When I was visiting my friends Maren and Lasse in Sweden one year, Maren and I made a week's excursion to the heart of Sweden, the landscape called Dalarna, home of the famous carved Dalarna horse and, for many years, an important farming district of Sweden.
For centuries the Swedish farmers would take their cattle to a summer pasture, where the girls herding them lived in a little village called a fåbod. Maren and I lodged in a little house in a former fåbod village at the north end of the long north-south lake called Siljan. Our house overlooked the lake. I slept in a cupboard bed painted with Swedish folk-design hearts and flowers with a curtain to draw for privacy. In the morning we heard clanking cowbells on the hill above the house, but the cows must have been grazing there only to add atmosphere because the fåbod tradition had died away in the mid-twentieth century. The economic backbone of this village was now tourist dollars. At the end of the week, though, at the southern end of Siljan, Maren and I found a fåbod still in operation, though also mostly for the sake of tourism. When we read in a brochure that this village, Ljusbodarna, offered a traditional Swedish glödsill, a herring dinner, on Sunday evenings and that this Sunday would be the last glödsill of the season, we decided to go, even though we steeled ourselves for a tourist's fake experience.
We got more reality than we expected. The twentieth century disappeared as soon as we left our car in the gravel parking lot and entered the village. Seven or eight log buildings formed a large square around the yard, where a score of roughhewn tables sat. Next to one of these buildings, at a table above the creek, a man was scrubbing huge mounds of potatoes. Over open fires three large tubs were steaming with boiling water, and smoke rose from the chimney of an adjacent hut, where charcoal reddened in preparation for the salted herring. Maren and I wandered through the farm before dinner, following a printed map to find the yard with its two pigs, the spring house where the butter was kept, and the shed with its fetid bovines.
By then it was dinner time, so we hurried back to the village. To our surprise, the previously empty yard now milled with people, all speaking, Maren told me, the Dalarna dialect. These were not tourists but local folks, chatting and laughing like old friends. They looked at home here, as though they came every year to this last glödsill of the year. They exuded a sense of festivity and anticipation.
But the weather was cold and threatened rain, so while Maren held our place in line for the buffet, I ducked into a small house behind the buffet table to see if we could eat there.
From the narrow entrance, I stepped into a small, low room with plank floors. A large hearth oven to the left of the doorway emitted warmth from a recent fire, and the room was rich with the warm smell of fresh knäckerbröd, the round Swedish hardtack. Dozens of knäckerbröd circles were swinging under the ceiling, strung through their center square holes on two long poles to cool and harden. I asked the four people sitting at the plank table if Maren and I could join them, and they said, "Yes, certainly, please."
When I returned to the courtyard, a woman clad in native Dalarna dress—a heavy black skirt covered with a red apron with yellow and dark red stripes, a white blouse with a red-and-white-plaid cotton scarf clinging over the shoulders, a white cap with its broad front brim turned back over the head—was hustling in and out of another house with food for the buffet table. A young man with a broad face and a good smile, and a young girl with blond braids—the woman's son and daughter—were heaping the table with grilled salted herring, boiled potatoes, sour-cream-and-dill sauce, knäckerbröd, butter, and pitchers of juniper beer, a slightly opaque, amber drink, like cider, with a low alcohol content. Crockery plates, real glasses, and stainless steel cutlery stood at each end of the table. This spread was the traditional glödsill dinner.
Once a week during the summer, Alice, the woman in Dalarna dress who managed this fåbod, hosted a glödsill for the tourists—and the last one, it seemed, for her neighbors. There was no electricity. The potatoes, herring, and bread were cooked as I had seen, and Alice had baked fifteen loaves of spice cake in a cast-iron wood-stove oven on a shelf in her little log house.
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| Swedish spice cake from my oven |
"It's the best baking," she told me, taking me inside. She bent over the oven to open the door of the firebox, giving me as she did a picture of Dalarna women of many centuries tending the fire for their spice cakes.
Carrying plates heaped with grilled herring, potatoes, sour cream-dill sauce, and buttered knäckerbröd, Maren and I entered the house with the hearth oven and sat it its table next to two other couples. We all introduced ourselves, the Swedes switching immediately to English in deference to me. The tall, white-haired, lively-looking man across the table, 91 years old, had been the priest of the beautiful, historical church in Rättvik that Maren and I had visited the day before. His wife, big and bold in a white coat that buttoned at the side of her chest, was 86, but still she managed to dredge from half a century ago enough English to talk to me.
