Scouse Skojs

It is strange. We are on the brink of nuclear war and facing economic meltdown. Yet we remain obsessed with food.

Given the war in the Ukraine, the aftershocks of the pandemic, climate crises and the resulting fragility of supply chains, the obsession could be forgiven if the preoccupation was with getting hold of enough food to survive.

But it’s not.

I don’t know. Perhaps foodie culture is a welcome distraction, a consolation for the uncertainty of the future. A kind of inverted anorexia nervosa.

But whether you’re into it or not, there’s no escape. Turn on the TV and you’re bombarded with an array of dishes of all shapes and sizes from the infra to the ultra of the gastronomic spectrum. Here in Sweden throughout the day, each terrestrial channel, whether public service or commercial, seems to show at least one programme devoted entirely to cooking, whether it’s in the form of a celebrity chef explaining how you can aspire to cordon bleu status, or ranks of wannabe celebrities trying to outdo each other in the surrealism of their creations.

Even the news programmes provide no safe haven. For any breakfast show worth its salt (preferably Himalayan pink) will have a slot filled by somebody preparing a three-course meal for two at the speed of sound. The other day we were introduced to a woman claiming to be an inspirer of tomatoes (tomatinspiratör). I missed what she was actually saying. I was trying to imagine how she inspired the tomatoes. Did she sing ‘Ode to Joy’ to them? Or just read them one of Churchill’s wartime speeches?

Just in case, you get tired of all the intervening distractions from food, like Death, Destruction and Pestilence, you can always tune in to a cable channel devoted entirely to the worship of all things digestible. You can bet even the commercial breaks are designed to keep your gastric juices gurgling with anticipation.

And we haven’t even started on the social media’s contribution to the cult. One of the (many) reasons why I refuse to sign up to Instagram and so on is that I have absolutely no interest in what other people are eating at any given moment. They could be separated from me at birth and I would still feel as little excited about their dining habits as I am by the prospect of winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

You can, of course, turn off the TV and be a Twitter refusenik. But there is still an obligation to talk to people in the old-fashioned way – face-to-face. And if they are friends or colleagues, you also have an obligation to listen when they describe in painstaking detail every meal they had on holiday in Tenerife. Even if they have spent their vacation somewhere more fascinating than the Canaries (ie just about anywhere), the Colosseum and the Eifel Tower will serve simply as palate cleansers between the courses of their gastronomic highlights.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not remotely into self-denial. I enjoy my food as much as the next gourmandiser. Indulging the appetite is one of the few things that makes the ageing process tolerable. You can stuff yourself as much as you want with whatever you want in the full knowledge that even in the short term it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. You’re going to get increasingly feeble, and then you’ll die.

And I’m happy to concede there are distinct upsides to the currently fashionable obsession with food.

One is that it is no longer acceptable to be served overcooked vegetables to the accompaniment of a piece of meat that has been salvaged halfway through the tanning process. And it is a massive relief that spaghetti is no longer regarded as something that comes out of can and sauce as something that comes out of a packet. I don’t know whether it was wartime rationing, tradition, ignorance or laziness. But this is what I was brought up to understand as home cooking. The situation was so desperate that even school meals came as a welcome relief.

I’m also grateful that it is now possible to visit restaurants that are not steakhouses, whose sole purpose is to replicate the stodge you would usually eat at home without putting your Mum into a stress-induced lather. And nowadays there exist Chinese and Indian restaurants that do not assume you want watered-down and westernised versions of their various cuisines. What’s more, it’s now possible to order a vegetarian meal without causing embarrassment to both your fellow-diners and the staff, and still end up with something more interesting than an omelette or cheese salad. Even if this is at the cost of reading a menu that insists on reminding you just how many calories you’ll be ramming into your gullet, and confusing you with a whole array of symbols for which you have to find the key at the bottom of the page – only to realise that you really don’t give a damn whether people who are hyper-allergic to nuts, lactic acid or gluten live or die.

