Swedish cuisine

Traditional Swedish dishes are echoes of poor life and fresh products lack of the past. That’s why simple products such as pork, herring, potato and root-crops are permanents ingredients of many classical Swedish dishes. Long boiling and intensive frying that can provide long storing of the products are some of basic principles of traditional Swedish cookery.

Only in last twenty years a lot has changed in Swedish cuisine because of other countries influence — dishes have become more sophisticated and complex, have acquired some refinement.

Meat-balls

The Swedes like meat-balls very much — one can only remember Carlson who adores them. Swedish name for such meat-balls is ketbular. And here is the Swedish recipe: “To make force-meat for ketbular you need minced and scraped meat, grated onion, boiled potato, starch, milk, salt and pepper. Mix well and make small balls. Brown them off in a frying pen”.

Buffet or smorgasbord

Buffet or “smorgasbord” is widely spread and it means that Swedish cuisine has won international acclaim. Earlier Sweden was a large but sparsely populated country. When a master invited a lot of guests from different settlements he had to care about the table. So dishes that did not need warming up and could be kept for some days — salty herring, potato and vegetable salads, hard-boiled eggs, cold meat and of course various sandwiches — were served.

Among undoubted decoration of traditional smorgasbord are kippered, boiled, fried and dried fish, shrimps omelet, mushrooms, blood-pudding with stewed fruit, jellied meat and fish, leberwurst (special ham made of pork pieces), metwurst (the same but made of beef), chops, gammon, potato pancakes, basturma, sweet rice porridge, cheese, apple cake, jams, whipped salty cream with caraway-seeds, pancakes with red bilberries, rye-bread, fancy buns…

However this doesn’t mean that the Swedes are limited in their gastronomy likings by this common set of products. The main feature of Swedish cuisine is the combination of salt and sugar. For example meat and fish dishes cooked with salt are flavoured with bilberries sauce with sugar or honey.

Swedish bread

According to official data a Swede eats forty seven kilos of sugar a year! Sugar is added to any dish — be it pate, haricot or even… pickled herrings. There is a special sort of sugared blood-pudding in Sweden that is served with stewed fruit. Sugar is also added to the favourite Swedish dish — dark haricot soup with salted pork fat.

Harmonious combination of salt and sugar is distinguishing feature and principle of Swedish cuisine. Even bread in Sweden is often sweet. And love of the Swedes for buns can be taken for granted!

Elebrod

There is one more traditional Swedish dish — beer soup “Elebrod” (boil beer with a lemon peel, add flour and milk mixture, some salt and sugar, a yolk and in five minutes serve). This soup must be cooked from two beer sorts.

Fish and sea-food

The Swedes eat fish and sea-food practically every day, sometimes herring is served three times a day! And surely no holiday can do without herring. Even beefsteaks in Sweden are made out of herring. There is beef there but together with pork, potato, eggs and the main component is steeped herring. Beefsteaks are formed from this mass and after frying are served seasoned with sweet currant sauce. Eel and salmon are very popular in Sweden, the latter by the way does not consider a delicacy. There are a lot of fish recipes so they are divided into groups according to seasons– for example mackerel is eaten in spring. The Swedes have a saying “Fish have to swim”, it is a correspondence of Russian idiom “Fish do not walk without liquid”. So any fish dish must be watered up. With beer. A lot of beer.

Swedes and alcohol

Earlier the Swedes preferred strong alcohol but now whisky and vodka make way for wine and beer. Nowadays there are strict alcohol laws in Sweden — strong drinks are rather expensive, they can not be sold to people under twenty-two years old. And you can buy strong drinks only on week-days till four hours p.m. in special shops «Sistembolaget». Restaurants with license are the exception. But the man who drinks vodka for appetite is considered a bibber.

So the Swedes drink milk, juices, hot chocolate and coffee. To say the truth Swedish coffee is weak watery solution. And one more interesting fact– the Swedes prefer home-made fruit water to any drink.

Recipes of Swedish cuisine