the swedish booze store

As everyone knows, beautiful, sunny Sweden is also the country of a state monopoly for selling alcoholic beverages stronger than 3.5 vol per cent of alcohol. In the ordinary supermarkets, there are only three kinds of beer available: light beer, which is basically water; somewhat less light beer (”middle beer”) which is water trying to do the beer thing, but failing, and something called Class II, which is very, very shy beer.

Common beer is called “strong beer” or class III and can only be bought at the dedicated boozery, or Systembolaget.

When I came to Sweden, the main Systembolag in Borås was a huge intimidating store with queue numbers, number beepers and multiple counters that were occupied by dour people who looked dispassionately at you while you tried to remember the four-digit code of the product of your choice.

kristianstad revisited

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,

surviving the shop

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.

crunchy veggie horrors

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.

game symphony and other swedish pizza

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.

ribs from another world

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:

up, down, and up again

Last November I got a gift certificate from these guys, a late but welcome ripple in the wake of the defence of my dissertation. Someone had found out about my interest in cooking: it was from the Swedish kitchenware chain Verner&Verner, issued at their first-ever store in the Nordstan mall of Gothenburg. Gratefully, I went to V&V’s website and picked out one of these things I always wanted to have but refused to pay for.

Verner&Verner, which began in 1986, has a profile that attracts the Glass-Door-Pantry and See-Me-Cooking types, with a lot of colorful Le Creuset’s assorted pots and pans, a selection of expensive knives, a sharpening service, shelves full of gleaming espresso machines, kitchen-aid mixers in green and red, piles of design accessories, pasta in fancy glass tubes, herbs and specialty coffee. They used to be quite alone with this concept in Sweden. It always was a pleasure to walk through their shops. But competition has caught up. Both V&V shops in Borås closed last year, and a week after I had chosen my gift-certificate-item, the newspaper announced that Verner&Verner had gone out of business altogether.

Darn. As soon as there was time, I stuffed my coupon into my backpack and we went to Nordstan in Gothenburg. Yes! The shop was still open. It was still called Verner&Verner. I went to the shelf, grabbed my box and lined up at the desk.

A young shop assistant, all towering regret, “I’m so sorry, but we are not accepting these coupons any longer. We have been selling their certificates as a service, but they’ve gone bankrupt, and we cannot, at this point…I am really sorry but there’s nothing I can do about the matter.”

spagetti [sic] in borås

Even though their homepage appears to be down, the Italian restaurant Spagetti in Borås was up and running yesterday. Upon arrival, it was under one quarter full of guests. This may have been a reflection of snow turning to a drizzle, and of slippery roads. Before the riverside of Södra Strandgatan and Sandwalls Plats was transformed into a cute pedestrian zone, complete with an abstract curry-sausage sculpture and palm trees during the summer, a health store resided where Spagetti resides now. Where I used to buy organic tofu (trust me, it is better), refills for my water filter, dry beans, Dutch honey and the occasional fair-trade cocoa’n’sawdust bar, I can now sit down and relax.

There are ups and downs with Spagetti, but to be fair, I want to praise its pleasant atmosphere and friendly service right away. We were a come-and-go company of an average of six persons. Four of these were in a drinks-craving after-concert mood. One of them was accompanied by six-months-old Elias, a bright and social fellow who most of the time was content with goo from a jar. Food was served in a most cheerful manner, unfaltering even when the youngest of the group had a food-deprival crisis. Musician’s babies have strong lungs, well developed vocal cords and a keen sense of pitch.

cooking for swedish teenagers

It is spring vacation, or sports vacation as it’s called here - a tradition from the days when we had snow in early February. This year, one might call it mud-week. Most parents have no mud-week, and so our newspaper printed this large article with “easy-to-make and good-to-eat” things that teenagers can prepare alone using what’s already at home - food that takes little time to prepare so that the kids can devote themselves to “computer games, their friends and skating” (Borås Tidning, 2 February, p 18-21).

Let’s have a look.

the benefits of cheese nationalism

A friend from Switzerland, about to introduce our party to Eating In Paris, was astonished when I told him that even Holland was famous for its cheese. It belongs to this story that I have to tell the French and Dutch readers at this point that Switzerland is famous for its cheese. Cheese nationalism is universal.

(As an aside, Sweden is not at all the same as Switzerland. Look at the map. The Swedish and The Swiss have different approaches to language as well. I keep repeating these things when abroad. The problem reminds somewhat of the old Boston joke “where do you come from?” “Iowa.” “In these parts it’s actually pronounced Ohio.” [sorry, folks from Idaho, there's only one way to tell this joke at a time])

Sweden, I wanted to tell, has no specific international cheese reputation. That doesn’t mean that some Swedish cheese isn’t good. Well, okay, some isn’t. Whatever the case, even in Sweden, one tends to become a bit vague when it comes to understanding other nation’s cheeses.