But you have to admit there’s a problem with the constant search for new dishes. Not to mention their presentation. Having exhausted the world’s pantry, many chefs decide to ‘fuse’ cuisines and dishes. An odd term to choose, you would think, since fusion is most commonly associated with wedding together atoms that Nature has deemed safest to keep separate. The result is a massive release of energy that, if undirected, leads to meltdown and, if directed, can lead to nuclear holocaust. Even if the process is harnessed successfully for civil use, you’re left with a waste-product that is toxic and remains so for millennia. Pursue the analogy and apply it to the production of comestibles, and the implication is that fusion food will result in acute evacuation of the bowels that will take out any innocent bystanders and leave an indelible blot on the landscape.

Clearly, some fusion food, despite the unfortunate connotations of the name, is delicious. Less pardonable is the elevation of style over substance. I suspect French nouvelle cuisine is chiefly to blame for this. What the French do behind closed doors is their own concern. But the trend has spread beyond the borders. I can think of no gastronomic experience that makes my heart sink quite so much as finally seeing the waiter approaching, only to be presented with small lagoons of pureed vegetables, surrounded by a reef of coulis (and what the hell is coulis?). In the middle, if you use your lorgnette, you might be able to spot an exquisitely sculpted central island of protein. As for any decent carbs, forget about it. At least it makes the choice of dessert simpler. If you hadn’t decided before, now you know you’ll go for the cheese board and ask for a further basket of that excellent sourdough bread.

After all, when it comes to the (molar) crunch, the only food that really satisfies is what the Swedes call husmanskost, which translates more or less as home cooking, depending on the whose home it is, of course. In my view, going to a restaurant, you should be getting what you would cook at home, if you were good enough, or what you do cook at home but you’d like prepared to a much higher standard. Thus the tastiest Indian dishes are those any self-respecting Punjabi housewife prepares when the occasion calls and the purse allows. And the best Italian pizzas are those the Italian eat themselves. I mean, whoever came up with the idea of sticking a ring of tinned pineapple on a capricciosa?

So, when I speak of Swedish food, I will be concentrating primarily on the type of stuff that is served up in the kitchens of your average Svensson, rather than on that of any young cosmopolite that has been contaminated by hours of exposure to televisual pollutants.

True, not all husmanskost is designed to appeal to the taste buds of aliens.

The first Christmas after my arrival in the country, I was at a loose end. I didn’t have enough money to go back to Britain for the festivities. And I hadn’t had enough time (and money) to make friends who were similarly footloose. In the early nineties, Sweden still had licensing laws that made Prohibition seem like an all-inclusive cruise. After a couple of hours queuing outside to get into a bar, your first urge was to shove down your throat as much booze as possible before they closed up shop. As a result, you were more likely to end up in a fight than a fraternal embrace.

So it came as a welcome surprise, though one I had worked hard for by dropping hints like confetti, to be invited to the home of a mother and daughter who both happened to be my students. The invitation was for Lilla Julafton. The main celebrations in Sweden occur on the Eve rather than the Day itself, which is set aside for convalescence. ‘Little Yule Eve’ was presumably invented to dispense alms to any waifs and strays encountered in the daily round before you got down to the serious family business on the next day.

Whatever the case, I was infinitely grateful for the opportunity to indulge myself to the max at someone else’s expense. It was, after all, the commemoration of the birth of Our Saviour.

We were seated round a table bathed in the light and warmth of an open wood fire. The coronary cockles had also been warmed by something called ‘glögg’. This is, it seems to me, onomatopoetically pronounced ‘glug’, and is the Swedish equivalent of mulled wine. The name is supposed to come from the glow it produces or perhaps the glow of the poker that warms the wine. I prefer my explanation.

We had already started to sample some of the smörgåsbord delicacies while waiting for something more substantial. I mean, I quite like rollmop herring, but it begins to pall after you’ve eaten 10 different variations on the theme. I’m also not sure my stomach likes being pickled in vinegar. If it’s going to be soused, then let it be alcohol.

At which point our hostess removed the small plate and replaced it with a larger one with something gelatinous swimming in what looked (and smelt) like its own vomit, saying ‘you have to taste this; it’s our big Christmas tradition’.

In my experience, this is a dangerous turn of phrase. When the two major clauses are combined, the first element automatically takes on a negative polarity. (Call it ‘Goulding’s Logical Fallacy’.) To put that another way, when you find the combination of terms addressed to you, you should immediately invent an allergy that no-one else has heard of. Or simply run for it.

