Latkes and Lingonberry: a Comparison of Jewish and Swedish Cuisine
Aden Middleton
Sephardi Jewish food and Swedish food have been important to different parts of my family in different ways, but they both serve the same purpose: bringing us together over a warm meal. Learning about my culture has always been important to me, especially with how hard my family has worked to keep our traditions, stories, and recipes intact. I think learning about your own culture is an amazing way to make connections, not only to your own family and people from your own culture, but also with people from other cultures. Finding the similarities between our different cultures helps build strong connections, and finding the differences can introduce us to so many wonderful new things. Food is a perfect place to connect, and a massive part of almost any culture. While Sephardi Jewish and Swedish cuisine do have a few things in common, like different kinds of flat, crisp bread (matzoh and knäckebröd), and a love for soups and broths, they also have many delicious differences that I really enjoyed exploring.
A large part of my family is Sephardi Jewish and came to the US from Egypt a few decades ago. Food is a massive part of our culture and family gatherings. Matzoh is one of the most well-known Jewish foods. The bread, flat and hard like a cracker, that was not allowed enough time to rise before the Jews fled slavery in Egypt. Matzoh is incredibly versatile and can be used in a myriad of dishes. Matzoh ball soup is a favorite of mine, with spongy, bready balls of matzoh in a rich, salty broth. Or matzoh brie, matzoh battered with egg and fried in a pan. My mom always coats it in cinnamon sugar to make a French toast version. Or another favorite of mine, rice pilaf, rizi bizi, and kofta. Rice pilaf is a delicious rice dish cooked with aromatics, broth, and small pieces of angel hair pasta. Rizi bizi (which just translates to rice and peas) is a tasty tomato sauce with peas that gets served over rice pilaf. Kofta are small beef patties with onions, parsley, and spices. I like to eat them with rice pilaf and rizi bizi, and my mom has fond memories of making sandwiches with them as a child. And there are many others. Hamantaschen, challah, latkes, sufganyot. Many family gatherings consist mostly of delicious meals and time spent with my younger cousins. Our culture and our food are very important to us. We tell stories at Passover, assisted by our seder plates and our family Haggadah, of the hardships of those before us. The Jews fleeing Egypt in ancient times. And we tell the stories of our own family. The Jews, once again fleeing Egypt to continue practicing our religion and celebrating our culture. Not in ancient times, not even 70 years ago.
Swedish cuisine is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about it aside from Ikea’s Swedish meatballs, Swedish pancakes, and the Swedish Christmas cookies I make with my dad every year. A lot of Swedish cuisine is centered around dairy, meats like beef and seafood, potatoes (lots of potatoes), various fruits and berries, and many different kinds of bread. Fish and seafood in general have been an incredibly important food staple throughout history, and the importance of fish governed Swedish population and trade patterns for centuries. According to Wikipedia, fish were often salted and cured for preservation, and as a result salt became a major trade item in the Scandinavian middle ages. Fish and seafood in general are still an important staple in Swedish cuisine. For example, inlagd sill, a pickled and sweetened herring dish, is a common appetizer. Lingonberry jam (yum) was and still is used to add a bit of freshness to heavy meat dishes.
One thing I found really interesting was that traditionally, Thursday is “soup day”, because maids had half the day off, and soup is easy to prepare in advance. Thursday is still “soup day” for many people. How neat is that? One traditional soup is called ärtsoppa. It’s a thick yellow pea soup with onion, salt, and small bits of pork. It’s usually served with mustard and often followed by thin pancakes (pannkakor) for dessert. Another thing I found interesting is the fact that pasta and rice were very uncommon foods in Sweden up until the last 50 years or so. Potatoes, usually boiled, were and still are the main source of carbohydrates.
Sandwiches (smörgås) are a very common breakfast food, often served on crispbread called knäckebröd, with things like hard cheese, cold cuts, caviar, and tomatoes or cucumber. Many Swedish breads, such as sirapslimpa, are sweetened, baked with small amounts of syrup. There are many delicious Swedish treats, quite a few of them pastries. Kaffebröd or fikabröd are a variety of different pastries, cookies, and other sweet baked goods usually eaten with coffee in the afternoon. There are a few that I’m familiar with, both of them are cookies traditionally made around Christmastime. Drömmar, delicious buttery, shortbread-like cookies with an almond on top, and pepparkakor, wonderfully spiced gingersnap-esque cookies that are a holiday staple.
Sephardi Jewish and Swedish cuisine are massively different in a lot of really interesting ways. Swedish cuisine focuses pretty heavily on preserved foods like pickled herring, salt-cured meat, and fruit jams to last through the long, dark, cold winter, as well as warm, hearty dishes like soup and potatoes to warm the body and lift the spirit. Many Jewish recipes have narrowly avoided erasure, and because of that, Jewish cuisine is a very important part of many Jews’ lives. Swedish cuisine serves to bring warmth in the long winters, and nourish the body, mind, and spirit. Jewish food serves as an anchor to tie us to the lives and struggles of those before us, and bring us together as a community. That’s one incredibly important thing these two cuisines (and, really, all cuisines) have in common. They bring us together. Jewish food has historically been a massive way we’ve fought back against forced assimilation and erasure. As Leah Hochman said in her book, “The food Jews eat and the powers of the Jewish palate continue to define the American-Jewish experience, simultaneously serving as points of assimilation and self-preservation.” Though I can’t speak for Swedes, I know that food is central to every culture, and all the delicious recipes of the world deserve to be preserved, and more importantly, loved.
Food and culture are wonderful things that bring us together in so many ways. Sharing stories over a good meal, be it stories from family members at Passover or gossip with friends over snacks and ice cream, is one of my favorite ways to connect. Spend some time sharing food, like latkes or ärtsoppa, with your loved ones. Share recipes and make a meal together, talk about your day over something warm and filling, or just bring some snacks. Share your food, share your culture, and share your love.
Works Cited
Hochman, Leah. Tastes of Faith : Jewish Eating in the United States. Edited by Steven J. Ross et al., Purdue University Press, 2017.
https://sbctclwtech.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01STATEWA_LWTC/1b1j6b7/alma99100 0195827702814
Wikipedia Contributors. “Swedish Cuisine.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 Apr. 2019,
