Today I am returning to a topic I have talked about before, and that is food. It seems like many of you enjoy it when I talk about Swedish food. So today I’m gonna take a look at the calendar for special celebration days for different foods in Sweden. Some of them I have mentioned before. and some I haven’t talked about at all.
So let’s start, and before we talk about the specific foods, you will notice that there are more special days celebrating food during the darker months of the year. In April, May, and June. There are very few in July. There are none so during the summer, we are not as concerned with food as during the darker months, but let’s start this and go month by month.
And the first day dedicated to a specific food is January 1st, which is pizza day. This is not just in Sweden. This is called International Pizza Day. So I guess many countries celebrate this, but one thing you should know about pizza in Sweden, Is that we often put what can be called weird things on our pizza. I know that in the US there is a divide between people that love pineapple on their pizza and people that hate pineapple on their pizza.
So whether you are in one camp or the other, listen to this. One thing that is very common in Sweden is to use bananas on pizza. Personally, I am in the pineapple. Camp, but I also loved bananas on my pizza, and one of my favorites, when I lived in Sweden, was a pizza with bananas, curry, and peanuts. It might seem crazy to you, but I loved it. Another common pizza that many people loved. Kebab Pizza where you put Kebab meat on your pizza. I don’t know how it is today in Sweden, but when I left about 20 years ago, it was most common that you ordered a personal-sized pizza. Not these big pizzas that we have here in the US, but I think that might have changed.
The next date we’re going to talk about is January 12, the day we celebrate Marzipan. Marzipan is used in several of the things I’m going to talk about when it comes to special food days in Sweden, and it’s not. Weird that Marzipan also has its own day. Now we move into February,
The next day is Carrot Cake Day. I don’t know why carrot cake had its own day. I was never a big fan of carrot cake back in Sweden, and I’m still not a big carrot cake eater, but I guess a lot of Sweden like their carrot cake, and it is celebrated with its own special day on February 3rd.
Then come to a day that doesn’t have a specific date, and that is Fettisdag or Fat Tuesday, which is 40 days before Easter Sunday and since Easter, Easter holiday that moves. So does Fettisdagen but Fettisdag is very special in Sweden because that’s when you eat semla. Semla is a bun, a cardamom bun that you dig out the center in. Inside this bun, you may put some marzipan and. You put some whipped cream, you put, back the lid that you cut off to dig out the contents inside your semla, put it on top of the whipped cream, and then you put some confection sugar on top, and In 2023, Fat Tuesday will appear on February 21st.
Then we come to March and March 7th. This is the spec special day for what we call dammsugare, Vacuum cleaner. This is a little condiment made out of marzipan colored green with a tasty filling and both ends are dipped in chocolate, so it looks like one of those very old-fashioned vacuum cleaners. You might find dammsugare at IKEA. If you have an IKEA close to you.
Then we have a big one that I loved as a kid. March 25th is the Official Waffle Day in Sweden, Swedish waffles are a little bit different than the thicker Belgium waffles. They are thinner, usually made like a four-leaf clover where you get four hard shapes in one waffle. You eat these waffles both sweet and savory toppings. My favorite was always a waffle with fresh berries and whipped cream.
Next come to a day that I really appreciate, April 12th, the official day of licorice, and you should know that when Swedes talk about licorice, it’s usually the black kind, never the red kind, like in a Twissler, licorice is black very often. It is also salty. That is probably, as I have talked about before, the candy I miss the most from Sweden, salt, black licorice, and of course, licorice has its own day to be celebrated in Sweden. Since 2009, there has been an official licorice festival every year in Stockholm. This went on until 2018. I don’t know why there wasn’t any 2019 festival, but in 2020 it was postponed because of the situation in the world, and it will maybe take place again in the spring of 2023. This is how important the licorice is to us Swedes.
Now let’s move on to the month of May 11th. The 11th of May is chocolate ball day. This is an easy-to-make sweet that I loved to make. As a kid, it requires no baking and no hot stove, and we often made it as kids. It is a sweet little ball. Made with cocoa and sugar and a lot of ingredients, and then rolled in either pearl sugar or we could also use coconut. And we made it very often as kids because as I said, it’s no baking, no hot stove, nothing like that. So you can let your kid make it themselves.
In May. We also celebrate the muffins. I know muffins are really not a Swedish bakery product, but it is still appreciated and has its very own day, and that day is May 27. . Very often you find blueberry muffins since blueberries are one of the things you can pick in the forest in Sweden, and I will come back to that a little later on when we talk about another special day.