But in those days, I wasn’t yet so wise to the ways of the world. Besides, I could hardly offend my hosts after all their kindness. Besides, they were due to continue in my classes after the Christmas break.

So I inspected the blob more closely, only to find it revealed no trace of its origin. The only clue lay in its smell, which was vaguely sulphurous.

‘Lutfisk,’ Ulla explained. ‘I don’t know how you say that in English.’

Neither did I. This is probably because no-one in England who had the usual quota of human kindness would dream of treating a fish so cruelly.

Let me explain. Lutfisk is usually a fish called ling. This fish is dried, then rehydrated for about a week with changes of water each day. Then it is soaked in a lye solution for another few days, before being returned to water for a while. Then it is boiled gently before being served, in this case with an egg sauce.

The one thing you can say for certain about this procedure is that you can be pretty sure the fish is dead before you consume it. But it does raise a number of questions. Ling is a fish I had never heard of. It appears it is related to cod. More to the point, you may be asking yourself, as I did, what lye is. I quote from wikipedia:

‘A lye is an alkali metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes, or a strong alkali which is highly soluble in water producing caustic basic solutions. It most commonly refers to sodium hydroxide.’

The webpage then goes on the point out that it was in the past used as the basis for soap.

It was a very honest dish. It tasted as bad as it looked. And smelt. And yet it is regarded as indispensable to the julbord (Xmas table – you should be getting the hang of this by now). Certainly the older generation claim to actually like it. But I have yet to meet a non-Scandinavian who could bear the dish

The fish is dried in the first place, of course, in order to preserve it. And thereby hangs a thread. Much that is special in the world of delicatessen attains its specialness courtesy of the method of its conservation. Think of prosciutto crudo, for example. Or baccalà, for that matter. The latter of which just goes to show that you can make something palatable out of eating fish past its sell-by date.

And the Scandis in general have shown themselves to be no slouches in other instances.

As I have pointed out, pickled herring can be delicious and the Swedes have at least 57 varieties of it. I can also manage gravlax, (Norwegian sushi) and smoked salmon, even if I have never acquired the same enthusiasm for either that is shared by many non-Scandis. The Swedish take on anchovies (In fact herring in various spices, including cinnamon), however, and a concoction called matjessill (herring pickled in cinnamon and sandalwood) are more borderline cases.

It’s probably the cinnamon that puts me off. It seems to be the single most popular spice in the Swedish cuisine, extending from herring to buns. For my part, every time I catch a whiff, I’m reminded of childhood sick days, when Langdale’s Essence of Cinnamon was the standard patent medicine for anything related to Ears, Nose and Throat, though I’m pretty sure the main function was as a deterrent to malingering.

But personal spice bogeys apart, I’m sure I’d draw the line at surströmming if I ever plucked up the nerve to open a can. Even southern Swedes turn up their noses at this northern titbit. This literally means ‘sour Baltic herring’. It acquires its sourness, which is detectable the moment you open the tin, by means of fermentation. The fish is first salted to stop it rotting while the fermentation has time to take place. Then it is left to ferment naturally with wild yeasts. In the course of this this process it emits various acids including something called in Swedish propansyra, which sounds suspiciously like propane. Even seasoned campaigners are known to stand well back when the fish once again meets the light of day. The uninitiated have been known to swoon on first olfactory contact. The phrase ‘an acquired taste’ must have been invented for the occasion.

Oh. And before we leave the Christmas smörgåsbord completely, there’s one other essential component that I should mention. This is an oven dish consisting of strips of raw potato baked in onion cream, and yes you’ve guessed it, Swedish anchovies. It’s called Janssons frestelse or Jansson’s Temptation, which raises the question of how easy it is to tempt a Jansson.

On the upside, you can wash it all down with plenty of small glasses of flavoured vodka, including, I expect, a few flavoured with cinnamon. Drink enough and you’re unlikely to be traumatised by memories of a repressed childhood floating to the surface like globules of fat. In fact, you’re unlikely to remember anything the next day. Christmas Day here is when you try to recall where you mislaid your short-term memory.

