Dairy Cows and Medieval Sheep, the Beauty of Alfta

The Swedish countryside is beautiful, and at the very start of Autumn, almost achingly so.  As we entered Jämtland, we drove along the sparkling Lake Oldsjön.  Still and clear, it was like a mirror that had been taken down from the wall to be cleaned.  78% of Sweden is forested, so the lakes invariably come with a reflection of trees built right in.  We began to talk about where we'd just been, Hälsingland, where a whopping 85% of land is covered in woods.  We stayed in Alfta for two days, visiting the Hälsingegården.  And while the painted farms are unique in the world, we were also able to see something there that is becoming rarer and rarer in Sweden - working farms.  Agriculture dates back to the Stone Age in Hälsingland, with proof of barley, wheat, millet and flax cultivation.  And while it has dropped off precipitously in recent decades, there is a tradition of farming that still holds strong.

"It's great that you got to see that.  It is more and more rare,"  Magnus Nilsson told us when we recounted an anecdote about visiting a dairy farm in Alfta just as a milk tank was arriving to pick up (or pump out) an order.  More surprising was that we'd just wandered into the backyard, trying to figure out where the advertised ostkiosken (cheese kiosk) was, and there was our host mother, Kersti Hisvid carrying a huge turkey!  A column of smoke rose up nearby, where they'd just flash-boiled the birds for plucking.  "We're feathering turkeys today!" Kersti declared as husband Ivar came up behind her with two more.  They didn't seem surprised at all to have run into us like this, almost twenty minute's drive from their own farm.  It is a small world, after all.  The couple they were helping out for the day - Susann and Astid Wedin - weighed the birds, 15 of them, and dealt with the milk truck's arrival.  Busy day on Jan-Hans farm.

"You can buy their milk at the grocery store here," Olav, the younger Hisved son, told us over coffee, well aware of how special that was.  He's been seeing things change throughout his life.  Some things have stayed the same, though.  "My parents do the turkeys with them every year.  Then, they all go out to a nice meal or down to the theatre in Stockholm.  It's a tradition."  The Hisveds used to have dairy cows of their own, but now just a few meat ones for themselves and neighbors, along with pigs and hens for ham and eggs.  The animals are mostly there, though, to keep the farm a farm, the fields open and the barns used.  We'd hear Ivar rouse early and go out to feed the animals in the morning, we'd put our muddy boots next to theirs when we came home. 

That's been the trend in Sweden.  Dairy to meat, both on farms and in stomachs.  Swedes have actually consumed 25% less dairy in the last two decades than the ones before and 33% more meat.  (The percentage of potato consumption has stayed the same for 30 years.  Go figure.)  Dairy had become the big cheese of farming industries in the latter part of the 1800s with more land devoted to cows than grain (and more grain devoted to cows than exportation).  The growth was steady and by the turn of the century, around 20,000 tons of butter were being exported annually.   Basically, mechanical milking machines put the farmers out of work, starting in the 1940s.  A full 60% of the agricultural workforce of Sweden was cut between 1945 and 1970.  Nowadays, the shrunken agro industry has gone back to cereals.

Olav and Per Hisved, the sons, both work for businesses in Alfta town proper.   Their parents open their doors to farmstay guests and Kersti sells truly delicious crispbread made in their centuries old bread oven.  This is the case with most family farms in Sweden.  Its owners may raise some animals or do some farming, but they make their living through other means.  It's called 'combined enterprise,' and in Hälsingland, where the farms are big and historic, this is usually accomplished through on-site cafes and B&Bs.  Even Jan-Hans, which stands out as a successful farming business,  has available rooms for rent in the summertime.  They do warn, though, that while breakfast is provided (including homemade cheese, of course) you'll have to go to the fridge and get it yourself because "this is a working farm." 

Then, you have a place like Lamm Katadrelan (Lamb Cathedral).  Also in Alfta, this farm is not only preserving a lifestyle endangered since the late 19th century, but also the animal breeds that were casualties of the same time.  Ancient breeds of cows, sheep, hens, pigs and even rabbits are kept on the farm, a number of which are highly endangered.  They were either interbred with other breeds with more uniform skins for leathers and wool - or abandoned all together for bigger breeds that could produce more milk and meat.  The Swedish Montane cows, smaller than your average cow, needs much less grain and has milk with a much higher fat content, but since you get less milk from them, they fell out of favor during the dairy boom.  There are 1.7 million pigs in Sweden, but Lamm Katadrelan has 2 of 300 landrace ones.  Their Hedemora chickens are descendants of a few renegade hens, found and saved by Viola Forsberg just when all the last ones were being crossbred with värphybrider in the 1970s.   Their lamb breeds date back to 500AD.  Traces of their wool have been found in Medieval church tissues.  This is some very cool life's work.