The other couple, 60-ish, were also locals. They had a summer cottage not far from here, and the man, Tor, had grown up nearby, in Leksand, selling salted herring from a sledge as a boy. It was he who had drawn the map of the fåbod that Maren and I had followed on our walk, so, to his amusement, I asked for his autograph on my map. The Rättvik priest had married Tor and his wife—"many years ago," Tor's wife added.
My dinner companions were eating heartily. "How do you like the herring?" they asked me.
I said, politely, "It's good, but a little salty." (To say the least!) They laughed, pleased, like any native people who can accomplish, with the ease of birthright, tasks that foreigners find impossible. They told me to absorb the salt with the potatoes and to drink lots of juniper beer, slightly sour and tingly on the tongue.
I was curious about the fireplace oven. Tor explained that the fire was built inside the long box and the bread baked directly on the hearth. The priest's wife, eager to satisfy my curiosity about old Sweden, pointed out that the curtained cupboard behind the table was a sort of bunk bed (like the one I had slept in earlier in the week). When I left my place at the table to investigate the cupboard, I found, hanging next to the bed, a valhorn, a musical instrument made from a cow's horn. The priest's wife saw me pick it up and said with a twinkle that it was very hard to play. I impressed her by managing first a sound, then a tone. She had no way of knowing, of course, that my hippie background had offered many opportunities to play conch shells with "mouthpieces" like that of the valhorn.
"I'd love to find a valhorn to take to my son," I said, replacing the horn on its peg. "He makes musical instruments and would be so interested."
"First you would have to find the cow and cut off her horn!" the priest's wife exclaimed.
When we had finished our dinner, the girl with blond braids came in with china cups and a copper pot of coffee. She set these down and returned with a plate of sweet-smelling spice cake. After the cake and coffee, both very good, we all went outside, where people were still drinking coffee or lining up to say good-bye to their hosts.
Tor and his wife and the priest and his wife, shook Alice's hand warmly. They hugged, said how good it had been, thanked Alice, promised to return—I couldn't understand the words, but I knew what they were. Then Maren and I said our good-byes and thank-yous, except I didn't know how to say what I really felt. How can you thank someone for opening to you the heart of a country? Here were the food, the clothes, and the beautiful old buildings of Sweden, but these things the tourists of the summer could also have had. What had been given me that night was the heart of the people themselves—their pleasure in this fåbod tradition and in eating with their friends around the tables of their ancestors the same foods those ancestors had enjoyed. I knew just how privileged I had been to be a part of the priest's small party when I noticed that the other guests were drinking coffee from ordinary coffee mugs served from an urn. Only the priest's party inside the "bread-oven house" had been given coffee in a copper coffee pot and had drunk that good coffee from beautiful china cups with ruffled lips and a rose motif.
Next week: "Dinner at Sweden's Best Restaurant"
Recipes from this post:
Grilled salted herring
Knäckerbröd
Swedish spice cake
GRILLED SALTED HERRING WITH SOR-CREAM DILL SAUCE∫
The concept is simple: Grill the salted herring over a charcoal fire. Add chopped dill to sour cream. Serve with small boiled potatoes. Add no salt to anything.
KNACKERBROD
Ingredients
1 cup coarse rye meal
1 cup rye flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup milk
Preparation
Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Lightly flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Preheat oven to 300º.
To make
Sift the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter. Add the milk and stir till smooth. Turn onto a floured board and roll very thin. Prick with a fork. Cut the dough into circular pieces about 1 foot in diameter. With a thimble make a hole in the center of each piece. Place pieces on prepared baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes at 300 º. Slide baked knäckerbröd through a string to hang close to the ceiling to cool and harden.
SWEDISH "SOFT SPICE CAKE" (MJUK PEPPARKAKA)
Makes one 9"x5" loaf
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
Preparation
Let butter soften./ Butter and flour a 9"x5" loaf pan. Preheat over to 350º.
To make
Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix dry ingredients together and add them alternately with sour cream, beginning and ending with dry ingredients. Bake in the prepared loaf pan at 350º for 55-60 minutes.
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