Best Scandinavian Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the most popular food in Scandinavia? ›

Meatballs. Thanks to a certain Swedish furniture company meatballs (köttbullar) are perhaps the best known of any individual Scandinavian dish. They are traditionally made with a combination of ground beef and pork, alongside spices including nutmeg and cardamom.

Köttbullar (Meatballs)

If there's one Scandinavian food that will give you a real taste of the region, this is it. Meatballs are served with boiled or mashed potatoes, a cream sauce, cucumber, and tart lingonberry jam. The meat can vary—some recipes incorporate pork, veal, and beef, for example.

The three main cuisines of Scandinavia are Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, each with its unique flavors and dishes that reflect the geographical and cultural diversity of the region.

An open-faced sandwich is a very common Scandinavian breakfast. It can be as simple as a piece of rye bread with butter and a slice of cheese, or you can spruce it up a bit with toppings like cucumber, apples, sliced egg, or bell pepper. Chopped chives or dill are never a bad idea.

Swedish meatballs, or köttbullar, are perhaps one of the most internationally recognized dishes from Sweden. These small, flavorful meatballs are traditionally served with mashed potatoes, lingonberry jam, and a creamy gravy, making for a comforting and satisfying meal.

Northern Norwegians eat a lot of smoked, dried lamb. Of course, we can't discuss meat without mentioning meatballs. There must be tens of thousands of different recipes – actually, that's probably a vast underestimation. In Sweden, a mixture of pork and beef is usually prepared, whereas Danes prefer pork and veal.

Pickled and fermented foods remain a part of the Swedish diet even to this day, and popular variants are cucumber, cabbage and other vegetables and root vegetables. The pickled herring ('sill') is a staple for the national holidays of Easter, Midsummer and Christmas.

These fruits and berries are common to grow in Sweden: Apples, which I guess is both most common to privately grow and eat. Pears, Plums, Cherries, Gooseberries, Red and Blackcurrant are all pretty common to. Blueberries, Lingonberries, Cloudberries are growing naturally in the woods particular in the nothern parts.

Scandinavian cuisine focuses on the food as it comes from the earth rather than doing too much to transform it. There's always plenty of fresh seafood from the waters of the North Atlantic, which becomes inspiration for culinary brilliance. Presentation is a huge focus in Scandinavian dining.

Nordic vegetables are cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, roots and peas. Fish varieties include salmon, sardines, mackerel, herring and dried salty cod. Fruits do not grow abundantly in the region; therefore, berries tend to be the primary source of fruit.

What do Norwegians eat for lunch? ›

It doesn't have to be complicated. The traditional Norwegian matpakke consists of slices of freshly baked bread (often as open-faced sandwiches) with a favourite pålegg (fillings and toppings), and maybe a few slices of fruit or vegetables, or berries.

Consumed at a rate of 15 thousand tonnes a year, hushållsost is the most popular cheese in Sweden.

Hard or soft boiled eggs (most of the buffets I ate offered both) can be eaten whole and stuffed with a bit of caviar-from-a-tube (the brand I saw the most being Kalle), or sliced up on top of bread or crisp bread and topped with caviar. (You can also just eat caviar on crisp bread, but it goes well with egg.)

Fårikål – mutton stew: the national dish of Norway. Cabbage and mutton are layered in a pot along with black peppercorns and salt (and, in some recipes, wheat flour to thicken the sauce), covered with water and simmered until the meat is very tender. The dish is served with potatoes.

Notable are the Norwegian fjords, the Scandinavian Mountains covering much of Norway and parts of Sweden, the flat, low areas in Denmark and the archipelagos of Finland, Norway and Sweden. Finland and Sweden have many lakes and moraines, legacies of the ice age, which ended about ten millennia ago.

Sweden's food culture centres on local produce, but many classic dishes have international roots.