Of course, we didn't know any of this when we approached the farmhand, Ervin, hoping to get a glimpse of Lamm Katadrelan's painted interiors.  The house and cafe were closed for the season, but he welcomed us right in to the barn.  Inside, was another sort of historic breed altogether, a BM 230 Victor tractor from the 1950s (right before Bolinder-Munktel was bought by Volvo).  Ervin hopped right in and started it up, which it did easily and with a healthy roar.  Then, he brought us into the stables to meet Wilma.  Pretty much the antithesis to all her farm-mates, Wilma was a Haflinger, an Austrian draft horse.  She was that beautiful foreign luxury car parked in the garage.

I love looking out the window of a car and seeing unspoiled countryside, endless green and jewel-toned autumnal forests.  But rusted equipment, electric fences, barns, sheds, plastic wrapped hay bails only make me love rural landscapes more.  The smell of manure.  It's becoming more and more difficult to sustain a small farm lifestyle, all around the world.  Luckily, the people of Hälsingland have always been good at protecting and preserving what is most unique about their farmsteads.  From historic painted rooms to medieval lamb breeds, from keeping the farm in the family to making traditional bread and small batch cheese.  We were lucky to have found Alfta and meet its farmers. 

Views of Stockholm by Boat

Stockholm is a watery place.  Agnafit in the sagas, its enduring image is Gamla Stan, a loop of color rising from the waves.  Walking from island to island, one comes up against the shore, turns and finds the sea again.  Better to take to the water, then, to really see the city and to move more freely.  Over two trips we spent a lot of time on boats, where the city spaces are broadest and Stockholm catches the best light.

On the ferry between Slussen and Skansen, we stood out in the wind and watched the buoys pass.  It's a little boat, with a small deck.  The locals - with shopping bags and strollers - sat inside, talking to each other.  On the way back to the old town, it was colder and the sky was grey.  We rested on hard wooden benches, looking out the window.  The Gröna Lund amusement park soared in a cluster of disused spires and spirals, closed for the day or the season.  Muted fall colors floated by in the mist.

There are enough trees and green hills in Stockholm to give some areas the feel of a village - copper steeples above low roofs, little quays jutting over cold water.  If you constrict your perspective, a view from shore can make the city feel almost rural.
We spent our last night in Stockholm on a hostel in the hold of a boat.  Our beds were small and uncomfortable, the ship rocked through the night, the room was as bare and cramped as a closet.  Still, it was fun.  From our cabin we could see passing feet and bicycle wheels on the dock.  We drank beer upstairs in the wooden bar, listening to a man and the waitress speak Russian.  A full moon was in the air and Stockholm's harbor was beautiful; the movement of the water, the quiet creaking, the smell of old ship and bleach - it all lent the evening a wonderful melancholy.  From the bar's portholes, we looked to the archipelago.  Thousands of islands spill from the city into the sea.  Some have cottages and trees.  Others are bare skerries, nothing but grey rock.

We left Stockholm and Sweden on a ferry to Finland.  The boat was huge and moved through the water as though on rails.  The view from inside was expansive - the boat's taller than most buildings in town.  Stockholm slipped away faster than we expected into the rainy morning.  Shoreline passed like scenery in a movie, smoothly, until we were looking at empty land, then - much later - only grey water.
People take the ferry for the day, getting off at the Åland Islands and taking the next boat back.  They drink and gamble on the way, lured by cheap beer and slot machines.  The sea is tax-free.  Old couples sit with glasses of wine and stare out at the waves.  Young men disembark with bags of alcohol.  Everyone is a little bleary eyed.  There's not much to see, but there's a slight feeling - once the boat has passed into open water - of the sea swelling under your legs and of the immensity of the ocean. 

Things Swedish People Like

Falu Red aka This Red Paint.  As soon as we drove away from Stockholm, we entered a land of red houses.  And all the same red, too.  This isn't an overstatement.  At first, Falu Red was designed to mimic the look of brickface in cities in the 1700s.  When, farmers began to paint their houses in the 1800s, they chose the paint for its practical purposes and it swept the nation.  Made of linseed oil, water, rye flour and copper compounds and zinc from the great copper mine in Falun (hence the name), Falu Red is non-toxic and actually helps preserve wood.  The recipe has been the same since the 1920s.   Falu Red has become so iconic in the Swedish countryside that "a red house," is used the same way "a white picket fence," would be - the symbol of an ideal.

Cardamom.  When we first saw kardemumma in a labeled shaker at a coffee shop - you know, where the cinnamon or cocoa powder usually are - we were surprised.  Then, we tasted it in one baked good after another.  It's a spice that we would probably never have associated with sweets before.  I'm not sure either of us could really have picked it out of a line up before Sweden.  But we sure can now.  Above, one of many kardemummabullar.  Think cinnamon bun, but with cardamom.

