Rømmegrøt: Norwegian Christmas Cream Pudding

(Note: A version of this article originally appeared as a patrons-only post on Patreon.) 
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Rømmegrøt is a Norwegian immigrant food that has been part of my life for a very long time. When I was just a baby, my mom told me, she took me to the big annual summer Scandinavian Festival in my hometown. My Grandma Ruby (mom's mom) was visiting and unbeknownst to mom, fed me some rømmegrøt. I was apparently hooked from the start.

Rømmegrøt has all the makings of a good baby food, and is often associated with births and holiday celebrations. Rømmegrøt is a type of flour and cream porridge. Very thick and smooth and rich, it's typically served at Christmastime here in the U.S., although historically it was also served at midsummer and other special occasions. Serious stick-to-your-ribs food, it joins a long line of other, grain-based pudding type dishes throughout Europe. 

In Norway, it is often left out on Christmas Eve as a treat for the nisse - the red-capped house elf who cares for animals and the home during the winter months. Artist Lennart Helje made some of the most famous tomte/nisse paintings around. Nisse are said to be friends with all animals, with special affinity for cats. But I love the Helje paintings featuring foxes the best.

Rømmegrøt in Norway was typically made with soured cream and was more often served with dried meats than cinnamon and sugar (a much later addition). In fact, if we break down the word we get "rømme" or sour cream and "grøt" or porridge. Modern Norwegian recipes usually call for dairy sour cream today. But they have a very different flavor from the kind I grew up with. 

As my mother pointed out, rømmegrøt is easy to make, calorie-rich, and tastes special without costing that much. Typically reserved for very special occasions like Christmas, midsummer, and births, rømmegrøt was also used as a food for new mothers to help build up their strength, which makes sense considering how rich-tasting it is.

In the United States, ready access in the late 19th and early 20th century to refined white flour and sugar made rømmegrøt easy and cheap to make if you kept dairy cows, like my great-grandparents on my mom's side of the family. It's not clear why Scandinavian Americans stopped using sour cream, but my guess is that because most American dairy farmers were sending their milk to cooperative dairies, instead of processing it at home, they had far more access to heavy cream than sour cream. In fact, both sets of my mom's grandparents were dairy farmers, and during the Great Depression, the "cream check" from the dairy was often the only thing keeping the family in store-bought goods. The cows, chickens, and huge kitchen gardens did the bulk of the heavy lifting in feeding families of 11 and 10 children, respectively. 

Although I have eaten rømmegrøt many a time at Scandinavian heritage festivals, those are few and far between out here in the Northeast. So I decided to try my hand at making rømmegrøt from scratch. I decided to use a recipe from the 90th Anniversary Elim Lutheran Church Cookbook, which was the church my grandfather (dad's dad) was pastor at for decades.

Rømmegrøt Recipe

This recipe comes from Nellie Anderson and Erna Tronsgard - two ladies I never met, but likely my grandmother Eunice (who also contributed a recipe to this cookbook) knew well. Here's their original recipe:

1 pint heavy cream
1 cup boiling milk
1/2 cup flour

Bring the cream to a boil and boil for 10 min. Sift in flour, reduce heat and stir until thick. In a few minute the butter will separate - remove this and save. Add milk which has been brought to boiling, add a little at a time, stirring hard. This will get smooth. This will get smooth. Now add 1 tablespoon sugar and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Ladle in dishes, top with cinnamon, sugar, and the butter that was cooked out.

With only three cups of liquid I knew this recipe wouldn't make much, and I wanted to make a big batch, so I doubled the recipe:
1 quart heavy cream (4 cups)
2 cups boiling milk
1 cup flour

I found a few tiny issues with this recipe. The first one is that 1 cup flour seemed like too much, so feel free to make it a scant cup, or add more hot milk. The other is that as you are boiling the cream, you have to keep stirring or it will boil over!

The cream almost boiling over!

The cream calming down after a good stir.

Once you add the flour, you're essentially making a type of roux, which is why a sauce whisk comes in very handy for this type of thing. The key is to keep stirring ​as it keeps cooking and then all of a sudden the mixture will "break" and the butter will automatically cook out by itself! Let the butter keep cooking out and use a deep spoon or small ladle to remove as much as you can (reserve the melted butter for topping later). Then add the hot milk and beat vigorously until smooth - it will look like a very thick white sauce. Then add the salt and sugar which are listed in the instructions, but not the "top" of the recipe measurements. Because the recipe was written by home cooks, not polished, published professionals!

After adding the flour and stirring, the sauce will "break" and the butter will cook out.

Once you remove the butter and add the hot milk and stir like crazy, you get this delicious smoothness.

As you can see, mine turned out VERY thick, and it will only thicken more as it sits. I had JUST enough milk left (trying to eat down the fridge before going out of town for the holidays), but I would add more in the future. 

Serve it warm or hot with cinnamon and sugar (pre-mixed is best) and traditionally it's also served with some of the melted butter on top. I find that to be too rich, for me. I like a lot of cinnamon and sugar with mine, as this is not really sweetened at all. But it's nice for people to be able to add theirs to taste. 

The finished product with cinnamon and sugar and butter pooling in the bowl.

No lie, I added more cinnamon and sugar to this bowl after tasting, because even though the recipe calls for a smidge of sugar, it's really not sweet at all. And this is about the serving size you want at it is extremely rich. But some folks like to add the butter back as a topping, and if you were living in dark, frigid, 18th century Norway, you'd probably want all the extra fat you could get in your diet. However, the butter is always too much for me. I've yet to find a decent use for the leftover semi-clarified butter, however. Maybe I just need to use it on bread! Or maybe lefse? But that's a Scandinavian treat tale for another day.

My mother-in-law, who had never had it before, said the flavor reminded her of rice pudding, which it does - creamy and thick and cinnamon-sugary. And rice pudding is super common in Norway and other Scandinavian countries at Christmastime. But rømmegrøt is much older, as rice was not imported to Scandinavia until the 18th century. 

To me, it tasted of nostalgia. Made me think of summer Scandinavian festivals, but still tasted like Christmas and the Midwest. With the advent of central heat, rømmegrøt is definitely not an everyday food, but it still connects us to the past in a way that reading about it never quite does. 

Have you ever had rømmegrøt? What Christmas food traditions in your family bring back fond memories or connect you to your heritage?

Yours truly, sitting in my cookbook library and proudly holding the Elim cookbook.

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