A taste of Sweden's culinary highlights

 

Bog coring in Värmland 

Over the past month, I’ve been testing out some more Swedish delicacies, covering the good, the bad, and avoiding the ugly (surströmming – fermented fish), while attending my first Swedish crayfish party, undertaking my first multi-day fieldwork of the year, and cooking the first meal on my new(ish) little Trangia stove.  

Simon, Josefin, Ellen, and I testing grain size

After the quiet months of the Swedish summer, things are starting to pick back up as the new term starts here at the university. Usually this would mean a hive of activity on campus as all the students return for classes, seminars and to meet with friends. However, being 2020 things are a little different. While Covid restrictions are comparatively lax over here, we’re still mostly sticking with online teaching, meaning lecturing takes place over zoom and laboratory practicals are replaced with our hastily made videos. While we were unable to take the students up to northern Sweden for a couple of weeks this September, a small group of us were at least allowed to spend a couple of days in western Sweden, learning about the geomorphology over there, and last Friday we even had a handful of students out coring a bog for the day, just south of Stockholm.

Ellen, Simon, Stefan, and I bog coring

Our trip west was to a region called Värmland, where a course usually runs each August to teach students how to interpret the landscape to understand how it was shaped by past ice sheet movement and what this can tell us about the climate over the last ~30 thousand years. Unfortunately, this course was unable to run this year, but I should be teaching on it in 2021 (fingers crossed), so this was a great opportunity to learn the ropes before I take over from Simon. So, a few weeks ago, Stefan (a Professor in my research group), Simon (his PhD student), Josefin, Ellen (both PhDs in climate modelling), and I piled into a minibus and headed west for Lungsund in Värmland. It quickly came apparent that this was going to be a very good opportunity to brush up on my Swedish skills as I was the only foreigner on the trip.

Ellen, Josefin, Simon, and Stefan

During our 3-night stay in Lungsund, we were based in a remote hotel which had clearly been hit hard by Covid as it turned out we were its last guests and it shut down the day we left (this explained the slightly questionable final breakfast). During the days, we drove off into the forest to track down eskers (wiggly ridges of sediment created underneath a glacier that can be hundreds of kilometers long), kettle holes (where blocks of ice got buried and then melted, leaving holes behind), peat bogs (perfect for taking cores of sediment to show how the landscape has changed through time), bucket loads of bilberries, and my first moose. Tha geomorphology was all very useful for me, as I was scheduled to give an online lecture to master’s students on these sorts of glacial landforms that Wednesday afternoon. I gave the lecture over Zoom from the hotel common room, not enjoying the experience of talking to a blank computer screen for 2 hours. On the upside, this was followed by a sunny swim in the nearby lake. On Friday, as we travelled back to Stockholm, we replaced landform hunting with tracking down derelict houses. It turns out Stefan is very interested in ancestry so we stopped off at a number of very remote locations for Stefan to jump out and photograph his Mother’s Great Uncle’s farm cottage or Great Grandfather’s sister’s old school; a thorough test of my Swedish relatives vocabulary!

Caviar

I mentioned at the start of this post that I’ve been trying some new Swedish food experiences, both good and bad; our Värmland meals mostly fell into the latter category. In the evenings, we ticked off the eating establishments of the nearby town of Filipstad: an ‘Asian’ restaurant, a pizzeria, and a kebab shop. I’d heard many stories of the Swedish pizza but not yet tried the delights of ‘kebab pizza’ or ‘banana curry pizza’, I’m sorry to say I was not that wild on this occasion but was able to try the obligatory ‘pizza salad’ (shredded pickled cabbage) and creamy kebab sauce with my veggie choice. At the kebab shop I opted for kycklingrulle, expecting a chicken wrap.

Smoked reindeer flavour cheese

Turns out I was correct in the concept but had vastly underestimated the size and interesting assortment of fillings. A flat-bread wrap the size of my head was filled with chicken, pineapple, sweetcorn, cheese, gherkins, and of course, kebab sauce – actually tasted slightly better than that combo sounds. For lunches, I was persuaded to get a selection of tubes so that I could conveniently squeeze my cheese and caviar onto bread and boiled eggs without the need of a fridge or even a knife! It felt a little like I was squirting glue onto my sandwiches but, despite being rather salty, the squeezy cheese was palatable.

From the questionable to the downright delicious. Back in August, Emil invited me to join him and his friends at a great Swedish tradition: the crayfish party. In summary, this is a party that tends to occur in the late summer where you gather together to munch on crayfish and drink schnapps to traditional drinking songs while wearing little hats. On this occasion, Emil and his friends ensured we had delectable crayfish along with prawns, salad, Västerbotten paj (a pie made with a scrummy Swedish cheese), and a wide selection of schnapps. The party was in a small hall in the south of Stockholm, so we scootered down there to meet the group for an evening of eating, singing (luckily we were given song sheets – I was still a tad lost with some of the Swedish lyrics!), playing team games, and then, once dark, dancing in the nearby woods. This is a Swedish experience I can thoroughly recommend.

Crayfish Party

On the head pictionary

I still haven’t been fully converted to the Swedish diet though. Earlier this week, after 2 years of requests, Felicity and I finally gave Abhay and Eva the full English breakfast they’d been hankering after. The four of us gathered at Felicity’s place at 6pm to have a champagne breakfast, for dinner. Eva and Abhay seemed thoroughly satisfied with the full works that Felicity supplied, including proper British sausages (not an easy feat over here!), and even managed to squeeze in a slice of the Victoria sponge I’d baked earlier that day.

Brinner - Breakfast for dinner with Felicity, Eva and Abhay

Stefan showing students a core

It seems I have digressed into a food blog again; back to the teaching! Beyond learning to teach in the field, Stefan, Simon, and I also met a group of 10 undergraduate students just south of Stockholm, to do yet more coring with them. This was quite a novelty, especially for the students as they hadn’t seen each other since March. As this was a Friday and the weather was bright, I was met after work by Emil to make the most of the last few mild and light evenings and spend a night camping by a lake, not too far from where I’d been bog coring. Turns out the lake that I’d chosen is held in a bedrock basin so the grassy pitch I’d been imagining did not appear as we walked our way around the shore. We finally settled on a marginally soft and flat area right by the waters edge to pitch the tent and set to work cooking dinner on the Trangia I’d found in a second-hand store a few months back. Despite a somewhat lumpy night, it was great to get back out into the nature and make good use of Sweden’s right to roam and still be back in the city by 11 am.

Morning brew

Things are certainly starting to gather pace again over here. My email inbox is once again being topped up, my working days are filled with online teaching or seminars on how to teach (definitely in the wrong order but there we go), and evenings involve foody meetups, next week Swedish classes start again, and before the sea turns far too cold, Felicity and I are packing in a final few swimruns. Next weekend we have the swimrun event ‘ötillö’ on Utö so we’ve been out swimming and running in the full gear each week in preparation; looking at the weather forecast I fear our stormy training sessions may have been good practice for what’s to come!

I’m staying up to date with how things are going over in the UK via news and chatting to friends and family and I hope you’re all keeping well. I do hope I can make it back across some time soon, but in the meantime send a big (distanced) hug across from Sweden!