June the sixth is the Swedish Flag Day, the Swedish National Day, but it is also the herring day. Herring is maybe the most specific summer food in Sweden, and I have talked about it when I talked about midsummer, but I have also talked about it when I talked about Christmas. Herring is very, very important for Sweden, and you couldn’t have a special food calendar without having a herring day.
But after that, we go back to the sweets. As I said, we have no specific food day in July. But in August, we have two specific days, and the whole month is also celebrated for crayfish. We have our crayfish parties, crayfish is something I remember as a kid, we were catching crayfish and had these crayfish parties, and I remember. It was. It is pretty cruel because you have to catch the crayfish and then boil them. You drop them in the boiling water when they are alive. Pretty cruel way of cooking crayfish, but that’s how it is.
Two specific days, as I said in August. The first one is the rolled cake day, and maybe you see a pattern here. We have a lot of different kinds of pastry that have special days. And that is maybe natural since you think about how important fika is in Sweden, that we celebrate these other bakery products that you can have with your coffee. So rolled cake day, and I love my rolled cake to have raspberries within it.
We also celebrate maybe the most typical Swedish food if you are a non-Swede on August 23rd. Can you guess it? Of course, it is meatballs and I have talked about meatballs before. We eat our meatballs with a cream sauce, brown sauce with mashed potatoes, and of course the lingonerries, and surprisingly enough, from everything I could find, lingonberries don’t have their own special. But I think we can celebrate them with meatballs.
Earlier I talked about picking berries. Well, when we come into September, we come into a period where many Swedes use what is called the right to roam. The right we have as Swedes to walk out in the forest and pick berries, and pick mushrooms, and pick flowers. I have dedicated a whole episode about the right to roam, and I will have that link down below. This is important because September 3rd is the day of the mushrooms. I miss that so much here in the US. The possibility to walk out in the forest and pick your own mushrooms, chanterelles, black trumpet, and a lot of different mushrooms that I used to pick every fall in Sweden and then cook at home. I really, really love fresh mushrooms.
At the end of September, September 28th, we celebrate the kebab. Kebab in Sweden is very common street food. We have probably just as many kebab stands as we have hot dog stands where you buy your kebab with the bread and eat it, just like you in the hot dog stand, can buy your tunnbrödsrulle. They are in many ways similar. One used kebab meat, and the other one used hot dogs.
Now we are in October, and as you see, the intensity of special food days will increase. October, we start with October 1st, the coffee day, every day in Sweden is a coffee day. We have talked several times on this podcast about the importance of coffee in the daily life of Swedes. The importance, not just of coffee say itself, but the importance of fika, which is a much broader concept than just drinking coffee. So of course coffee must have, its all own very special day and not long after that. October 4th is the official day of the cinnamon bun. And I think coffee and the cinnamon bun is the first thing people think about when you hear the term a Swedish fika
Two days later, we celebrate the cream cake on October 6th, and let me explain here in the US. We often use frosting on top of a cake. I have never learned to love frosting. It’s way too sweet to me, and that’s because when we bake a cake in Sweden, the most common topping, except in one case, but the most common topping is whipped cream. So where you use frosting Swedes use whipped cream, and naturally, the whipped cream cake has its day in October. I said there was one exception, and that is what we call princesstårta, A princess cake that is, has whipped cream, but on top of everything, this is covered in marzipan, green marzipan, and that’s very, very typical. For this specific cake, and as I said, Marzipan is important for many of the things we bake in Sweden.
Let’s move on from this whipped cream cake day and go to October 14, another day where we celebrate something I talked about in the episode about the food I miss, and that is the Swedish shrimp sandwich. And if you are curious about knowing more about that, I will have a link to that episode in my notes.
November 7th. we celebrate kladdkaka. A kladdkaka is a chocolate cake. That closest can resemble a brownie, but it is much softer inside. I
In November, we have three additional special days, maybe because it’s one of the darker months in Sweden.
November 11th is the chocolate day. On November 14, we celebrate cheesecake, and November 22nd is Danish day. And then we reach December and Christmas is around the corner.
December 1st is the day of glögg. Glögg is a Swedish mold wine that you drink warm and you add almonds and raisins to it. 9th of December, we celebrate gingerbread, and December 13th, when we celebrate Santa Lucia, is the day of the saffron buns, and you can learn more about it in my episode about Swedish Christmas.
Finally December 18th, we just celebrate cookie day, all kinds of cookies. So there you have it. The special food days we celebrate in Sweden.
How to bake a semla
No baking chocolate balls
The yummy kladdkaka
For Lucia bake some saffron buns
In my next episode, we’re gonna talk about something a little bit more serious and that. Why are Swedes so happy to pay their high taxes? Until next time, as we say in Sweden, Hej Då!
