When Sweden killed the McFlurry

“The only regional cuisine I haven’t enjoyed is Swedish. I figured I’d be all over it, considering how much I adore the meatballs and ligonberry sauce in the IKEA food court. But when we ate at a Swedish joint, they served us a dish that was scary enough to change my opinion of the entire country. Fletch ordered potato sausages, which sounded great, right? We imagined thick country pork sausage, nicely seasoned with sage, blended into a chunky patty, studded with red potatoes, and browned to perfection. Maybe they’d even come with gravy!

What we got was a bowl of two-inch-long glistening pink tubes. They were so phallic that we had to cover them with a napkin.”

- from My Fair Lazy by Jen Lancaster

During my junior year of college, I spent a semester abroad in Växjö, Sweden. Particularly during my first month there, I did an enormous number of stupid things. For instance, wasted an entire bottle of laundry detergent because I did not realize the reservoirs in the washing machines drained directly into the tub; I just kept pouring, waiting for the stupid thing to fill up, until I ran out of detergent. I also managed to get stranded at 3am so I had to resort to hitchhiking. I went to Rome without really knowing what the Roman Forum was. And, in one of my proudest moments, I got locked in a shipping yard.

Still, some of my funniest memories of Sweden have to do with disgusting Swedish food. Don’t get me wrong. The Swedes have many delightful dishes that I genuinely miss eating. Pytt i panna, a dish consisting of fried sausage and potatoes, topped with a fried egg and beets, was a staple for me while I was there. I’ve tried to recreate it with some success, but I wish I could just buy it frozen again. Swedish bolognaise pizza is delectable. Our version of thin-crust pizza just does not make the cut. For years, I looked for and attempted to bake my own Swedish chocolate balls, which are a chewy pastry flavored with coffee. I did finally taste their awesomeness again last year at Russian Tea Time in Chicago, but that’s the only place I’ve seen them. I’m starting to lose hope that I will ever taste a meatball-and-beetroot-salad sandwich or genuine Swedish pear cider again.

So yes, I did enjoy some types of Swedish cuisine. However, there are some other foods that the Swedes eat that are downright horrifying. And due to my complete ignorance of Swedish language and culture when I arrived there, I tasted much more of the horror than I intended.

My troubles started at the grocery store on the day I arrived. I was completely terrified and overwhelmed, and I basically wandered around the store throwing anything that looked vaguely familiar into my basket. One of those things was a package of brownish deli meat that I took to be roast beef, because really – what other processed deli mean is that color? Let me tell you what other processed deli meat: horsemeat. I bought, and eventually ate, horsemeat. Sweden – 1, Katie – 0.

Many of my other food issues revolved around seafood. While I’ve grown to like fish in recent years, it’s still not my favorite, and at age 21 I still didn’t like it much at all. Still, I knew that the Swedes were big on caviar and herring, so I had resolved to try some. Then I found out that they eat caviar by squeezing it out of a tube onto toast. Out of a tube. Onto toast. Their breakfasts look like someone smeared cinnamon-flavored toothpaste on bread. And the herring? They don’t eat it until it is fermented. Fermented. As in, broken down by bacteria. And believe me, it smells just as bad as you are imagining right now. I found out these little pearls of information before I actually tried either one, so I was going to give myself the point on seafood.

However, later in the semester, the international student organization hosted a dinner featuring several traditional Swedish dishes. One of these dishes was crawfish. Full-bodied, still-in-the-shell crawfish. As the poor thing was already boiled and on the plate in front of me, I decided to try it. The native Swedes told us how we should go about eating the crawfish. First, pick it up and suck the juice out, they said. Ok, I thought. THAT is gross. I’ll just skip that part and move on. Next, they told me to use my thumbs to break the shell. This part I did – and sprayed my entire table with crawfish juice. Oh. That’s why they suck the juice out first. Sweden – 2, Katie – 0.

As I experienced these horrors and others, I’m only a little bit ashamed to say that I often retreated to somewhere familiar: McDonald’s. I couldn’t go wrong there, right? The apple pies were a little different (better, actually), but otherwise the menu was close to the same. One day, I decided to splurge and get a McFlurry. The worker asked what mix-in I wanted, and I pointed to the Oreos. She pointed to the bit and said, “This?” while raising her eyebrows in a way that seemed to ask, “Are you sure?” I said yes, that, thinking something along the lines of I happen to like Oreos, ok?

As I walked back to my dorm, I put the first spoonful in my mouth, expecting bliss. Know what I got instead? Black licorice, with salt on it, mixed in ice cream. The Swedes eat salty black licorice the way we eat the red kind, and that is what was in that bin, not Oreos. Despite the warning from the McDonald’s cashier, I had ordered and tasted a salty black licorice McFlurry. FAIL. Sweden – 3, Katie – 0.

Yes, I definitely had some bad food experiences in Sweden. They were disgusting and embarrassing, but they make great stories. And, in some cases, they also make for FANTASTIC pictures.