Herring and aquavit

This week’s match of the week - herring and aquavit - was paired for me - appropriately enough - by the restaurant Aquavit which has just opened an outpost in London.

It’s not a groundbreaking match - I've recommended it before - but it was done particularly well.

I’d already been for breakfast, which I can highly recommend and had decided on the strength of that to meet up for an early dinner with a couple of food writer friends with whom I’d been on a trip to Scandinavia last year.

We’d spent a memorable evening at a totally unpronounceable herring restaurant called Bakklandet Skydsstasjon and had developed a bit of a thing about herrings.

Aquavit’s menu, which includes four different preparations - three as part of a herring selection - was the perfect opportunity to revisit our herring fetish, along with a few ice-cold shots of aquavit in beautiful little frozen glasses. I *tried* - OK I drank - two different kinds the Aalborg Dild (dill) and Aalborg Taffel (caraway), both delicious though I can’t say that one matched the herring better than the other.

It must have been along the right lines as on the menu they pair both the Matje herring (with potato, sour cream and egg yolk) and the herring selection which consists of Brantevik (dill pickled) herring and herring with mustard and curry sauces with O.P.Original which is flavoured with caraway, anise and fennel.

In Scandinavia aquavit would generally be accompanied by a glass of lager as a chaser as at this meal in Copenhagen I enjoyed a few years ago but I must confess I prefer sipping it on its own. A fun way to entertain friends in the new year.

Chilled cucumber and garlic soup and Chenin Blanc

On Saturday, as I mentioned in my blog, I was at a food and wine festival in Constantia, where we wandered round the impossibly beautiful Buitenverwachting estate sipping wine and grazing on upmarket canapés devised by a selection of the area's best local chefs. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon ....

The food was great, not least this chilled cucumber and garlic soup. which had a heck of a lot of raw garlic in it which made it so spicy I suspected it had also been spiked with chilli. (Apparently not but the South Africans certainly like their garlic - we had a white garlic soup the same evening in Cape Town which was equally ferocious.)

So, cucumber, garlic, dill, yoghurt (or sour cream, maybe). What do you drink with it?Something crisp, something cold, something dry . . . Could easily have been Sauvignon Blanc but I actually went for the Chenin Blanc that was conveniently to hand - a fresh-tasting, zesty 2013 Kloof Street Chenin from Mullineux up in the Swartland region which hit the spot perfectly.

Young unoaked South African Chenin pairs with very similar food to Sauvignon Blanc as you can see in this post: Which food to pair with South African Chenin Blanc.