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Recipe: Delicious Swedish baked cod with spinach

This Swedish recipe for cod with spinach by food writer John Duxbury makes a great warm weekend meal.

Published: 23 February 2018 07:09 CET

Recipe: Delicious Swedish baked cod with spinach

Baked cod with spinach. Photo: John Duxbury

This is a fabulous dish and can be made with cod fillets or any similar fish, but it is particularly impressive when made with Skrei, a migratory cod caught off the coast of Norway between January and April. Although most Skrei tends to end up in posh restaurants it is possible to buy some from good fish mongers. For instance, in London it is usually sold on Borough Market from Furness Fish and Game during February and March.

Summary

Serves: 4
Level: Easy
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes
Total: 45 minutes

Tips

• Use a good quality fish stock, either homemade or ready-made, rather than using a bouillon cube.

• A mixture of button mushrooms and sliced chestnut mushrooms works really well.

• Adding lemon wedges to the dish before baking it makes them lovely and squidgy, if a little messy!

Ingredients

600 g(1¼ lb)Skrei or other white fish

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

150 g(6 oz)mushrooms, roughly sliced

½ onion, thinly sliced

2 tbsp oil, for frying

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

250 g(9 oz)spinach

3 tbsp pinenuts

Sauce

200 ml(¾+ cup)whipping cream

200 ml(¾+ cup)fish stock

4 tbsp dry white wine

100 g(¾ cup)grated Parmesan cheese

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F, gas 7, fan 190°C).

2. Skin the fish (or ask your fishmonger to skin it) and then cut it into four pieces and lightly season with salt and pepper.

3. Heat the cream, stock and white wine in a saucepan without a lid and reduce until the sauce thickens, between 10-15 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a wok and then lightly fry the sliced mushrooms and onions until soft, but without colouring. Add the garlic and after a minute the spinach and cook until wilted. Season with salt and pepper and spread over the base of a large gratin dish. Lie the fish on top of the spinach mixture.

5. When the sauce has thickened, add the Parmesan and stir to mix thoroughly. Pour the sauce over the fish. Sprinkle the pinenuts on top.

6. Bake in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes or until the fish is just cooked.

7. Serve with new potatoes and lemon wedges.

This is a recipe by John Duxbury originally published on his Swedish Food website.

OPINION: Are tips in Sweden becoming the norm?

The Local’s guide to tipping in Sweden is clear: tip for good service if you want to, but don’t feel the pressure: where servers in the US, for instance, rely on tips to live, waiters in Sweden have collectively bargained salaries with long vacations and generous benefits.

SEE ALSO: What’s the tipping etiquette in Sweden?

But there are signs that this is changing, and the change is being accelerated by card machines. Now, many machines offer three preset gratuity percentages, usually starting with five percent and going up to fifteen or twenty. Previously they just asked the customer to fill in the total amount they wanted to pay.

This subtle change to a user interface sends a not-so-subtle message to customers: that tipping is expected and that most people are probably doing it. The button for not tipping is either a large-lettered ‘No Tip’ or a more subtle ‘Fortsätt’ or ‘Continue’ (it turns out you can continue without selecting a tip amount, but it’s not immediately clear to the user).

I’ll confess, when I was first presented with this I was mildly irked: I usually tip if I’ve had table service, but waiting staff are treated as professionals and paid properly, guaranteed by deals with unions; menu prices are correspondingly high. The tip was a genuine token of appreciation.

But when I tweeted something to this effect (a tweet that went strangely viral), the responses I got made me think. Many people pointed out that the restaurant trade in Sweden is under enormous pressure, with rising costs, the after-effects of Covid and difficulties recruiting. And as Sweden has become more cosmopolitain, adding ten percent to the bill comes naturally to many.

Boulebar, a restaurant and bar chain with branches around Sweden and Denmark, had a longstanding policy of not accepting tips at all, reasoning that they were outdated and put diners in an uncomfortable position. But in 2021 CEO Henrik Kruse decided to change tack:

“It was a purely financial decision. We were under pressure due to Covid, and we had to keep wages down, so bringing back tips was the solution,” he said, adding that he has a collective agreement and staff also get a union bargained salary, before tips.

Yet for Kruse the new machines, with their pre-set tipping percentages, take things too far:

“We don’t use it, because it makes it even clearer that you’re asking for money. The guest should feel free not to tip. It’s more important for us that the guest feels free to tell people they’re satisfied.”

But for those restaurants that have adopted the new interfaces, the effect has been dramatic. Card processing company Kassacentralen, which was one of the first to launch this feature in Sweden, told Svenska Dagbladet this week that the feature had led to tips for the average establishment doubling, with some places seeing them rise six-fold.

Even unions are relaxed about tipping these days, perhaps understanding that they’re a significant extra income for their members. Union representatives have often in the past spoken out against tipping, arguing that the practice is demeaning to staff and that tips were spread unevenly, with staff in cafés or fast food joints getting nothing at all. But when I called the Swedish Hotel and Restaurant Union (HRF), a spokesman said that the union had no view on the practice, and it was a matter for staff, business owners and customers to decide.

So is tipping now expected in Sweden? The old advice probably still stands; waiters are still not as reliant on tips as staff in many other countries, so a lavish tip is not necessary. But as Swedes start to tip more generously, you might stick out if you leave nothing at all.

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