Sodd

Sodd is a clear broth with cubes of cooked meat and small meatballs, served with potato and carrot cooked separately. In Trøndelag, in central Norway, it is the quintessential festive dish: it appears at weddings, confirmations and other large family gatherings.

The word is old. The Norwegian regulation that protects “Festsodd fra Trøndelag” cites the saga of Haakon the Good, written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century, in which peasants from Trøndelag force the king to eat horse sodd at a feast in Lade; the name would come from Old Norse sjoda, to boil. From the mid-19th century, local history books describe sodd as the main dish at wedding and funeral feasts, served with the flatbread skjenning.

Until the 1970s, village cooks prepared sodd for celebrations: they arrived one or two days earlier, helped slaughter the animal and made the dish according to their own recipes. From the 1950s, that knowledge passed to meat companies in Inn-Trøndelag, whose recipes descend from those village cooks.

According to the 2012 regulation, Festsodd fra Trøndelag contains cubes of lamb and beef, with at least half lamb, meatballs of the same meat made with milk, cream and nutmeg, and a broth seasoned with nutmeg and ginger, clarified for at least one and a half hours. It contains no pork. Each part of Trøndelag has its variations, and debate about the right recipe is part of the tradition.