Dagens Rätt.  This means "Daily Lunch Special," and is served for about three hours mid-day Monday through Friday at just about every Swedish restaurant. Usually, it's a smörgåsbord (buffet) of soup, one or two hot dishes and an extensive salad bar. For the record, "salad bar" in Sweden means a whole selection of salads, from grains and beans to tzaitziki and hummus. We're not simply talking lettuce and fixings, here. A soft drink and coffee is included and, sometimes, a small dessert. It began decades ago when the government decided to subsidize lunches to keep workers happier and healthier (and more productive). Nowadays, most employers subsidize the lunches. So, places are packed at lunchtime. It was easily the healthiest and best we were able to eat on the cheap in a very long time. Swedes like the system so much that even big city brunch - the trendiest meal of all - is a buffet by reservation system in the hottest places. I call it smörgåsbrunch.

Wallpaper.  Don't let the white walls of Ikea fool you (or the lime green or pink ones for that matter).  Swedes love wallpaper and, being as I love wallpaper, it has been a real treat.

Beer and Burger Pubs.  In Sweden, bars can only sell alcohol if they classify themselves as 'restaurants' and serve hot food until at least 10pm.  That's a recipe for a pub right there - a place where you can sit with your stronger-than-supermarket beer and eat something simple.  Like a burger.  Boy do Swedes like their beer with a burger.  And they like one strong and the other big. The list of beer was always impressive, from the island of Gotland to the island of Jamaica and a whopper of a homemade veggie burger was available at each place we tried.  Never the thin, frozen type, either.  It was nice to go to these pubs and not feel like they were British or Irish themed.  Just good ole fashioned (or new fashioned?) Swedish beer and burger bars.

Extra Headlights.  In an unofficial survey performed by me in the passenger seat on a highway 4 hours north of Stockholm, 9 out of 50 cars (18%) had extra headlights attached to their grills.  Logically, they showed up more and more as we continued on toward the Arctic Circle. In the far north of Sweden, Lapland, the sun rises above the horizon for only two hours during winter.  (Stockholm gets about 5 1/2 hours of daylight in that same depth of winter).  So, one can see the point of the extra wattage. At a gas station yesterday, a man affixed his extra headlights.  Autumn has arrived.  The beginning of the sun's end.

Wooden Butter Knives.   These are not just quaint decorative touches.  A Swedish person would never dream of spreading butter with anything but a wooden butter knife.  Families have one for each member - different hands, different perfect fits. Households tend to have slightly different knives for use with different breads.  They are smooth, light, often made of juniper wood and every kitchen we rented (4 in all) had loads of them in their utensil drawers.  The handles are thinner than the blade.  They're kind of like little, shortened canoe paddles.  Above, the magical butter at Fäviken Magasinet.  Don't let the photo fool you.  Swedes skim their butter from the top.  Those wooden butter knives were not made to dig, scoop or chop, but rather gliddde and spread.

Saab.  It is the only automobile given the "Royal Warrant" by the King of Sweden and, as of June 2012, Saab belongs to the Swedes once more!  Well, the Swedes and the Chinese who share ownership of a company called National Electric Vehicle Sweden.  Sure, there was the whole GM bankruptcy snafu, but Sweden came to the rescue and their beloved brand will live to see another day.  (Obviously, Swedish people also like Volvo, but I really wanted to use this picture of an awesome classic Saab in Stockholm).

Honorable Mentions

Making you pay for the toilet.  Even as a paying customers in some cafes, you've gotta fork it over to pee.  Lessons learned the hard way, folks.  We felt stealthy when we discovered a free one, marking it one our maps.  Carry coins with you if you ever go to Sweden.  5 - 10 krona (75¢ to $1.50) is the going rate to use the restroom and since most have a door that you insert a coin into, it's vital to have exact change. Apparently, Stockholm pay toilets have been transitioning to Pay-By-Text functionality, but we didn't run into any of those ourselves.

Too Many Toppings.  This applies the most to pizza.  Outside of the cities, pizzeria and kebab restaurants are your local places to eat.  The pizza menus in Sweden are massive and include a list of combinations that seem bizarrely overwrought.  Pizza with kebab on it was a no-brainer, of course. But then...shrimp, skagen (roe and mayo salad), ham, pickles, pineapple, bernaise sauce.  On one pie.  Hot dogs get served with all sorts of pålägg (toppings): shrimp salad, Kalles (the iconic tubed caviar spread), bacon, cheese, coleslaw or mashed potatoes stuffed into the bun.  Lest we forget smörgåstårta.  The land of buffets has bred some very overzealous taste mixers.

Sill and Strömming

From a food cart window beside Stockholm's harbor, this man served us one of Sweden's true treats. Nystekt Strömming is a little place, with a simple name - it literally translates to "freshly fried herring."  We've eaten a lot of the stuff in Sweden, Norway and Iceland... not just fried, but also cured, pickled and slathered with sauce.  Along the coastline of these northern waters, herring is a staple.  We love it.
The Swedes differentiate between sill - herring caught in the North Sea, south of Kalmar - and strömming - fished in the Baltic north of Kalmar, and slightly smaller.  They're both herring, and essentially the same species, but to locals they're as distinct as bratwurst and frankfurter.

