Swedish Food & Culture

As I mentioned before, Swedish food is so different from anything I've eaten before, so I saved a whole blog post just for that. Since food and culture are so closely related, I'll throw in a little extra on what I've noticed of Swedish culture.

Interestingly, there are similarities between South African and Swedish food and culture! Swedes drink something called filmjölk, it's basically maas, with fewer lumps. They eat it with their cereal at breakfast. The above pic shows a breakfast bowl: filmjölk, Kellog's Special K, topped with äppelmös, which is basically apples boiled and mashed. Any sort of sweet fruit topping can be used: berry jam, strawberries prepared in the same way as the apples.

This is standard breakfast fare, and is usually followed by bread of some sort.

Because Swedish summers are so short and intense, with very long days, Swedes love to make the most of being outdoors, and don't even want to have to go inside to gym, so you find these little gyms set up in parks. Not a moment need be wasted indoors!

Sweden has the highest number of summer cottages per capita in the world! (But the among the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in Europe.) A summer cottage doesn't have to be anything fancy and is usually on an island out of the city. Going through the Stockholm Archipelago, I noticed red and white cottages were the most common. The red and white is how Swedish houses were painted traditionally.

Understandably, fish and seafood are eaten often in Sweden. The food is often quite rich and the flavours strong. Because the winters are as intense as the summers and longer, the fish or meat had to be preserved to last through times when fresh food was not obtainable. So even today, food is often cooked with strong flavours and spices which were used to preserve food in the old days. The above is a salmon soup we had for lunch when we went to Grinda.

Yesterday we had a crayfish party. This is very traditional. It usually happens toward the end of summer when the evenings are still warm. It is always held outside. Lanterns and balloons are strung up and everyone wears bibs and hats. There is crayfish, of course, and snaps is integral to it all!

Last night, for my benefit, we had a bit of a nontraditional crayfish party. We started off with midsummer food. On the plate above there is potato, two types of salmon: cold smoked and warm baked, pickled herring, boiled egg with caviar paste, sour cream and knäckebröd (crispy bread). Normally all of this is not eaten at a crayfish party. (Note the small bottle and cup.)

After all the midsummer food, we got to the real stuff. Swedish crayfish are fresh water crayfish and are quite small, so it's not difficult to polish off a large amount, expecially between 6 people.

And of course, the snaps. I was deceived by the small size of the bottles. That stuff is potent! The little bottle on the left can be shared between two people. (It's poured into the small cup seen in the midsummer food picture.)

Before drinking the snaps, everyone sings a snaps song while holding up their glasses. All snaps songs have the same theme. One goes something like this: I am a bird, I am a bird. My owners feed me fish, but all I want is snaps, give me snaps!

Then everyone shouts 'skål' and raises their glasses higher before drinking it in one gulp.

We started the party a bit early yesterday, so it could end early and everyone would be alright to drive back to Stockholm today and be ready for work tomorrow.

After the usual big breakfast, everyone helped to tidy up, and now just Anna and I are left at the cottage, sitting on the couch. It seems very quiet.

We'll leave a little later and stop at her brother's house on the way back to Stockholm. Tonight will be my last night in Stockholm. Tomorrow, Belgium, I hope...