"Blood pudding" is a traditional Swedish meal, still served as school lunch etc. It is made from pig´s blood, gravy, rye-flour, lard and seasoning. You can buy it in stores, ready for the frying pan. It is served fried in slices, with lingonberry jam and, if you want to be fancy, also with fried bacon slices. That said, I have never liked it, and have avoided it ever since I had any say in what was on my plate! When our daughter Mimmi was in primary school, she came home one evening and asked "Why do we nerver eat blood pudding?" My wife Ritva, who feels the same way as I do, put on a brave face and served blood pudding for dinner next evening. After tasting it, Mimmi´s comment was "Mummy, you do not need to bother with this anymore!"

The milk pudding is another matter, a true delicacy! As Georgia notes it is done with the first milking, when the milk has a high concentration of nutrients, including the whey needed to get it to coagulate. The milk is simply poured into a pan and cooked in the oven. What is now called a cheese is sliced while still warm, served with milk and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. The best part, however is what you do next day with the leftovers: Slices of the cheese are pan-fried, and served with cloudberry jam and whipped cream. Of course, with industrialized milk production, it is very hard to get hold of the milk needed. This is a specialty of northern Sweden, my mother-in-law who comes from northern Finland also makes in when she has a chance.

Swedes are among the largest consumers of coffee in the world and we have been for a long time. Keeping a pot on the stove at all times was also a sign of hospitality - when your neighbor dropped in, a cup of coffee was offered as a matter of course. This coffe was made by boiling the coffee grinds in the pot, it was never filtered. After a couple of hours on the stove, the taste was rather bitter, and a traditional way of making it slightly more palatable was "kask", mixing it with Swedish vodka. You start by putting a coin at the bottom of the cup, add coffee until you can no longer see the coin, and then add vodka until it becomes visible again. Since alcohol has always been a favorite object of taxation for Swedish authorities, a lot of the so-called "vodka" was produced locally.. Mixing the home-brew with coffee was also a way of making the unrefined distillate a little more palatable..