The Swedish taste for preserved herring tends towards sweetness.  Every supermarket carries a variety of jarred sill packed in dill sauce, mustard, curry, white cream, onion, vinegar or even berries.  The main curing agent in these seems to be sugar, and they can be cloying or even syrupy.  We're fond of the herrings in senap (mustard), but to be really palatable in a sandwich it has to be tempered by other ingredients.
The consistency of this jarred stuff, on the other hand, is near perfect for a picnic.  Delicate-fleshed, but still toothsome, it's cured without cooking - the scales flash silver, the meat is pink.  On dense, dark bread, with slices of Herrgårdsost cheese, it can be delicious. At Syltkrukan, the "jam pot," we had "toasts" of egg and sill with strong cups of coffee.  It's was great for a light lunch, but Swedes often like more substance with their strömming.

On a red-painted wharfside on the northeastern coast, in the pretty town of Hudiksvall, we found out how heavy a herring lunch can feel.  Möljens - a snack stand that serves ice cream and hotdogs in addition to its famous fishes - is an institution here, and was reasonably busy on Sunday afternoon.  They have a short list of strömming preparations, all involving pre-made patties of breaded fish.  Both the "strömmingburgare" and the strömming tunnbröd wrap (tunnbröd is a kind of semi-porous flatbread) were slathered with tangy tartare sauce.  The wrap was weighed down with several pounds of mashed potato.  Eating it by the waterside, with ducks paddling around waiting for the scraps, we were reminded of New England fish filet sandwiches.  The meal was a simple, filling pleasure, but we couldn't taste much of the herring.  Flaking it apart, though, revealed real fish.  These were actual filets, not processed white mush.

Simpler and more elegant, this plate-sized cracker from a gatukök ("street kitchen," or food cart) in Härnösand was fortifying enough on a rainy day.  The man who made it was especially proud of his dill and cream sauce.  As we stood and waited, we could hear strömming crackling and spitting in the pan.  Some young Swedes stood by with their mother, waiting for their own fishy treats.

It's occurred to us before how much of a divide the Atlantic makes in people's taste for fish.  From Lithuanian restaurants to Estonian ferries, Dutch beaches to the streets of Brussels, herring is ubiquitous.  In America?  It's almost unknown.  It's a shame, really, because the little creatures are about the perfect food.  Raw, tinned, brined, fried, smoked... there's no real cut, when you look at a herring you see what you're going to eat.  And, even if the taste is a little mild, it's also a great compliment to its environmental flavors.  What other fish is so easily translatable from one preparation to another?
On a sidewalk corner of Slussen, where Stockholm's traffic, people and water come together at a narrow bridge, Nystekt Strömming dishes up some of Sweden's finest and most elemental street food.

In Scandinavia, this is fast food.  Rebecca had a demure knäckis - two lightly fried filets on knäckerbröd (like Wasa) with onions and cucumbers piled on top.  My fish came with mashed potato, lingonberry jam, red onion and beets.  The fish was fried so gently that it was coming apart under its own weight.  There was a full moon rising over Stockholm's harbor.  We sat at a makeshift outdoor table and watched ferries rock in the water, people rush by and the sky darken.  The fish was too hot to eat at first, and smelled of salt and seaside.

The Painted Farms of Hälsingland

The man with the sword, to the left to the door, is the Guardian.  A quote above him states that he was there to protect anyone that entered, but also reserved the right to kick you out of it you got too drunk.  In the panel closest to the fireplace, the Fiddler laments his role as maître d'.  He is there to wrangle people, entertain, keep order.  He is harassed by a rowdy bunch whose job it is to make his job difficult, hiding in barns, boozing it up.  On the opposite wall, Sophia promises her unending love in a wedding ceremony and a man with a horse spins a tale about a buzzy political topic of the day, To Eat or Not to Eat horse meat.  This is the festivities room at Ol-Anders farm, one of the decorated Hälsingegården (farmsteads of Hälsingland).  These painted rooms are one part of what make the Hälsingegården unique to Sweden and the world. 

 In the 19th century, a boom occurred in Hälsingland.  It was a perfect storm of events for the region with a farming tradition dating back to the year 200.  Things that the farmers of Hälsingland had done for centuries suddenly became big business.  This is flax country and flax makes linen.  So, when a British man with know-how and his team of women who could spin with both hands simultaneously came into town, Hälsingland became Sweden's linen capital.  (The only linen mill still in Scandinavia exists here, today).  Then, when cotton began to usurp linen, in the mid 1800s, fortune struck again.
Agricultural reform gave farmers large swaths of forest they had little-to-no interest in.  But just about at the same time, industrialization started, railways were built and selling off land and felling rights became a goldmine.  Add to all of this a doubling of the population (thanks to peace and the smallpox vaccine) and the lack of a noble class and the farmers of  Hälsingland soared. "Cash in their pocket," Gun-Marie Swessar explained to us at Ol-Anders, something incredibly new for a population of people traded goods amongst themselves.  This is what they chose to do with it.

