Some friends had lovingly introduced us to Swedish surströmming (see this story). As a matter of returning a favor, we exposed them a little later to our experiments in Indonesian cooking. One of the recipes that I tried on one of these occasions was Bandeng bumbu ketjap, according to the Dutch-Indonesian Keijner cookbook (I have also posted here about this book).

Bandeng is Milkfish. I must admit that I do not know its taste. Everyone says that mackerel is a good substitute for Bandeng. On the other hand, it seems rather unlikely to me that mackerel works as a substitute for anything else than mackerel.

In any case, there was no Bandeng in Borås at the time, so I did take mackerel for this recipe. I managed to get some really fresh specimens, too. The original recipe wants us to stamp 6 red, 4 white onions and 8 small Chili peppers (those that sometimes are called Thai peppers) to a pulp, which we then fry in butter (another recipe uses coconut oil instead). Now we add a cup of water, a few tablespoons of Indonesian soy sauce, salt and lemon juice, put the fish into the sauce, cover the pan and cook everything until the fish is done. The sauce should not reduce too much.

For our Swedish guests, I made an emergency-room-avoidance version with not quite as many onions and peppers. The soy sauce I used was the excellent Indonesian sweet soy (kecap manis) of the ABC brand. Before putting them into the pan, I cut the whole, cleaned mackerels with a sharp knife into chunks. This may seem a bit rustic but it keeps the fish manageable when turning and helps the sauce to come in contact with more fish surface. I do admit that I was a little doubtful about the mackerel myself and that I had prepared some other, safer, things as well. But my worries were unfounded, the dish was very good and our guests left in a happy mood.

At that time, I already knew that the quality of one’s food is influenced by the quality of the ingredients, but I still thought that a careful and loving preparation was more important. So one day, when I was alone at home with my two beautiful children (then about four and seven years old), I felt confident to, again, prepare mackerel bumbu ketjap. This time, however, I had only access to a package of frozen brick-shaped mackerel fillets, the onions in the pantry were huge and rough and the soy sauce was of some unknown off-brand.

I thawed the fish. I did my onion and pepper pulping ballet, heated some oil in a large pan, and began frying the onion and pepper goo. The first two smells that established themselves in my kitchen were that of hot and harsh onions and of quite old fish oil. They always say that the fish is freshly caught and frozen right on the trawler, but who knows what they do with it first, and how long they do it. I put the kitchen fan on high.

Now I poured the soy sauce into the pan. A solid cloud, smelling of boiling cheap molasses, rose from the stove, by-passed the kitchen fan and, carrying a rich bouquet of sulfuric onion notes along with it, slipped out of the door and up the stairs.

Jessica came downstairs and made a face of utter disbelief. - What are you doing? This stinks!

Oh don’t worry, it is going to be good, I said (airily). I’m going to cook this fish. You do like fish, don’t you?

Ick, said Jessica and left the kitchen.

My next step was to add the lemon juice and to put the fish into the sauce. I covered the pan, adjusted the heat and cooked everything until done, tasted a small bite of fish, and then the whole content of the pan went straight into the bag under the counter. I tightly knotted its plastic handles, carried it out and down the hill to the trash can, and made spaghetti.

This was the last time that I prepared something first and pitched it afterwards. Nowadays, if a cauliflower has a smell of cow dung in turpentine under its airtight plastic wrapping, I do no longer waste my time and olive oil to save this zombie. If a thawing bit of fish starts smelling like the cod liver oil that we once bought and then never used: no fish that day. If an avocado is so fresh that I need a jackhammer to make guacamole - you get the idea.

Here I am asking the universe for an improvement. Worldwide. Think that you are in a medium large city, carrying around a backpack with a book or two, your calendar and your laptop, you’ve got an hour to spare and it is, say, 11:15. Time for a seat, a cup of coffee, a horizontal surface and an illusion of a tiny private space. Unless you’re at some American university campus and have access to some dedicated sit-and-wait-and-sip place, your chances of finding a suitable café are small.

