Pingvinen in Bergen

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Originally uploaded by watermirrors

Husmanskost is a word that is not easily translatable to English. It means food that is distinctly Scandinavian, but cloudberry creme brulee is not husmaskost.

As an American, husmanskost is analogous to soul food: unpretentious, home-cooked, hearty, and made with native ingredients. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to find unless you live here and with natives. Many meals my roommates make are classic husmanskost, but when you go to Uppsala most restaurants serve kebabs, sushi, burgers, and fancy expensive Scandinavian fusion cookery. Most tourists never get to taste real Swedish food.

When I took a trip to Bergen, Norway I knew I wanted real Norwegian food. Googling husmanskost + Bergen, I came up with Pingvinen:

If you associate contemporary Scandinavian dining with cloudberries, minimalist tableware and breathtakingly expensive menus, you'll find the Pingvinen (Penguin) restaurant in Bergen, Norway, a refreshing departure from form. Tucked into a corner of Bergen's university district, the year-old gastropub trades on unpretentious local fare, done the way it used to be. "People come in here and eat my food and you can see they get nostalgic," says 38-year-old chef Alma Valle. "They want to talk about it."

Walking in from the cold Bergen rain, Pingvinen immediately felt warm and welcoming. At the bar they translated the menu for us and recommended the seafood dishes. I had sea wolf with mussels and vegetables, which was incredibly delicious and satisfying. My friends and I chatted for hours at the candlelit bar.

Unfortunately, Norwegian beer-brewing is stifled by draconian laws, so the beer I washed it down with was a little tasteless.

Later on my trip I ate at a fancy gastropub, but it wasn't nearly half as satisfying as my meal at Pingvinen. If you want to really experience Norway's food culture, I suggest paying Pingvinen a visit.

Food in Dalarna

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Originally uploaded by watermirrors

Recently I paid a visit to Rättvik, a town in the Swedish province of Dalarna, for their biannual fair. Much of the fair is filled with junk and bad food, AKA, kebabs, but you could still savor Dalarna's traditional cuisine.

The infamous Brunost, the sweet, but salty caramelized whey "cheese" seems more popular in Dalarna than in other regions I've been to. Stands sold many varieties, mostly made with goat's milk, of both the solid mesost and the spreadable mesmor.

At one stand they had kolbulle (kolbullar), which is a type of pancake invented by coal miners. To make one, basically fry bacon in butter and add flour and water. This one was topped with lingonberries and mesmor. The people working the stand initially gave me it without mesmor, which is because...well, many people from other countries feel the same way about messmor as they do about traditional salty liquorice.

However, I hate wasting food, so when I bought a package of mesmor on a whim, I used it up even though I thought it was bizarre and in the process grew to like it. So I insisted on having some on my kolbulle.

Being an inland province, seafood was not a big presence at the fair, except for one stand that sold herring on tunnbröd, another regional specialty. aTunnbröd is a flat bread quite like the more common knäckebröd , but flatter and more compact. At the fare there were many stands where they made it fresh. Oh, and don't forget the Tunnbrödsrulle, a piece of tunnbröd wrapped around two hot dogs and usually mashed potatoes and some shrimp salad (tiny shrimp plus mayo...the Swedish passion for mayo deserves its own post).

The Swedish confections at the fair were mostly liquorice, a taste I have not quite acquired, and other "godis," gummis and other candies which were mostly the same as the godis elsewhere. I tried some "fudge" but it was bland and insipid compared to American fudge. I did pick up some delicious honey and cloudberry preserves though.

There were also lots of stands selling game meats from wild boar to moose. I purchased some smoked reindeer because the cuts of moose were pretty expensive or sausages with only a small percentage of moose.