Dinner at Home – Sweden

We arrived in Stockholm at 9pm on Monday night and were collected from the airport by the lovely friends we were staying with. We didn’t have a plan for dinner and, given the time, I suspected they may have already eaten. I should have known them better though and, while I thought they were pottering around in the kitchen with a few snacks, they were actually preparing a traditional Swedish meal.

On the table in front of us were five types of herring, some dill potatoes, cheese, horse meat (I’m not sure this was traditional but it happened to be in the fridge), hard bread, red onion and yogurt. This was our third trip to Sweden so we were familiar with herring but hadn’t tried it in so many variations, we had plain, onion, garlic and tomato. There was also another tinned type that was described as the Marmite of the herring world: you either love it or hate it. We both loved it but Stephen found it particularly attractive and ate it at every possible occasion during the rest of the trip.

I neglected to photograph it but for dessert, our hosts produced a box of Daim ice-creams which are one of my favourite things about Sweden. For every jar of herring Stephen ate, I matched him with an ice-cream.