In one typical kind of coffee place one can only manage a quick, standing and back-nudged espresso, like in that corner shop in Ithaca’s Collegetown where there was not even a place to hold the cup.

In others, such as the last-resort-type cappuccinery at Kiel Central Station, one drinks one’s coffee while balancing on a wobbly bar chair. Göteborg’s Da Matteo has bar chairs and standing facilities as well and as an additional attraction some puppety tables in the half-protected area outside the shop with blankets for coping with one’s gothenburgian-fine-day goosebumps. Try to sit there with a laptop and concentrate - all this is quite a shame because Matteo’s coffee is the best I know (…the coffee there is the best I know!).

The third kind of Café puts too many too small tables in too tiny a space together with too many chairs and hence attracts customers with SUV-size strollers and a minimum of four bulging shopping bags per person. There are usually also shrieking kids there.

One Café in the Gothenburg Central Station has the lounge area that I’m looking for, but very low tables; reaching for the cup becomes something of a yoga exercise. They also raised their prices recently. But you can in fact read a book there all right.

Finally, there is the Chamber of Torture kind of Café. You enter, it looks like you will be able to find a table, their coffee smells nice and their sweet temptations look as if you absolutely need to have one, or two. You sit down and unpack. You line up and order. You sit down again. And then the banging and shouting behind the counter starts, the First Generation Diesel grinder gets going (apparently grinding medium-sized rocks), five infernal coffee makers burst into a deafening hiss all at once like a bunch of steam locos at the end of their workday, the juicer starts making noises like a sawmill, and the cozy old-style high ceiling does its best to amplify everything into supernatural proportions. No matter where in the world you are, Borås, Staunton, Belfast, Bremen or Shizuoka, these are the cafés that rule. Coffee making is serious business, and the customer must suffer for it (and eventually turn stone-deaf).

Please, Universe, give me some silent, spacious cafés with good coffee and normal tables.

Last night, I dreamed that I attended a large birthday party. They were just beginning to hand around cakes, brownies, pastry and stuff - lots and lots. I believe I saw about 20 items in huge piles, chocolaty ones, flaky ones and some big bits with thick layers of sugary gleaming icing.

I had just managed to think that I’d better skip most of the powdery brownies (while munching one) and other lesser kinds in favor of the ones with the most icing when I woke up.

We do have homemade bread and nice jams, and I can make quite a decent pot of tea, but after this dream no breakfast was good enough to console me. After driving Robin to the train station, I bought a bar of fairtrade milk chocolate and ate it. I looked in the pantry - there was a bit of the Dutch Droste caramel chocolate left. I ate even that. Tonight, we dug deep into our cookie-dough and chocolate chip ice cream. It is now 11:58 p.m. and I am, for the first time today, feeling okay again.

This was almost as bad as when I was six years old and dreamed that I had gotten an electric train.

A great way to entertain a bunch of standing, balcony-invading, chatting, newly arriving and otherwise not organizable guests is to place a baking tray full of chicken bits in some strategic location close to the drinks. In order to avoid big or unwieldy pieces I don’t do it the cheap way this time, which would be chopping up a few whole chickens. Robin likes chicken wings; I find that they often have too much crunch in relationship to the meaty part. I buy a lot of chicken drumsticks.

I preheat the oven to medium high, 360-370 F (180-190 C). I pour an appropriate amount of salt over all the parts and mix them by hand. I press some garlic over two thirds of the chicken bits and mix again (I do wash my hands before and after). Then I make three heaps, two with garlic and one without.

One of the piles receives a healthy dot of sharp sauce of some sort. I could make one from scratch and this is how: using a blender or a stone mortar, I grind one coarsely chopped normal-size hot pepper, a pinch of salt and a dash of white vinegar into a smooth pulp. This pulp is then rubbed into party chicken No. 1. Appropriate complementary spices are cumin, coriander powder and paprika (not too much of the latter because it gets black in the oven).

For the second of the heaps I blend a teaspoon full of freshly ground or chopped rosemary, some ground black pepper and three tablespoons of red wine and rub this mix evenly into the the chicken bits.

