There’s no such thing as a pan-Nordic food culture: there are just too many differences between the component cultures. Diversity in food comes down to two things: geographical size – which is also really closely related to climate – and population distribution. In a small country like Denmark, the climate is the same from one end to the other, as is the way the population is distributed, and so the Danes have a very homogenous food culture. If you go to Finland, on the other hand, what you eat in Helsinki and what you eat two or three hours away on the Karelian-Russian border will be completely different. The climate is different, the culture is different. Food varies much like language does, and both are constantly evolving.
Food is the only cultural expression that everyone has to relate to: we all have to eat, regardless of how poor or rich we are, so it’s a very immediate indicator of what is happening in a country. In researching the recipes that would make up my book, The Nordic Cookbook, I travelled extensively and read all the books I could get my hands on. With historic dishes as with newer dishes, you can really follow their evolution. One revealing example is pizza. It’s impossible to say for certain where the first pizza was baked in the world – as long as you’ve had dairy production, and ovens to bake flatbreads in, you’ve had someone throwing some kind of pizza into the oven. But you can see, for example, that in Sweden, the pizzeria arrived in the 1940s with immigrants from Italy.
And each subsequent generation of immigrants, wherever they came from – Somalia, Turkey, the Balkans, Afghanistan – added something to that pizza culture. It’s pretty cheap to buy a pizzeria – there’s a steady demand, so it’s what a lot of immigrants do as their first business. When the immigrants from the Balkans came during the Bosnia crisis, they brought with them the marinated cabbage salad, which is now served in every Swedish pizzeria, alongside the pizza. The Turks then mixed it with their doner, so now you can have a kebab pizza. And that makes it into a regional speciality – it differentiates it so much from the Italian origins, so it’s no longer an Italian thing made in Sweden, it’s Swedish. And that in turn then makes you question what “Swedish” means.
The taco quiche is another example. The taco was brought into Sweden in the late 1980s or early 1990s by spice companies as a marketing ploy. They marketed taco kits with minced meat and taco spices, and it led to a bastardised Tex-Mex taco, which became really popular – partly because it’s delicious, and partly because it is accessible. When people were over the initial excitement, they started adapting it to suit their circumstances and their flavour preferences better, and you got combinations developing, like the taco quiche, which is like the Swedish meat pie but with taco seasoning. And that has become one of the most popular dishes.
If you look at another dish that is like this iconic symbol of Sweden, the fermented Baltic herring. Fish is fermented all over the world, but what makes this stand out is that the herring is fermented in a tin can. The tin can wasn’t popular until the early 20th century, so it follows that this dish isn’t likely to be much older than 80 years, and 80 and 30 years are both very short windows of time from a historical perspective: they’re really not that different in age. They’re both made from regional produce. If you line up a hundred Swedes and ask them if they like fermented herring and how often they eat it, maybe 20 would say that they eat it, and probably only once or twice a year. If you ask the same number of Swedes how many eat taco quiche, and how often, maybe 80 would say they eat it, many times a year. So which is the most Swedish dish? Who decides what’s a regional speciality or not? And who decides what defines your country?
• Magnus Nilsson was talking to Dale Berning Sawa