"That which... in Hälsingland, immediately arouses an outsider's attention are the magnificent and imposing buildings."  Elementary School Textbook, 1878.  Not much has changed since then.  As we drove to Alfta, where we'd booked a farmstay with the Hisved family, we kept noticing these enormous barns and houses.  Estates, really, grand in stature, but with an overwhelming sense of functionality.  Some people call the Hälsingegården, Hälsingland farmsteads, 'log castles,' and their layouts are pretty fortress-like.  Above, you can see the traditional form.  A fourth building used to be right where we're standing, completing the square.  The winter house is at the top, facing south for optimum sunshine.  The cow stables are to its left and the festivities and summer house is to its right.
This farm, Ol-Anders, was originally down in Alfta's town center.  However, after a 1793 fire destroyed almost all the buildings, the Anderssons and other families, moved their farms up onto hills, out of close proximity to neighbors.  For extra protection, they set them up like mini fortresses.  After the blaze, came the boom and what started as one story - two windowed buildings expanded upward and outward.  

Then came the decorative touches.  In parts of the region that were connected more closely to city, via trade routes or proximity, elaborate doors, detailed woodwork and pastels were the design of choice.  That's what the urban folk were doing, after all.  In places like Alfta and Långhed, porches were the style.  It's impossible not to notice them, some baroque, some rococo, some faux Greek temple.  "It took about 25 - 50 years for the fashions of the mainland [Europe] to get to this part of Sweden," Gun-Marie said, laughing.  Whether with a porch or not, the entrance to the home was considered the true sign of status.  Amazingly, though, even when the authorities actually began to complain that they were building on too large a scale and 'being too extravagant with wood,' the farmers of Hälsingland were never trying to outdo one another.  It was more like they were all deciding upon a local folk art, using most of the same builders and artists.

The painters mainly came from Dalarna, south of Hälsingland.  They would come on foot, with no job opportunities in their own neck of the woods, knowing that there was some wealth to go around up north.  Offering to paint for a few nights room and board, the artists began to adorn the festivities rooms.  Then, one room after another became canvases.  As the buildings grew, there was more wallspace to adorn.  With international styles beginning to come into vogue, farmers asked their painters to create the look and feel of expensive materials that would never be available to them.  Paint was used to create the illusion of oak and mahogany, Italian marble and French silk.  Always practical, the most intricate art was left for the rooms used only now and then.  More durable wall treatments, like stenciling and splatter painting, were used in entrance halls, sleeping rooms.  Because the fanciest murals were done in rooms that got use maybe a few times per generation and were not exposed to smoke or grease, they were able to remain intact.

Before we met with Gun-Marie at Ol-Anders, we didn't quite know how we'd be able to get a look at some of the famous interiors.  "Perhaps I can call my friend," Kersti Hisved told us when we asked about it.  We stayed with her and her husband, Ivor, in the hamlet of Långhed.  "Or, you can just come upstairs and look at ours!"  Ivor remembers touching the wall paintings as a child.  The paint used to come off on his fingers, he recalled.  Amazingly, with windows all around, it shows no signs of fading.  They've turned the festivities room into a kitchen, removing the wall panels temporarily to add insulation and having a restorer add a protective sealant before beginning any construction work.  "He told me to clean the walls with bread," said Kersti, "that's how they do all the old churches.  Lots of bread."  She dabbed at the wood with an imaginary chunk of baguette.
"In the 50s and 60s, everyone wanted everything new."  All across Hälsingland, some design elements became casualties of modernity.  But the festivities rooms, with their lack of insulation, were often the last things to get touched.  "She did not have the money to renovate this whole, big house," Ivor said of his grandmother.

Although the buildings on Kersti and Ivor's farm date back to 1845, they have only been in the Hisved family for four generations.  Some Hälsingegården have been in the same family for 400 years.  A strict code of inheritance governed the land here, where there was no aristocracy to clamor for real estate.  Father to son and if you had a daughter, it was customary to marry her off to a close neighbor.  Ironically, though, right after all these big houses were built in the mid 1800s, 10 - 30% of the people in this area emigrated to America.  They were following Erik Jansson, a preacher whose love of book burning got him run out of town and whom they promptly shot in Bishop Hill, Illinois after discovering that - prophet or not - he was an egomaniacal control freak.  Anyway, lots of houses were left empty.