The no-garlic version for the wimps is this one: some crumbled (or chopped fresh) tarragon leaves, three tablespoons of white wine, pepper, mixed as above.

These parts should be done after c. 50 minutes at 370 F (190 C).

Our kitchen in our third-floor Amsterdam apartment looked out on a wide, flat roof under which the ambulances of the city were parked. The white-blue Chevy Van ambulances would hoot their jolly Dutch warning melody (a 4-6 chord c-a-f-a) into our living room whenever they roared and squeaked out of their cave. This experience belonged to the front of the house. The roof at the back was owned by the cats and usually relatively quiet. Cats have a mind of their own. They would howl at nights, chase the gulls, fall off balconies with astonished faces, but they refused to touch the rat while it was fresh, that had experienced a major roof-climbing mishap. Legs asplay, it first slowly increased in diameter for a week or so, and then needed a whole summer to vanish. Looking out while doing the dishes or chopping onions was, in other words, an exercise in selectivity.

Another gourmet-discouraging factor of living in that particular house in the mid-eighties was the small Kroketten factory downstairs (look here, if you wonder about Dutch Kroketten). The company was run by the son of the house owner, a short, balding guy in his mid-forties in blue work pants and a white-and-blue striped shirt, who had the knack of looking completely inconspicuous. Quite a neat trick for someone who chops a lot of meat and makes food out of garbage. His sidekick was a huge man in a battered leather apron with a small, sun-tanned head and eyes of a startling translucent green - I never met him after nightfall, and that is probably why I haven’t become a Kroket myself. These gentlemen arrived every workday at five thirty with a solid clang of the heavy iron entrance door. Their job was to boil cheap soup meat, mix spices and chemicals, store leftovers for a few days too many and make Kroketten for an unknown market. Our apartment, our books, our harpsichords and our clothes smelled of cheap soup, taste enhancers and too-old bones.

This was the time when I got a cookbook by Paul Bocuse as a present and defiantly started buying outrageously expensive butter sticks and chickens from France, found a source for Italian Farina OO for handmade pasta, walked through half the city to a tiny cheese factory for some Dutch-Italian handmade cheese, or in the other direction to the most expensive butcher for entrecotes, and started a collection of high-end Bordeaux wines (all gone - even the Pauillac from 1976 that today could buy me a new Volvo).

One evening, I made lamb curry with apples (Paul Bocuse La Cuisine du Marché, German translation, p. 215). He browns 1.5 kg of lamb in large cubes together with 2 tablespoons or so of curry powder and some chopped onion in butter, adds first some flour and then a few French herbs and water, moves everything into the oven to create a 2 1/2 hours stew, selects the nice bits of meat, pours the sauce through a strainer, takes off the fat, reduces it by a third, adds a healthy dash of crème fraîche and finally adds apples and bananas that have been separately cooked in butter.

The result does not belong to any tradition in particular, but is heavenly nevertheless. Also, the straining, selecting and removing of one kind of fat only to add the other one makes you feel like you’re doing real quality work. I still have to experiment with different kinds of curry powder - maybe I ought to make my own mix: apart from the touristic touch of the apples and bananas, this lamb stew should perhaps not be too mellow.

Mellow or not, on that day the fumes from my stew managed to shove the stale kroketten-vapour out of the door. I put on some background piano music (Schumann’s Humoresque in the earlier of Valdimir Ashkenazy’s two recordings), fetched the plates, opened the wine; and then a pipe in the locked, empty, unheated room above one of the harpsichords burst and let down a brownish rain of cold water. We carried the harpsichord out of the room. I silenced Ashkenazy. I went upstairs, kicked through the door and tried to bend the lead pipe to stop the water flow. That didn’t work as well as tying together another part of the water line that, for reasons of its own, had been replaced by a bit of garden hose. We called the house owner, started wiping and finally we had cold lamb curry á la Bocuse, while outside the ambulances were hooting as always.

