Swedish food

Every country has its own culinary traditions and I will tell you about a few of Sweden's culinary traditions.

Sweden has a long tradition of eating a lot of flour. The men brought meals containing a lot of flour to their jobs. Besides pancakes they ate ”palt”, which definitely is a Swedish phenomenon. Palt is simple home cooking in Sweden and is made of potatoes and flour. Today palt is a culinary speciality from the north of Sweden. We eat palt a lot but people from the rest of Sweden have often never tried it. So, in cases like this, you really notice that we have a long country.

I guess you have heard of Swedish meatballs. It is often considered a Swedish national course but it can be found in all parts of the world with different names. Traditionally, meatballs are to be eaten with potatoes (or mashed potatoes), gravy and lingonberry jam. Nowadays it is also eaten with spaghetti or macaroni, which probably is something we stole from your culinary traditions.

Another famous typical Swedish culinary speciality is the ”smörgåsbord”. A smörgåsbord is a like a buffet meal where you can choose from a lot of different meals. The point is to eat a lot of proteins so the selection of vegetables and potato meals are limited. This is at least how it was supposed to be from the beginning. Nowadays we eat our smörgåsbord as we like it.

Over to smörgåstårta (smur-gos tor-ta). Smörgåstårta is extremely Swedish and well, literally it means sandwich cake. The basic ingredients are bread and mayo that you “frost” the cake with. It is made of several layers of white bread with creamy fillings in between. The fillings and toppings vary but often includes some sort of cold cut or fish. You usally use tomatoes, cucumber and cheese as well. Smörgåstårta is served cold and sliced as a cake.

The best thing with the Swedish culinary tradition is definitely fika. You pronounce it fee-ka. Fika is a noun and a verb. We call it fika when we take a coffe break, kind of. It roughly means to drink coffee or tea accompanied with something sweet. Fika is not only the act of eating and drinking but also the social part of it. Fika is to enjoy each other's company.

Denise