Raggmunk

A few days ago, this word cropped up in my mind. Raggmunk. I've no idea what set it off, but there it was floating around and I had to look it up to work out what it was. Shortly after, I put it straight on my list of things to cook this year.



Raggmunk translates to "shaggy monk". Though mind you, the word "munk" is also used for "doughnut", but given the difference between a raggmunk and a doughnut, I root for the first meaning - monk.

Now this is Winter comfort food and one of the recipes specifically stated not to use new potatoes, but you can't always get what you want.

I chose this recipe (in Swedish), only because it required 2 eggs, most others called only for one and I still have some left over from Easter.

Ingredients

about 600 g potatoes
2 large eggs
2 dl plain flour
5 dl semi-skimmed milk
salt and pepper
butter or ground nut oil for frying
400 g unsmoked cured gammon or bacon
lingonberries stirred with sugar

Method

1. Peel and finely grate the potatoes. Then squeeze out all excess liquid to end up with about 200 g


2. Whisk together eggs, flour and milk to a fairly thin batter and season to taste.


3. Add the potatoes and stir in well, so there are no lumps in the batter.



4. Fry the gammon on medium high heat and put in the oven on the slow cook setting to keep warm.


5. Put some butter or oil in the same pan and allow to heat up well. Then using a ladle, spoon into the pan, spread a bit and fry until golden brown, turning half way through.
   


6. Serve with the gammon and the lingonberries

Now, lingonberries are not available in England, as far as I know and certainly not at this time of the year. So we made do with the excellent lingonberry jam that my Mum has given me. I also forgot to season the batter, but adding it on afterwards worked OK too. I also had some sprouting broccoli left, which I steamed.

Overall, I think more potatoes in the batter next time, they were barely noticeable and the raggmunkar (that's the plural) tasted very much like regular pancakes.

I got 9 pieces out of the above amount of batter and please note the fat is essential. I had very little butter left and used it sparingly on the first three raggmunkar, which I struggled to scrape off of the pan. When the butter ran out, I moved onto ground nut oil and was a bit more generous with it, which made all the difference in the world and the remaining raggmunkar turned out very nicely indeed.

An idea is to repeat this when there are fresh cranberries in the shops, they are fairly close to the lingonberries, so would perhaps be a good substitute. Another thing that might be nice is some sort of onion chutney or jam, that would work well too.