For some altogether unknown reason, my earlier post about Kristianstad’s restaurants has been honored by the greatest amount of hits on this blog - 141 altogether (while, for instance, the delicious chicken thighs with tomatoes only caught forty-something hits). Time for a sequel: last weekend I was back. However, because of a lack of time and of social obligations of the “stick to the gang” kind, I never found my way into Modesto, as promised, which was sad for me but good for my purse.

What I can offer instead is a review of the Greek restaurant Den Lilla Tavernan, which is a well worked-in meeting place of the musicians who are trying to fill their stomachs after rehearsals in the big church. Why? Because it is five steps away from the church, it is cozy and the food is affordable and astonishingly good.

We were lucky and got a table for four on a Saturday evening, which is an almost impossible thing. I ordered Dolmadakia as an entrée, a plate with various grilled items as the main course and a glass of retsina. The Taverna’s cooking is plain but sincere. The dolmas, rice-filled wine leaves, tasted perhaps just a hint too bland - I would have used somewhat more oil, mint and salt in the filling (and a touch of garlic), but then again, who am I when it comes to Greek traditional cooking (I should add that I do, in fact, make my own dolmas at home).

Their Tsatsiki was fresh and delicious; the quality of the garlic impeccable (not at all a given thing at the end of March in a country of the North). The charcoal-grilled lamb chop was superb: perfectly done and perfectly salted and spiced. The solitary grilled oval meatball was no more and no less than what it looked like: meatballs are meant to be simple and satisfactory food even in Greece. The Souvlaki were nicely spiced and tough, but to be kind, I’ve never had any that weren’t.

All this came together with salad and slices of potato, fried to a golden brown. The potatoes were somewhat limp, which tells me that the kitchen prepares a huge pile ahead of time and adds them to all the dishes throughout the evening. Not my favorite method, but their taste was good enough.

The Taverna serves great olives, not those cardboard placebos as known from other mid-price Mediterranean restaurants. They do serve a heap of red onion rings on top of the salad like everyone else, but to my happy surprise these had been soaked in salt water and tasted pleasantly mellow.

The lettuce itself was, on the other hand, just the same watery disgrace as in any ordinary lunch restaurant. The soggy and dripping green snippets reminded me of the Amsterdam zoo, where the sea cow is incessantly munching lettuce heads that someone, at regular intervals, tosses right into the muddy-green water which is the sea-cow’s home. The pre-booked Saturday guests of a charming mid-town restaurant are no sea cows; they don’t die if they don’t get lettuce all the time and if someone offers them lettuce nevertheless, they don’t appreciate if it floats. Dry lettuce is a matter of 30 seconds of spinning; one really doesn’t have to serve lettuce soup, unless one needs to satisfy some hidden urge to punish one’s guests.

If you’re not someone who requires a carefully designed plate of food, featuring sticky sauce doodles, heaps of watercress and fresh thyme, shaved Parmesan, splashes of balsamic vinegar and roasted pine nuts together with half the food of an ordinary meal, you will appreciate the Taverna’s abstinence from silly food decorations, fake ingredients and postmodern re-inventions of traditional dishes. This place is a great reminder of what going to a restaurant means (lettuce notwithstanding). Here, you are paying for the food as it is, not for some dressed-up stand-in.

A note about the retsina, however: if you have a sensitive stomach (which I seem to have - which I didn’t know), take something else. There’s plenty of choice.

This is not going to be about food at all, it is my weekly rant about elbows. We are back from the store. It is Friday afternoon, and even this time, we survived. This isn’t so easy as it sounds.

I’m born in Western Germany. One would think that this prepared me for most shopping styles of the world - however, a Friday in a Swedish store makes me wonder. But let’s go generalize nation for nation.

Many Germans are polite but a few are not. Kids in German shops hit other customer’s heels with their shopping carts just as anywhere else. Otherwise, shopping is a predominantly verbal affair. We have learned to stomach pretty much anything from “just step aside, will you” to “watch out, you peat-head,” and we have a good supply of things to say back.

Robin is from Virginia. People in the US do one of two things: stepping way aside, mumbling “excuse me” or walking right up front mumbling “excuse me.” However, US stores are huge most of the time; you will anyway not meet many people on your half mile along the soft drinks aisle or during your chips and peanuts marathon.

