Top of the Glas

Ben McFarland samples some of Sweden's finest beer and food combinations.

If the “bork-bork-borking,” cabbage-shooting, moose-smearing and chicken-chucking chef from The Muppets is your sole experience of Swedish cuisine then, well, you should stop being so flipping childish and read on.

Not content with flooding the globe with reasonably priced, flat-pack furniture and safe yet unexciting automobiles, Sweden also boasts some top-notch tucker.

Swede Anna Mosesson, cook, food writer and owner of Upper Glas, a Swedish restaurant in North London, certainly thinks so. “Swedish cuisine simply doesn’t get the attention it deserves,” says Anna, who has written extensively on the subject. “It’s a completely different experience. There’s healthy fish dishes including eel, mackerel, herrings and, of course, Gravad Lax and Swedish anchovies – a lot sweeter than those of other countries.

“It’s always seemed incredibly unfair to me that beer still has this slight stigma attached to it. I have a lot of friends who are total wine snobs and they look at me in disbelief when I order a beer out at a top restaurant! They’d never think of having a beer to accompany a fish dish – which I can assure you, is a superb combination.” So banish clichéd associations with stodgy meatballs because Swedish cuisine is far more sophisticated than that.

And so, indeed, is its beer. More readily associated with aquavit, vodkas and other heady spirits, Sweden is not renowned for its ales yet there are more than 20 microbreweries in Sweden and, considering the tight taxation of bo.....

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By Ben McFarland

Section : Beer and Food

Page number : 40