While driving along in Edsbyn, we spotted Panesgården, a Halsingegården-turned-garden shop.  A warm welcome was given by Rosemarie and Rolf, who'd bought the building under a year ago.  Rosemarie had a flower shop in town, but fell in love with the historic farm, which wasn't being put to any use.  The ceiling had been newly touched up, the old faded painting could still be seen.  As we gawked at it, Rosemarie came up beside us.  "Want to see the upstairs?" she asked almost mischievously.  The impossibly narrow spiral staircase was unroped for us.  "You do this at your risk," she said before telling us to duck.  "I'm not allowed to let customers up here."

Upstairs, we emerged into a huge, bright room with some of the prettiest painting we'd seen.  She would like to turn the space into a cafe, if she can figure out the dangerous staircase situation.  Of the 1,000 Hälsingland farms, around 50 of them can be visited.  Many have been turned into B&Bs.  I think it was most fun to have just stumbled upon some.
What I love most about these farmers' mansions is the clear idea you get of what was truly valued by the people who built them.  Even as the farms grew almost ludicrously large, entire families would still sleep in a single room.  Why heat more than one?  They remained self-sufficient, continuing to spin, weave, slaughter, build, brew, bake... and all those big buildings gave them space to do it.  On most grand estates, the space is filled with stuff.  Here, they were filled with tools.  On most, fashion trumps function, wallpaper and furnishings are switched out for newer styles.  On these walls, art was made to last. 

A Dinner in The Woods: Fäviken Magasinet

Near the end of our dinner at Fäviken Magasinet, two chefs sawed through a cow's femur.  This bit of theater happened in the middle of the dining room.  There was no preamble and no explanation until the marrow had been picked out and plated with diced calf's heart and wildflowers.  We were told to salt it ourselves and spread it on crackers.  It was a delicious few bites of food, but the magic of the restaurant isn't constrained within the normal bounds of taste and smell. 
There, in an 18th century barn, we were treated to a dark, beautiful, nearly wordless dissertation on Autumn - from the dense vegetables to the fading light to the woodfire and our bed under the eaves.  Fäviken is a total experience.  One arrives, explores, eats, sleeps, wakes up, has breakfast and leaves... baffled, excited and with a new concept of what a restaurant can be.  Namely, environmental.  As a final petit-four we were given a plate of tiny raspberries, lingonberries and blueberries.  The fruit was small-globed and cold from the night air.  It had just been picked.

In the Swedish northlands, eight hours drive north of Stockholm, Fäviken isn't actually as remote as you might be told.  There's a town about ten minutes drive from the restaurant, with other restaurants and shops - but it still feels far away from everything.  Once you arrive, you're there until the next morning. We slept, with the other guests, in the same old barn as the dining room, tucked into little rooms.  It's somewhat luxurious, though everyone has mud and mown grass on their boots, and a tractor grunted in the misty morning air.  The setting is an old hunting estate, built on an even older farm.
All of us guests were excited about the food, but even more so about sharing an adventure.  Part of the point of the place is that it's completely overwhelming; the bedrooms, the shared sauna, the long drive north, the wet meadows outside, breakfast in the morning - it's a total experience, and immersion is unavoidable.  Nobody quite knows which door to go through, how to dress or what's going to happen.  It's mysterious, but easy - the meal takes on the tone of a dinner party.  There were only ten of us. There's one seating, every course is served to everyone at the same time.  I've never been in a restaurant where the whole room says goodnight to one another, or where everyone says hello again at their breakfast tables. 

The dinner actually began in a kind of drawing room, with a hearth and wooden armchairs.  Guests sit next to each other and kindle conversation.  The barn is built of old, heavy timber.  The decor is a mixture of forest-Swede icons: a thick fur coat by the stairs, a large-tooth saw by the liquor, bundles of herbs hung to dry on the walls.  We we given glasses of wine and - almost without being aware that dinner was beginning - a sudden trickle of amuse-bouches.  The chefs brought us the food and cooked some of it right before us.  They emerged with plates and pride, gave us explanations, asked us questions.
Fäviken would be fun even if the food wasn't great.  But it is great.  It's so good that we wondered if it was the best we'd ever eaten.  The problem with comparing it to other restaurants is that other meals seem so staid in comparison.  Our dinner was a procession of thoughtful surprises. Above, a ball of what was called "pig's head."  It was so tender that it could have passed for melting butter. The fried outer crust burst between the teeth, the flavor was intensely porky.  Just before this, we'd had toasted lichens, dusted with dried trout.

Putting down two little dishes of barely congealed cheese, a chef told us proudly that it was "just five minutes old."  This immediacy is a common trait of the kitchen's.  A leaf of kale, barely steamed was "dying on the plate."  A boiled turnip had been dug up "just now, during dinner." Magnus Nilsson, the restaurant's star, told us that his scallops - cooked in the shell over juniper embers and eaten with your fingers - are often mistaken for being overcooked.  "They're not overcooked," he said.  "It's just that they are still contracting, because they're so fresh.  If you wait a few seconds, they soften up."
Before the meal, we'd taken a long walk around the fields and into the trees.  We'd seen the kitchen garden, under an old stone wall.  The sheep had trotted over to meet us. The same aromas that end up on the plate - spruce, reindeer moss - begin in the dripping woods.  That turnip had been served under a bed of "last autumn's leaves," which had been collected in the springtime when the snow retreated.  The kitchen boils them with the roots, and then piles them on the plate together.  We were urged to search for our vegetables - like digging in forest loam - then slather them with butter.  It was a warm, earthy dish that went beyond taste.  Something of the chilly wilderness had come in with the leaves and the turnip, harvested just then in the dark outside.  We were being given a taste of the seasons - both last year's and right now.