Holland is a crowded country which generally results in two kinds of behavior: 1) people have learned the virtue of stepping aside 2) some people have learned that stepping on other’s toes helps them getting where they want to be. In other words, Dutch shopping customs are rough but transparent.

No special remarks about France, Italy and Spain.

I can’t judge how Japanese people treat each other in their stores because when I am around, they tend to step aside and look, especially the kids.

What’s special with Sweden? Sweden changed from left-hand traffic to right-hand traffic in 1967. The Swedish shopping population falls apart into elderly people who still navigate along the left side of things and block your way whatever you do, young people who have learned to ignore elderly people and foreigners who don’t understand what is happening to them. Sweden is also a large country with rather few people, which means that these people have very little experience with avoiding to bump into each other, and that most families are used to shouting at each other from a distance. Sweden is also the country of dour self-righteousness when it comes to standing, queue number in hand, in the way of everybody else who doesn’t even want to be at that particular counter.

Combine all these things and you can imagine how life-threatening a shopping trip can become in these parts. A second of hesitation about whether I prefer the green, the wrinkled or the mouldy tomatoes leaves me half deaf and with a bunch of sore spots, because a young lady already knows which tomatoes to choose, attempts to grab them straight through my ribcage and informs her husband, who is busy with the dark green bananas fifteen yards away, about her choice - right into my ear. A leisurely stroll along the coffee aisle will leave you plastered against the racks because someone else wants to push by with a three-babies-wide vehicle in pink blankets. The milk department is invaded by three hyper-active pre-school kids and their towering dad, who keeps shouting monosyllabic directions at the world in general while elbowing himself into a good position to access the yogurt. The meat is inaccessible because of a broadside of shopping carts while their owners stand in a cluster elswhere, gossiping and blocking the cheese. A charming old gentleman fails to slide his magnetic card through the machine at the specialty butcher’s counter. I help him to hold the card in the correct manner. He is very grateful. A moment later, however, he gets into a heated discussion with his wife, forgets all about me and wedges his torso squarely between me and the card reader, so that I have no choice but to bump into the row of people behind me.

And at any random other place of the shop, you are again and again cornered, bullied out of the way, thwarted and looked at by solitary elderly ladies. I have no idea where all these aggressive grandmothers and grand aunts come from, and where they learned that 1930s Chicago Bumper Car Trick for eliminating adversaries while letting it look like an accident. There must be a training camp someplace out there in the woods.

But we made it again. My next post, I promise, will be constructive, relaxed and friendly.

During the 1992 opera rehearsals in the beautifully situated Swedish castle Läckö we, that is the singers, the musicians and the people who talk with their hands in their pockets (we call them producers) got mass lunch in the castle’s cozy restaurant Fataburen. As soon as the performances began, I was suddenly the only one who stayed out at the castle (the rest of the gang traveled from elsewhere) - in the most fantastic weather on the camping site nearby - and still needed lunch. They gave me a special price, and during those three weeks I tried their whole menu up and down again. This is long ago - nevertheless I should recommend their kitchen wholeheartedly even today.

…or at least almost wholeheartedly.

There was a problem with the vegetables. Boy, how some chefs lose their inspiration when it comes to vegetables. I remember a no-cheap restaurant in Amsterdam where they served boiled endives as an aside. No butter, no bacon, no anything, just boiled. The Fataburen chef had at the time a special preference for broccoli and cauliflower. It came with fish, pork, beef and fowl, and it was invariably under-salted, under-cooked and entirely un-oiled or -buttered. Lots of vitamins to be sure, but also a crisp signal for the carnivores to seek consolation with the sausages further down the hill.

