The what-la? Yeah, that was my first thought. During the month of February the city is plastered with posters advertising the Semla, particularly at the million 7-11s across the city. Newspapers run stories on this pastry, every bakery in town makes them, and then on Fat Tuesday (Fettisdagen), everyone has a semla (or many of them).
My semla experience was nice. I tried a little bit at work, and then Dave stopped by a nearby bakery on his way home last night. They were similar in that both had the cardomon-spiced bread, the almond paste, and the whipped cream; and yet, they were pretty different.
It's part of living in Sweden, right? Gotta try everything at least once (or twice in one day).
Growing up in my family means that you appreciate root
vegetables, all things cabbage, and herring (unless you’re my sister and
deathly allergic to fish). We come from
hearty Eastern European stock where fresh citrus was a delicacy. Lucky for me I was born in California and, with the exception of my years in Boston,
never knew hardships coming across produce. I knew that moving to Stockholm, after a
summer of being spoiled by the California farmers markets, meant that I would reconnect with these old familiar
foods. I also knew that along with the
beets and cabbage would come an assortment of mushrooms that I had only seen
overpriced on the shelves of shmancy grocers. I’ve partaken in most of the produce but have yet to tackle the wall of
canned and preserved fish that constitutes a very large refrigerated section in
every market I’ve perused. We’ll report
on the adventures of canned, fermented, and spreadable fish another time.
For those who know me, it’s not a surprise that I’m writing
about food. I love food. And for those who know me even more, it’s
even less of a surprise that I have a love-hate relationship with food. My list of food allergies is long. Most relevant to my new Swedish life: my list of food allergies is in English. In the U.S my nemeses soy and corn hide
in most prepared and packaged goods; they hide under aliases in long lists of
ingredients. I expected that they would be
hidden much the same here, and they are. But, what I didn’t expect was that the words to describe these simple
and common foods would be so hard to come by. The cereal and bread aisles are filled with containers advertising fullkorn, much to my surprise and relief
fullkorn does not mean full of
corn. In fact, the word korn might not even mean corn. Some online
sources (1, 2)
tell me that it means barley or grain (therefore fullkorn means wholegrain),
but others like this one tell me Korn: grain, kernel, corn, barley, barleycorn. So what happens if we search the word corn
for its Swedish translation? Well, we
get the following: säd; majs; kärna;
liktorn; spanmål, korn. Fortunately
eating corn doesn’t send me to the hospital, just makes me feel lousy for a
while.
