A Taste of Scandinavia

When National Geographic Mission Projects Editor Hannah Bloch commented on a recent post about bacon-wrapped hotdogs she found in Copenhagen, we asked her to elaborate, and she provided a veritable buffet of Scandinavian treats.

Food is always a central part of my travels, but even by my own gluttonous standards, Scandinavia took the cake. Or rather, I took the cake. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. Many cakes. Usually with coffee. Nordic cakes were some of the most beautiful I’ve ever eaten, and I drank some of the loveliest lattes of my life–usually presented not in mugs or cups but in heatproof, easy-to-hold Duralex glasses with the foam shaped into hearts and flowers. In Copenhagen, the scenery is so charming you don’t want to miss it for a second, no matter if the weather is cloudy, cold and windswept, and outdoor cafés provide blankets so you can take everything in without freezing. You almost feel as snug as all those rosy-cheeked babies you see bundled up and trundled around town in prams attached to their parents’ bikes.

Nobody in Copenhagen, Stockholm, or Helsinki ever asked me if I wanted my lattes skim, decaf, half-caf or with soy milk (thank God). It simply wasn’t an option. And I must also mention that nowhere did I glimpse a single Starbucks. I have no idea how they’ve managed to keep the U.S. burnt-bean behemoth at bay, though a friend in Stockholm told me gloomily that a single outpost would soon be opening at the airport. I imagine homesick American tourists might be the only ones tanking up there.

But why waste time being homesick, anyway, in a region with so much delicious coffee and food? One of the biggest revelations during my three days in Copenhagen was the bacon-wrapped hotdog, sold from street carts and known locally as pølse med svøb and pølse i svøb. It’s easily a foot long, exceeding the size of any bun, grilled in a spiral of crisp bacon and served with a choice of ketchup, mustard, sliced pickles, raw onions, and a generous sprinkling of what I initially thought were bacon bits (oh my God!) but which turned out to be fried onions (still great!). I ate several of these dazzling dogs during my stay, the final one in my last evening there, when I took shelter from a drizzle under a street cart’s awning near the Royal Danish Theater.

“You want everything on it?” the young woman asked, reading my mind.

Yes, yes, yes!

I was also drawn to the Cafe Malmø in Nyhavn, tucked in the basement of a building at the corner of Havnegade, which runs along the inner harbor, and Peder Skrams Gade. It was an old sailors

watering hole, named for the Swedish port city just across the Øresund Strait, and the new owner has paid tribute to those old sailors by displaying some 3,500 bottle openers they left behind on their long-ago visits. The walls are covered in a crazy array of these things, some dating back a century or more–bottle openers shaped like hands, fish, candelabras, piece of fruit (I glimpsed a pineapple), even the scales of justice. One simply says “CAPTAIN.”

From Copenhagen, I went to Stockholm, where taking time out for coffee and cake is so ingrained in the local culture the Swedes have a special word for it: fika, used as a noun or verb meaning to have coffee and a snack. I fika-ed myself silly. I only veered off course once, after visiting the Nobel Museum

housed inside the Swedish Academy in Stockholm’s old town, when I headed across the square to the Kaffekoppen café to savor a big bowl of hot chocolate instead of my usual coffee/cake combo.

Then from Stockholm, I flew north to Helsinki, where I was able to maintain my cake habit without interruption, but I discovered a surprise when I asked the long-haired bartender back at my hotel to suggest some Finnish vodka for me to try. “Well, we only have one kind on tap,” he said, (and then he said a brand name whose spelling I will never be able to replicate) “but it is smoother than Finlandia.” Vodka on tap?!

I gawked at him and he gestured toward a frosty sphere about the size of a soccer ball. My fantasies of a gushing beer-like vodka keg/tap vanished–this one was relatively refined and discreet, and he was only serving the vodka in shot glasses, not in overflowing steins. Still, I imagined how vodka on tap might go over in a U.S. bar, and what I came up with was mayhem. This bar was very low-key–clearly they’re used to it.

Being in Helsinki meant I should have sampled some reindeer, but I didn’t. Still, I bought a can of it at the Stockmann department store food hall the night before my flight out, figuring I could brave it with friends back home in D.C., maybe throw Rudolph into a pot of beef stew one of these days.

The next morning I was stopped at airport security, and the young guard rummaged through my carry-on bag till he found the reindeer can. He brought it over to his supervisor and then returned to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said politely, “but we consider this to be a liquid.”

“It’s meat,” I said, stating the obvious.

“Yes, but for our purposes… we consider it liquid.”

“Meat is a solid,” I persisted. (I was arguing only halfheartedly, more out of pride than any genuine desire to hang onto the reindeer can.)

“I’m sorry,” he said, putting it away.

I shrugged, and couldn’t help feeling this might be all for the best–especially if that reindeer meat was in fact mostly in liquid form.  

Fortunately, I did manage to bring some other food back to D.C. with me. Among my haul: lingonberry-filled chocolates, cloudberry candies, herring in mustard sauce and–get this!–bacon in a tube. Yes, people, you read it right, I brought back bacon in what looks like an oversized toothpaste tube. Actually, it’s “bacon ost”, which means it’s mixed with cheese. I bought it in an ICA supermarket in Sweden, where people seem to have a strange and well-documented propensity for eating many things squeezed from tubes. In the deli case, I also noted caviar in a tube, lobster in a tube and maybe not so surprisingly, plain old cheese in a tube.

I’ll let you know how it tastes.

Photos: Top and Bottom, Hannah Bloch. Hotdog illustration: Hawk Krall for Serious Eats, where you can learn a lot more about the delicious dish.  For more on cloudberries and where to find them in the wild, see this IT post by Jenn Blatty.