The only other festivity that I’ll detain you further with is the Crayfish Supper, or kräftskiva. This used to take place at the beginning of August to commemorate the traditional opening of the cray-fishing season. By now the starting pistol has been delayed to the middle of the month and so has the feast. Unfortunately by the time the tradition had started to become something more than an upper-class preserve, the river crayfish were already well on the road to becoming extinct in the Swedish waterways, due to a disease called logically enough crayfish plague. So in recent years imports from Turkey and China have mainly taken up the slack for the purists, if you can call imported crayfish ‘pure’. In the meantime, the invasive American signal crayfish has pretty much taken up the advertised vacancy in Swedish rivers and lakes. And in any case people on the west coast tend to prefer the more substantial and significantly easier to eat sea crayfish, or langoustines. Or of course, you can eat both.

The main constant in the constellation of options is the presence of lots of flavoured vodkas/ snaps in miniature bottles. They are an option at Christmas but wholly obligatory at the August celebrations. So much so that you might suspect that the fish is really no more than an excuse for a comprehensive piss-up. As if the proceedings needed further livening up, you are required to wear paper bonnets, similar to coolie hats decorated with fishy designs, and are provided with a song-sheet. For each drink of brännvin, must be prefixed with the singing of a snapsvisa. A visa is a folksong. Some of them are very good. Snapsvisas, however, are usually very bad. Many of them at least have the virtue of being very short. Others never seem to finish. As a poor foreigner unable to hold what passes for a tune, you will be left staring wistfully at your glass until your eyes glaze over. It is easy to see why most sensible people take the end of the song as a cue to empty their glasses to the bottom. You never know when the next one’s coming.

Generally speaking, tastes and cuisines vary in most countries of any size according to region. And as you may have gathered Sweden is no exception. This is not altogether surprising. Sweden is the fifth largest country in Europe and has a coastline that extends, including offshore islands, for an astonishing 43,000 km from the North Sea round the Öresund into the Baltic. They say that if you flipped the country over so that the north faced south it would extend as far down as Milan.

You should have realised by now how your position relative to the North or Baltic Seas can influence the kind of fish, or crayfish you might eat. Something similar can be said about who your neighbours are. The closer in the north you are to Finland you are, the more probable it is that you’re going to be presented with blodpalt, which is dumplings made out of flour, mashed potatoes and reindeer blood. A proximity to the continent, however, will get you having a knees-up at Martinmas, but only after you’ve put away a goose accompanied by svartsoppa, or black soup – a euphemism for, yes, goose blood heavily flavoured with spices and spirits.

The best that can be said is that cinnamon is not amongst them.

It’s the Deep Southern region of Scania that lies closest to Denmark and Germany, so that’s where you’re most likely to have your goose cooked. It’s also the place where you’ll encounter sooner or later spettekaka, or spit cake. As luck would have it, the

spit referred to is a skewer that is used to form rings of something like meringue into concentric circles that are placed on top of each other so they form a tower. The result resembles a wedding cake which, like that in ‘Macarthur Park’, has been left out in the rain and collapsed in a fit of tears. Perversely, it ends up as dry as the Sahara.

Fortunately, there are less eccentric versions of husmanskost. Indeed, some of them are exceptionally tasty. Stews are generally very good. And many of these, especially those for special occasions, are based on the local availability of game. This can range from reindeer and grouse in the far north, to red deer in the south, and elk, roe deer and wild boar just about anywhere.

If the worst comes to the worst, and you find nothing to suit your palate over here, either because you lack a sense of adventure or you have only time for a quick bite between connecting flights, then you can always settle for a traditional snack. Yes, we have our own versions of fast food. Even if the Swedish hot dog is as little lacking in nutrition as anywhere else, Gothenburgers have put their own particular twist on it, by serving it with mashed potato as well as bread.

And if all else fails, there are always the ubiquitous köttbullar or meatballs. Usually they taste just fine, if they don’t fall apart (as mine usually do). Alternatively, you might just settle for picking up a pizza on the way home. True, it’s more likely to have been baked by someone from the Middle East than by an Italian. But as with meatballs, you really have to make a really special effort to sabotage a pizza.