Magnus Nilsson grew up not far from Fäviken Magasinet ("magasinet" means something like "store") in the heart of sub-arctic Jämtland.  He's unassuming, gracious and young.  When we first arrived, he was trying to fix the stereo system.  After dinner, he sat with his guests as we drank tea and duck-egg liquor.  The guests began the night in awe - in Scandinavia, Nilsson's become a culinary demi-god.  Fäviken is currently ranked 34th in the world by a (somewhat improbable, but much mentioned) authority.  By the end of the evening, he seemed like a friend or a neighbor.
Though he's exceedingly humble, Nilsson does have a dramatic streak.  He chopped cauliflower with an ax and put glowing embers on the table.  He likes to play with twigs, sticking them into food to make little antlers and using them like toothpicks.

There are more courses than we could really count - the food begins in small morsels, like tiny wild treats found in the woods, then builds to larger plates before subsiding again into sweets and sleepiness.  There were beautifully briny tastes of seafood - along with the gigantic, convulsing scallops, there was monkfish singed right in the kitchen's birch coals and served with spruce jelly. Skate with shallots, "fingered" so that it looked like soft pieces of white asparagus.  A langoustine tail, so delicate that it fell apart on the plate, served with caramelized cream (a wonderful thing, gently burnt and milky flavored at once).  This tiny morsel of pea-flour crust, pea-flower and pea-cream enveloped a juicy, steamed mussel.  It tasted equally of the coast and the garden.  Mussels also turned up at one point as a kind of remoulade with flax-seed crackers.
The meal had more fish than meat, but there were some bloody exceptions. Trout roe was cupped inside a dried crisp of pig's blood. The bone marrow and heart dish was the loudest exclamation, but the most endearing was one of the first: a few strips of cured pork belly, "from last year's fattest sow."

Nilsson has a knack for the jokily gruesome.  Pigeon arrived like this; singed talons, breast and split head.  "You can use the twig to pick out the brain," we were told.  "Really, if you want to chew on it, you can eat the whole head. Except for the beak."  The smear of buttered lingonberries provided an extra jolt of bloodiness.  It was one of the last courses, and arrived to laughter.  By that point, the room had been thoroughly won over.
The desserts were concise and fun.  The most memorable was a sugar-cured duck's egg yolk with a kind of crumble.  The crusted, shiny orb got broken into the dry grain, releasing the yellow liquid inside.  "Mix it together to make a little dough," the sommelier said, "then have it with some of this meadowsweet ice cream."

The nicest thing about Fäviken is that, even with all the complicated preparations and surprising flavors, it's really a very simple place.  When I woke up - hours before the nine-o'clock breakfast - I took another walk.  My boots got wet from the dew, the mountains around were hidden by fog. The birches were bright yellow in the cold morning light.  It felt and smelled like fall.  Most of what we ate the night before - aside from the salty seafood - had come from right there.  Trout is fished in the pond. The meat is butchered in another barn, the vegetables are grown in the garden. The berries, spruce and birch come from the woods.  Taking that morning walk, I felt like I was still experiencing the meal.
Our favorite food at Fäviken?  To tell the truth, it might have been the butter.  It was so rich that the color was almost orange.  The taste was of summer grass.  It's made from mountain cow milk, old Swedish breeds.  Our host agreed that it was delicious.  "You're lucky to have it, actually," Nilsson said.  "The brothers who make it don't get along.  These are the last days of the butter."

Skansen, The Swedish Original

Just fifteen minutes by boat from Stockholm's old town traffic, on a green island in the archipelago, one can wander through the 18th and 19th centuries.  When we asked one young volunteer how they had decided on the "year" of the house we were in (meaning the time portrayed, not the date built) he nodded to a wooden-faced, centuries-old clock.  "Because of that," he said.  "It's the newest thing in here.  We don't want a clock expert to come in and tell us that it hadn't been built yet."  He was dressed in garters and a tri-cornered hat, and had just put a few more logs on the open fire.  Because of the warmth and the dusty light filtering through wavy glass, we were ready to believe that this was some version of the 1700's, some parallel existence of rural Sweden.
Skansen is the oldest and largest outdoor museum in Sweden.  A cluster of buildings, objects and traditions rescued from the brink of extinction, the collection is a pan-temporal glimpse of the country's past.