I always believed that this broccoli al dente was a clumsy pre-stage of the Mediterranean cooking vogue that hit Sweden at the end of the nineties. But it must have lived on in some creepy corner. Today I found a recipe for “delicious spring stew” with lamb steak and spring vegetables in the newspaper that recommends all of the following: boil 2 small potatoes for ten minutes (ten minutes! No amount of genetic manipulation makes this ‘two small boiled potatoes’). Boil cauliflower and broccoli a few minutes “so that their rawness subsides but no more.” Quickly blanch a bunch of green asparagus in slightly salted water. Cut a red onion into wedges, a squash into cubes and a few spring onions into rings. Make a red wine sauce using red wine, water, calf fond [sorry - translation mistake. Should be "veal;" however, the font from the calf of the veal is probably best] and corn starch or use instant wine sauce. Cube the steak and fry the cubes in butter and olive oil, add salt, white pepper and rosemary. Fry the potatoes for some time in olive oil and butter (how many pans have we used until now? I lost count). Mix everything, add parsley and serve. No cooking of squash and onions, as far as I can see, but this might be a mistake; they’re probably boiled as well, or fried separately in butter and olive oil - but we’ll never know for sure.

The person who wrote this has missed every point there is to miss. No idea about how to serve raw veggies to their advantage. No idea about stir frying (which, with a bit of crafty cutting and slicing, would have been an interesting way to treat these ingredients, and the only way to present crunchy half-cooked veggies without a shudder); no idea about the hidden wonders of cubed fried steak, or about alternative tasty ways of preparing lamb steak; no idea about how the aromas actually need time to blend (granted, also I would cook the broccoli and cauliflower separately. But they are the ones that need tampering and butter frying afterwards!), if we want to call it a stew at all; no idea of combinations of ingredients: what in the world is green asparagus doing here at the side of the cabbages? Rosemary is great with lamb, potatoes and onions but not with broccoli and the rest - the same applies for red wine (which is pretty horrible together with broccoli, as opposed to white wine). And where is the garlic? Finally, apparently no idea or no concern about the fact that the addition of corn starch to the sauce would weaken all the flavors.

It is true, if you boil your vegetables into mushy gray submission, you’re committing something of a crime. But what we see here is no cooking at all, it is just plain incompetence.

I thought that low tide in Swedish spring was reached during this year’s edition of the annual song contest, with Christer Sjögren’s abysmal sixties-schlager-revival song “I love Europe” and the flopped joint venture of Carola and that other cowboy, but no. We are bracing ourselves for the next big event: the Nordic Championship In Pizza 2008.

Nordic Pizza? But of course. Pizza has been around in Sweden since the late sixties, and it has developed into something altogether special: the daily routine of self-punishment for the office worker; a vehicle for just about anything edible on earth, be it bananas, kebab, French fries, sauce Bearnaise or large slices of roast beef; a dumping ground for things that are not really edible at all, such as special processed pizza ham (family of dog food), special processed pizza cheese (no family), special hollowed and de-aromatized pizza olives (family of old black socks), thumb-thick half-raw onion rings, special processed pizza tomato sauce And I Am Not Kidding. Using these ingredients, the united Swedish pizza bakers are determined to find out how much you can undercook a pizza without bringing bodily harm to your guests, or inducing the guests to bring bodily harm to you.

Swedes are tough and so they have managed to survive this collective nightmare for one generation. But you are not supposed to offer pizza when you have Swedish guests. Their disappointment would be too great, no matter what wonders you can create in your kitchen. They also tend to damage their teeth on real olives.

Hah. I am writing off sixteen years of Concert Tours And Their Pizzas here. To be fair, I experienced my very first Swedish pizza as really quite good - it came across our path after a lengthy walk through the outskirts of Borås on a recognition and house hunting trip shortly before we moved here. Of course, after a lengthy walk, almost anything tastes okay. No matter, now comes the Nordic Pizza Contest. There will be six finalists; four from Sweden, one from Denmark and one from Norway. What do they cook?

Borås tidning (27 March 2008, p. 33) presents one of them, Elias from Kinna. Elias tells the reporter that he doesn’t understand why everyone always talks so much about Italian Pizza. “Swedish Pizza is by far the best in the world.”

Really. Pizza bakers sure do learn to sell all sorts of stuff to people.

