan time when the Nordic Gods in Valhall eat their bore Särimer every day over and over again) with very hot home made mustard. An important thing coming from my wife’s family is that we use the very old cups and saucers from tableware that has been in her family very long. It is Swedish china from Rörstrand and it is called Japan; an enormously over decorated set from the turn of the century (not the last one).

After this quite filling breakfast it will only be coffee and traditional buns with saffron and a ginger sponge cake for lunch.

The dinner is however the big occasion. Again the ham has the most important place, together with red cabbage, hot mustard and the dark bred dunked in the bullion from when we cooked the ham. Our home made meat-balls are also important. I always make cured salmon and our daughter and her husband had brought Swedish herrings that they pickled in a traditional way. They had also brought the ham, as we can not get such ham in France and they baked the dark bread the day before as dark bread is rare in France. The red cabbage is bought at Ikea.

An important thing is the aquavit (snaps) that is spiced in a traditional way. Sometimes you can buy that at Ikea as well, but this year the French customers obviously had liked it too much so it was sold out. I however did it myself. In the end you will find the recipe for Swedish Julsnaps.

We also have cheese and to the honour of our new home country we have foies gras on the table. A couple of small boiled potatoes go with the herring and the cured salmon is accompanied by a special sauce I make.

We drink dark beer with the food and at a number of occasions throughout the dinner we say “Skål” (skol) to each other and have a small glass of snaps.

We actually have quite a few other things as well on the Christmas table, but theses are the essentials.

After dinner we give each other presents and eat some sweets, maybe some of the men smoke a nice cigar from Cuba and if someone feel like it liquors and digestive is served.

JULSNAPS

I bought 90% alcohol at the pharmacy but you can use Absolute Vodka and let it soak a little longer.

Put these spices into a jar and poor over a few decilitres of alcohol.

A piece of cinnamon

A bit of fresh ginger

A few whole cloves

Half a vanilla, cut up so the seeds come out

A few white pepper seed

Dried peels of bitter orange or oranges

Some fresh lemon peels – the yellow

A few seeds of cardamom

If you use 90% alcohol a few days will be enough for it to soak, with normal vodka it takes one or two weeks.

I also put a handful of cumin seeds in a small jar and poor alcohol over it and let that soak the same amount of time.

Poor the spicy alcohol through a fine filter and mix the first with water and Absolut Vodka until you get a good taste and strength. I use these proportions:

15 parts of vodka

5 parts of the first spicy alcohol

5 parts of water (only if you use 90% alcohol above)

and finally

1 part of the cumin alcohol

Be careful with the water; it will make the drink milky if you take too much.

But you have to taste it so you get it “right”.

If you want to chill it put it in the fridge. To your disappointment your “snaps” will go milky, but if you keep it a couple of days in the fridge and again run it through a filter and maybe add some vodka it will be clear again. You can also drink it at cellar temperature and it will keep clear all the time.

CURED SALMON

Buy 1 ½ kilo of best quality fresh salmon side and freeze it for a couple of days. You have to freeze it to get rid of eventually parasites.

Defrost the salmon; take away all bones, cut the side in two so you get two pieces of approximately 25 cm long each. Put the two pieces into a plastic bag and poor the below mixture over it and seal well.

Mix 1 litre of water, 2 dl of salt (NaCl), 2 dl of sugar, 6 tablespoons of coriander seeds (crushed), 1 tablespoon of crushed white pepper and some stalks of fresh dill. Make sure the salt and sugar is well solved in the water. IMPORTANT: Do not use potassium salt (KCl) – if you do that the salmon will be poisonous and you will probably die AND use natural sugar nothing else!

Keep it in the fridge for two days, turn two times a day. Ready to slice in thin slices and serve with the below sauce. If you cure it too long it will be too hard.

THE SAUCE

1 tablespoon of vinegar

1 tablespoon of mustard – sweet hot Amerikan or Swedish style; not French style

1 tablespoon of sugar

¾ dl of a good oil (not olive)

Salt and pepper

Stir it as you would do with a mayonnaise until it is thick. First stir everything but the oil and after add oil in drops while stirring. Mix in the grated peel (the green) from one lime fruit and three tablespoons of chopped dill. Let it mature for a few ours.

Snaps and beer is nice to drink, but if you want to serve the salmon as a separate dish or a starter I would recommend a full bodied Chardonnay to go with it.

I have not reported on my work on the handrail for a while. The reason is that I cut myself with a knife during the work so I have not been able to do as much as I wished I had done.

Suddenly the knife slipped, cut through the glove and I had a two centimetre long and 5 mm deep cut in my hand just where the palm meets the wrist. It was Saturday 11. 45 A.M. and in France lunch is something sacred and I was bleeding quite a lot. Where do I get a doctor at this time of the day? We phoned the local doctor; the wife answered and said “just come over”. I put a bit of toilet paper on it and wrapped duct tape around it and off we went. There were a few people in the waiting room so I had to wait for 20 minutes.