We've been to many "skansens" in different places - the name has become a noun, and we use it pretty broadly to mean open-air house-museum.  Notably, there was a terrific one in the Czech Republic and a half-abandoned example in the hills above Tbilisi.  Our favorite, probably, was the first of the trip - we actually spent the night at the rambling, rainy skansen in Ciechanowiec, Poland.
Several years ago, on a trip with my mother and aunt, I'd taken the ferry from winter-darkened Gamla Stan to the island of Djurgården.  From my memory, I was able to call up a kind of endless landscape on a hill outside Stockholm proper, where the buildings were all of old wood and we watched wolverines and a grey owl.

I found Skansen about how I remembered it, if less dreamy.  The trees were more fully leafed when Rebecca and I got off the boat, and there were more visitors.  Like so many public green spaces, the hill that the museum is built on has a specific grayness in the offseason.  The sky was overcast, but the gray was more emotional response than true color - shuttered buildings, leaves being raked, the smell of woodsmoke trickling from the chimneys, a melancholy that comes before bare branches. The ferry docked at the entrance to Gröna Lund amusement park, where autumn-quieted rides loom over the boat and the walk uphill to the museum.  We shared Skansen with a few other young couples and American tourists, but schoolchildren made up the largest demographic - and the most energetic.
Above, potato starch set on a windowsill to dry.

As the afternoon got close to evening, the air was cold.  We were drawn to the various hearths and kitchen stoves, where costumed men and women told us about their imaginary lives.  One man in large-buckled shoes showed us a collection of rocks and told us about copper and iron mining.  A pregnant woman lit an oil lamp and talked about the portrait she was painting of a farmer and his wife - she was usually the wife, but the dress in the picture didn't fit her at the moment.  A schoolteacher worked at knitting something (a mitten?) and laughed when we asked about the wallpaper.  The performances were casual, and broke between eras and characters.  In general, the people seemed happy to talk to someone - most visitors ducked in and out without saying hello.

Peasant architecture, handcrafts and artwork weren't appreciated much before they began to die out. Because they weren't considered high art, the beautiful objects of every day life - painted walls, carved tools, woven clothing - weren't preserved outside of the home.  The idea of needlepoint being worthy of a museum is a rather new concept.  As modernity began changing lives, it also changed the value people gave to their old things, and much was discarded.
At ethnographic museums, those objects aren't the entire point.  They're important, but their effect is more so - like a theater set's is to a play.  We are supposed to enter living dioramas, where fires crackle, chickens cluck around the doorways and the smell of yeast hangs in the air.  It's a kind of theater in perpetuity.

Of course, the buildings themselves are as fascinating as anything inside them.  Collected from all over Sweden, they range from churches and chapels to government-built soldier's homes and windmills.  There are several complete farmsteads, a faux mine, a Sami camp, a schoolhouse, post office, countless barns and the tallest steeple in Sweden.  All of the buildings were carefully taken apart, moved and reassembled.  Walking around the seventy five acre collection is surreal, especially when one catches a glimpse of modern Stockholm in the distance.  The juxtaposition of old, new, rural and urban is a little comical.
The idea behind Skansen was actually Norwegian - King Oscar II had created a similar museum a decade before the Swedish one opened.  Industrialization was rapidly shifting the way people lived their lives, and things that had once been taken for granted were suddenly disappearing.  Artur Hazelius, a professor and folklorist, founded the museum after traveling in the Swedish countryside and noticing how much the peasant communities were changing.  Today, it's one of the most popular attractions in Stockholm, even among the Swedish.  We talked to one woman from the capital about it - "Everybody goes at least once a year," she said, only half joking.

Skansen's collection extends even to live animals.  Moose lumber around on spindly legs, brown bears sleep in furry piles, wolves hide in the trees.  The scandinavian wildlife collection is interesting but - as with all zoos - a little lifeless.  The owls are maybe the best feature.  One, the great grey owl, is housed in a walk-in aviary.  It's possible to get quite close to the huge thing, which is unnervingly still most of the time.
Less depressing are the domesticated livestock, who are much more content than the fat seals and pacing lynx.  Goats and cows dutifully graze and look placid.  Horses swish their tails and stare into the distance.  Peacocks preen and give grating cries.  Here, bloody fish wait to be thrown to a pair of otters.

Of course, Skansen isn't really magical.  Walk around and you'll run into tractors and golf-carts, women shoveling sawdust with earphones on, cotton candy and (even) the tinny music of amusement rides.  There are buckets of lollipops and bad coffee.  But the boat ride really does something for the visit.  Leaving the city pier and arriving at the island, then getting back on the boat as the sun gets low, the museum gets set apart from everyday life - cut off by gray water and some minutes of voiceless wind. By the time the division has been made - hotel room and tourist bars cut away from windmills and hair kerchiefs - Skansen is impossible not to find fun and interesting. These sort of things are inevitably hokey, but they're important too.