Sweden Travel: Food Familiar and Strange

We met a Swedish couple visiting their son at Fowlds Cafe in Camberwell London and I asked what iconic Swedish food I simply must try. Among the food to try are Swedish style crawfish, which are only available in August. Yesterday, at the fresh food market, we found a wonderful fishmonger who had some, and so we embarked on an iconic Swedish food experience. And Lo! it was good. Now, we didn't go full hog with the experience because the tradition is to do a shot of schnapps after each crawdad. We stayed largely sober with just a glass of our imported, much travelled, French champagne. We also enjoyed a wonderful smoked mackerel, really very good, smoked just the way I like and finished with amazing strawberries. The joy of travelling from south to north is that you follow the season for particular foods, like strawberries. We've sadly gotten past the ripe blackberry line which we had just caught the beginning of in London. We'll have to drive south slowly, scanning vacant ground to find the ripe blackberry line as we travel next week.

One of the joys, and one of the travails of travel, is new food. In our homogenized world, it is actually quite difficult to find really new food. More strange and unsettling is the food you expect to taste the same, that tastes subtly or completely different. Its like ordering an egg salad sandwich on rye and getting tuna salad instead. Both are good, but your tastebuds are expecting sulphuric eggs, not fishy tuna. Take butter for example. Mexican butter tastes so different from Canadian butter it isn't really the same thing at all. Then there is the shock and surprise when you find a food that tastes exactly the way it 'should'. It is quite disjointing as well, but sometimes comforting. The Swedish smoked mackerel was one of those foods for me. Coming from a land of immigrants it is hard to know sometimes what foods and flavours originated where and how transformed they've been by their time in Canada. Smoked mackerel that I like is apparently purely Swedish style. It makes some sense with similar landscape, forest, field and sea.