The doctor looked at it and said: “I think we need a few stitches here, do you need any anaesthetics for that?” “No”, I said, “not really, it can’t be too painful.” It was not too bad. I got a recipe on some material to clean it with and some bandage. He asked me to come back on Monday to get a new bandage and a shot against tetanus because the pharmacy was closed so we could not get it on a Saturday.

The health care in our home country Sweden is quite good, but in Gothenburg it would have taken about 8 hours before we had got any help at the emergency. Here in France I was back home within an hour. The doctor charged 22 Euros, which is his fee. At the pharmacy it did not cost anything.

We went to the dentist the other day, my wife and I. We both got our annual control and the dentist took away the plaque on our teeth. On top of that I had a chipped tooth that she fixed. The cost for both of us was 54 Euros and that is what the dentist charge for it. If we go to the social security we get some refund.  In Sweden we would have paid at least 250 Euros for the same treatment.

Public health care in France is very good. In a study in Europe they have found that France has the best health care and Sweden the second best. The problem in Sweden is to get access to it; you have to wait for ages. The technical quality is about the same though. The costs for public health care are cheaper for simple things in France but more generous when you really have those serious problems in Sweden. In France however most people have a private insurance. If you have one of those, treatments are almost free. Medication is free, you get support for glasses and contact lenses and dental treatment. You can also get massage and other therapy for free. The amazing thing is that for me and my wife who are over 60 it cost us only 100 Euros/year to have such insurance. Another amazing thing is that it is illegal for the insurance companies to investigate in people’s medical history and you do not have to sign a health declaration. It makes sense as if they did not have those laws only healthy people could have an insurance, but where else in the world does authorities make sensible decisions?

Anyway, it is now Christmas and after that we will go to Cuba on vacation so it will be very little done with the handrail for a while. We like to go to Cuba before it becomes democratic and see Castro’s old Cuba. We fear that, in a near future, after a liberation the US and South American mafia will take over so it will be dangerous to go there. Being Scandinavians we have seen what happened to the former Soviet Union that now spread trafficking, prostitution, drugs, weapons, contract murders and other “signs of freedom” to the rest of Europe. That is no place you want to go to on vacation.

Merry Christmas to everybody!

  Château Villerambert-Julien is a producer in Minervois. The village Caunes-Minervois is most famous for its marble that still is produced in small quantities. This marble has an intense blood red colour with beautiful fields of grey and white. In Carcassonne most part of the main square is paved with this marble. Some of Grenache of the Château is growing at the quarry and we were told that they had to blow holes in the rock to plant the vine. It can not be much water and soil for those plants to grow in, but on the other hand, somebody told me that the vine has 50 meters long roots and need to suffer to produce powerful grapes, so I am sure they are all right.

Water is over all a sparse recourse at the vineyard. They actually have to pump all water from the nearby mountains. Our host showed us an old concrete reservoir where the builder mixed the cement with wine instead of water as water was more rare than wine. This was a long time ago and the builder obviously did not know very much about chemistry. As wine is acid and cement is alkaline it did not result in very durable concrete.

  The Château itself is impressing and the tasting room housed in the old Chapel is magnificent. We had the opportunity to get the whole production chain explained to us. It all started by tasting the wine of the year that was still in its “cuve”.  I can not wait until I get hold of a few bottles of the new white wine made from Viogner and Roussanne. It was a dream of fruitiness and elegance. It is going to be bottled in a few days so I am looking forward to get the ordered case of it.

As boys of all ages I can not get enough of looking at the bottling and labelling machines. It is just like Santa’s Christmas workshop as Walt Disney describes it in the film. I must say I am also impressed by the gigantic harvest machines they use nowadays, even if it does not feel right to shake off the grapes – it is much more picturesque with people handpicking grapes and carry them in big cones on their backs.

The tour ended with tasting of the finished wines. Except for the white they produce rosé and red wine. We tasted a couple of excellent cepage wines – one Syrah and one Grenache, but the real experience was the Cuvée Château Villerambert-Julien 2004. This wine is made of Grenache and Syrah that have been left as long as possible before it is harvested to gain as much power as possible. This makes it very vulnerable to the weather so some years when the rain comes early they can not produce this wine. This was the case in 2005, which might be a pity as it was a year with high quality of the grapes in this region.