However, Elias’s creation, Game Symphony, is ambitiously different: the dough is made of wheat flour, omega-3 eggs (Arrr…what be these?), sugar, salt, olive oil and healthy low-GI flax seeds. The topping is wild boar and deer with a morel sauce and blueberries, on top of “luxury tomatoes,” goat cheese and mozzarella. The blueberries are, in fact, “mostly for the visual effect,” which is something of a relief.

In my experience, such a list of ingredients can result in anything between utter bliss and complete disaster. One ought to give Elias the benefit of the doubt: it took him a year of experiments to find the right balance for his recipe. The pizza on the picture looks in fact quite yummy. I hope that he wins: in that case he promises to offer Game Symphony in his restaurant - Kinna is a rustic 45 minutes by car from here.

The other contestants fall apart into those who try to kick a traditional pizza a few yards down the fancy lane (example: spelt in the dough and a topping of tomato sauce, Parma ham, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella, red pesto and arugula), and those who walk it all the way to the end, introducing duck breast (remember Casper Caveman at 2:20 in this cartoon, saying “my favorite vegetable, Duck”?), omelet with white truffles, maple syrup, “cherry tomatoes from Halland” (Halland is no typo but a Swedish province, although I have no idea what’s so special about their cherry tomatoes) and “salt flakes from Australia” (no doubt from Salt Flake City) as pizza ingredients. I believe that Elias is having good prospects.

There would be another benefit if he wins: wild boar have multiplied in the last few years and quickly became a nusiance on the Swedish roads. They are especially good at looking like there was no wild boar at all, at running fast, at completely demolishing car fronts and at attacking strangers even on their deathbeds (not the stranger’s. The boar’s). Imagine a prize-winning recipe for roadkill pizza - hmmmm!

Swedish pork ribs are different. They come with a four-inch layer of meat-streaked blubber un-firmly attached, and are pretty difficult to treat in the kitchen. Here are the choices:

- You cut off the offending layer and treat the ribs as ribs. Use the fat and the meat for sausages.

- You do a Chinese slow pot roast with star anise, garlic, soy sauce and spring onions. This will have to be a heck of a slow pot roast, or you’ll end up with layers of salty, tough meat embedded in sweet wobbly matter that carries a faint taste of anise. If you manage to summon the patience to cook the ribs all the way through (three hours…four hours??), discard as much of the accumulated fat as possible, rescue the heavenly sauce, but take care to have the Vodka chilled nevertheless - you will need it.

- You make several deep cuts in the meat parallel to the ribs and oven-roast - or grill - the whole combo, with the objective of letting the fat cure or tenderize the meat, or at least getting it to dissolve and vanish. This is, however, not going to happen:

One Summer day when my kids were here to visit, Robin made a fantastic red tomato-y and spicy rib rub, took a huge chunk of Swedish ribs, made the magic cuts, thoroughly applied the magic rub, created two beautiful piles of glowing coals on each side of the grill, dumped the meat in the middle of the rack and closed the lid.

Then we waited. We tended the coals; we half closed, half opened the valves; and closed them again. Took a beer. Waited some more. Attempts to pierce the meat with the fork would soon make layers slither sideways while staying, in themselves, impenetrable. The smell, on the other side, was irresistible. Eventually our growling stomachs brought the rational part of our day to an abrupt end and we retrieved our chunk of Steaming Something.

But what a transformation had taken place! The meat had assumed a vivid and aggressive dark red, turning into a sinister blackish finish around the edges. It looked like volcano-cooked vulture and tasted like Penne con Alligator, spiky, very difficult to conquer and with an overpowering note of garlic and triple-concentrated tomato. Disregarding the still undissolved fat that winked at us with jaundiced layers, there was only a marginal difference between meat consistency and bone consistency. I always wondered what Orc meat would be like - well, here it was. We kept hacking and laughing for most of the evening.

Apart from its general unruliness, the experience was, in fact, pleasantly exotic. Since that time, I nevertheless go for the first of my alternatives if I can’t get normal Old School ribs. If we once have a Fantasy party, we’ll perhaps have another go at Ribs from Mordor.