Given what I’ve written, you might think I was either living on takeaway food or starving in my adopted country. (Or is it the country that adopted me? ‘Think not what country you would want to adopt, but what country would want to adopt you’?)

Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not. Firstly, I do most of my own cooking. Secondly, the great majority of dishes that are served in home or restaurants cater to the tastes of plebs like myself.Most eateries concentrate on what Swedish cooks are good at – serving simple dishes made from fresh produce. And as you might expect, our cooking is at its best when it is preparing an ungarnished piece of fresh fish. Having said that, of course, what was once a poor man’s diet has now, with the depletion of fish stocks, become a luxury item for many. With the notable exception of farmed salmon, about which the less said the better.

I have only two real grounds for complaint about what we eat here in Sweden.

Firstly, I do not understand the fetishisation of dishes that were invented by Mother Necessity, caused by a lack of money, seasonal produce and deep-freezers. OK, I get it. You can’t fish for cod when the sea is frozen and your boat’s out of the water. So you are going to have to go for something you prepared earlier. But these days, you can eat cod year round (if you can afford it). So why serve up something as unappealing as lutfisk on a festive occasion? Is it some kind of nostalgia trip? A way of patting oneself on the back for having emerged from poverty? Or is it designed to evoke the warm glow of childhood memories? If the latter, at least I can begin to appreciate the attraction. I still have a thing about tinned salmon, though the feeling doesn’t extend to Brussel sprouts.

My other complaint concerns the attempt to market Swedish cooking as a serious competitor in the field of world-class cuisines. There’s an assumption that this can only be achieved by disguising the food on the plate out of all recognition. (See above under ‘nouvelle cuisine’.) At best, you can call this ‘fusion’. At worst you can attribute it to the vanity of chefs seeking celebrity status.

While I await writs from irate culinary practitioners eager to sue me for libel, I would like to conclude by discussing one particular item of husmanskost. To wit, lapskojs.

This may ring a faint bell with the reader, since my website address is similar. But I chose the name ‘lappscouse’ not only because I live almost exactly halfway between Lappland and Liverpool. I was also fascinated by the supposed Nordic origins of the word ‘scouse’.

As you may be aware, ‘scouse’ refers not only to the Liverpool accent and the scouser that uses it to communicate. It is also the name of a dish, abbreviated from the more corrrect ‘lobbscouse’. (An ‘aha!’ moment?) In the form it was served at our school dinners, it was basically a fry-up of leftovers. The etymology of the term is, as the dictionaries say, ‘uncertain’. But the best guess is that it comes from Northern Europe where, with allowances made for linguistic variations, it also meant a dish resembling a fry-up. Why this should catch on in Liverpool and no other place in Britain is an open question. One suggestion is that, since Liverpool was the country’s major port, then it would be more open to Continental contamination.

And sure enough, Sweden has a similar dish called by a similar name, viz ‘lapskojs’. Needless to say, the etymology of this is also ‘uncertain’. To a rank amateur like myself, it sounds as though it should be a northern Swedish dish, eaten by Lapps in Lappland.

Incidentally, we don’t called Lapps ‘Lapps’ anymore. The more acceptable term is ‘Same’ (pronounced ‘Sameh’). ‘Lapp’ is considered offensive for reasons that escape me. After all, we still call Lappland ‘Lappland’. One of the more bizarre aspects of Swedish wokery, I guess. After years of trying to persuade the Lapps to self-immolate, is everybody supposed to believe that changing their name is a way of kissing and making up? To make matters worse, the ‘skojs’ bit sounds like it has something to do with the word ‘skoj’, which means ‘jest’ or ‘fun’. So please note – it is no longer acceptable to make fun of Lapps.

In short, Swedish etymologists haven’t a clue. In desperation they claim it comes from the English word ‘lobbscouse’. This is manifestly impossible, since as we have seen, the etymology of ‘lobbscouse’ has a Nordic origin.

It’s almost as if both countries were trying to disclaim any part in the invention of such a recipe. But in point of fact, both lapskojs and scouse are among the more acceptable forms of husmanskost. So perhaps it’s a case of Sweden lobbing the scouse of responsibility back to the UK for having invented scousers. And, hand on heart, who can blame them for that?

(As usual, thanks to wikicommons for the pix.)