The process of making this wine is very long. After fermentation and having rested in the “cuve” it is matured in oak barrels for a couple of years and after that allowed to mature in their bottles before it is labelled and offered to the market. The 2004 wine we tasted was just in the labelling process which means it has matured for four years before it can be enjoyed by customers. Do not worry – the wine can be saved in a good cellar until 2014. The amazing thing with this wine is that it is an experience to drink right away. It is powerful with high alcohol content, very well balanced with a taste of very ripe dark berries, vanilla and caramel. The tannins are present as it should be, but soft and in harmony with the acidity and fruitiness. I must admit I have seldom tasted a young wine that is both so pleasant to drink right a way and have such potential for saving for a long time. It obviously pays in terms of quality to wait a little before presenting a wine to the customers even if it ties up the money for the producer.

I really hope I have the character to leave a few bottles for future consumption.

Note: The pictures above are "stolen" from the website of the Château as the weather was lousy when we were there.

I must admit I was a bit nervous when I was standing in front of the huge block of wood with a chisel in my hand and had to start forming the first piece. Everybody, both amateurs and professionals have looked at me in a strange way when I said what I was going to do. Oh! -  They say. “That is quite a quest”. Or – “have you done anything like this before?”

Anyway, I had sharpened my Stanley chisels on a diamond whetstone so I could shave with them – but why would I do that?  I used my polyurethane model as a guide and started to cut away those parts of the wooden block that I did not need. For this purpose I used a heavy sword saw from Bosch that could cut through the 10 cm thick wood. I left a couple of centimetres extra wood around the actual form to safeguard from mistakes and wrong calculations. This showed to be a good policy later on when the three dimensional forms were so complicated that I could not really understand were they would lead me. Despite of that, I almost cut away too much on a later section.

After doing this rough form I started to do the 2 cm wide cut that the top of the railing should fit into. As this was quite an easy section it was not to difficult, but I found it very tiring to cut away all that wood, that still was left, with my hand chisel. It actually took me a couple of days of just hard work and after that I still had the delicate work to get a perfect fit. I realized that this would be a long story.

I had however seen a power tool that could do the job faster and started to look for it on Internet. Bosch has a power chisel, but that is only for small hobby jobs in soft wood and would not be of any help to me. Browsing the internet I found what I was looking for in Australia. It is a very powerful power chisel made by the company Arbortech. It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, but how do I get it? The French dealer did not carry that product and the British one only sells to companies. I finally found it in Norway at Verktøy AS in Stavanger. They could deliver it right away so after less than a week I had the tool in my hand.

This was really the tool of my dreams. I fell deeply in love at first try. It was like cutting in cheese instead of wood. The second section of the railing that was almost exactly like the first one took less than half the time to finish and I felt that I had total control all the time.  

I have another tool also that is quite handy to do the cut for the top of the railing. It is a small mini circular saw that I can fit on my Dremel. It just cuts 5 mm which is exactly what I need.

Next chapter will be about how I made the two first sections and how I managed to join them together.

I had understood that the tricky part would be to form the lower surface – which means the surface under the handrail that we mostly don’t see. This was tricky because the flat steel bar that now worked as the handrail was curving in three dimensions and was super elevated, sometimes in the wrong way, in the bends. This steel bar had pre-drilled holes for the wooden handrail so it had to fit well.

After succeeding to form this lower surface I am planning to cut out the widths of the handrail using a large band saw. After that I will have three sides forming three sides of the handrail and all in perfect right angles to each other. I will now use the band saw and cut the fourth, meaning the top surface of the handrail. This would give me a handrail that followed the railing perfectly, but had a square cross section. The cross section I was looking for had a nice curved top surface and a waist with the narrowest part at the bottom. The cross section should look a little like an air balloon, but a little flatter. I was planning to do this curved upper surface and the waist with a handhold router. The bottom one first, piece by piece and the upper one when the entire handrail was finally fixed to the railing.

There are only a few problems that I have not solved. It is quite all right but a little risky to use a handhold router on a piece of wood that is not flat but is curving away – has a convex surface. If one is careful it will be all right and the router bit will cut with the same depth through the curve. To, on the other hand, use a hand hold router when the piece of wood is concave – is curving upwards, is both dangerous and difficult as the supporting plate of the router will loose contact with the wood except on the opposite edges and the cutting bit will cut shallower and shallower into the wood until it hovers over the wood if the curve is sharp enough. This would be a small problem on the top surface where the concave curves are few and with a large radius but an enormous problem on the bottom surface where they are many and have quite small radiuses.

Another problem I worry about is the joints between the sections. The have to fit perfectly and that is not easy as I mostly have no straight edges or right angles to measure from. The joint will mostly be everything but perpendicular in every direction. You can imagine the feeling to have made the section perfectly right and when you cut the ends to fit them together you have made it to short so you get a gap or get any of the angles right so the joint is not tight. It would be very unprofessional to have to use mastic to fill the gaps.

As I, when I write this, have not done it yet I do not know if I will solve these problems, but I have some ideas of how to do it. So, follow the story and see how it goes.

NEXT ARTICLE