Yes, Chef (3 page)

My mother organized our dinners the way she organized the household—efficiency and routine ruled the day. No more than ten dishes made it into her regular rotation. On Mondays, we had meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and gravy. On Tuesdays, herring. On Wednesdays, a roast. On Thursdays, we ate split pea soup and on Friday, fish casserole. Once in a while, we veered from the routine. But not often.

Tuesdays I loved most of all. That was the day the fishmonger drove his beat-up Volvo panel truck into our neighborhood’s modest shopping area, which consisted of a tailor we never used, a grocery store owned by the Blomkvists, and the newsstand guy from whom I could occasionally cadge a peppermint and where my father bought canisters of loose tobacco and cigarette papers.

My father, the son of a fisherman, was no fan of the fishmonger. “His fish is not fresh,” he said disapprovingly.

“Day-old is better than frozen,” was my mother’s ever-practical reply. “And his prices are better than good.”

My mother always took me with her to the fishmonger on Tuesdays, but not before raking a comb through my hair, yanking so hard that for the next hour, I could feel the aftershocks on my scalp. My laces had to be tied, my freshly ironed shirt tucked in. My mother dressed up, too: lipstick, a leather purse, and a sharp red felt cap that she felt gave her a more sophisticated air.

We would both watch as the fish man, Mr. Ljungqvist, parked his truck at the curb in front of the Blomkvists’ market and unfurled his blue-and-white-striped awning. Mr. Ljungqvist was shaped like a bowling ball, with thick white hair curling out from under his black fisherman’s cap. He wore a sweater under his smock and a red apron on top. No matter how cold it was, his pink hands were bare, chafed and scraped from handling so much ice, sharp belly scales, and spiny fins.

I liked to hoist myself on the bottom lip of the service window and see what was waiting on Mr. Ljungqvist’s icy deathbed. It never turned out to be anything too exciting—some cod, some perch, some
sill
, which is what we called herring—but I always hoped he’d procured something more surprising and exotic from the bottom of the sea, like an eel or turbot or squid. But there were no surprises as to what my mother would buy or how my mother might cook it. The big, oafy-looking cod would be ground into fish balls. Perch would be broiled and served with butter and lemon. And the herring? The herring was our hamburger.

Herring is the classic Swedish fish. It was on almost every table at every meal, figured into almost every course but dessert, and showed up at every holiday. It was even woven into the language. You could be deaf as a herring or dumb as a herring. Tram conductors who carried trolleys full of commuters were called herring packers. If you were exhausted, you were a dead herring. Smelly shoes were called herring barrels.

Ljungqvist’s customers bought lots and lots of herring—to poach, pickle, bake, and layer into cheesy, creamy casseroles with leeks and
tomatoes. On the nights my mother would fry the herring, she bypassed the ten-inch-long Atlantic herring in favor of the smaller, silver-skinned
strömming
that came from the Baltic and fit better in her cast-iron pan. As a Swedish woman who came of age in the 1950s, she may have happily served mushy peas from the tin, but she scaled, gutted, and filleted the herring herself. For her, that wasn’t a kitchen skill. Knowing how to clean a fish was as innate as knowing how to open a door.

I helped my mother pick out our fish. What you wanted to avoid at all costs were cloudy eyes and blood spots on their gills, telltale signs that the fish was not fresh. My father, who had grown up in a family of fishermen, did not trust my mother to pick the fish. It was
my
job, he told me secretly, to make sure she made the right choices. When we found the acceptable choice for that night’s supper, Mom nodded to me, I nodded to Mr. Ljungqvist, and he picked the fish out of the ice, added it to the others he had laid into the crook of one arm, and wrapped them in newspaper.

Next, my mom would pick out the anchovies for our Friday night dinner, Jansson’s Temptation, a traditional Swedish casserole of potato, anchovy, onion, and cream. Mr. Ljungqvist dug into a shallow pail of anchovies with his red scoop, and then shook out the extras until he had exactly the right amount. They glimmered, metallic and shiny, against the ice. Put that one back, my mother would say. No, no, I want
that
one.

There was a kind of “who’ll blink first” thing going on between my mother and Mr. Ljungqvist, each respectfully trying to gain the upper hand. To this day, I could not declare a winner in their silent battle of wills, except to say that learning how to pick the freshest fish, for the best value, helped lay the groundwork for my work as a chef. And as my sisters did not accompany us on these fish-buying expeditions, they would never know that, occasionally, despite her virulent anti-sweets policy, our mother could be swayed. Every once in a while, after we’d made our purchases from Mr. Ljungqvist, I would talk her into walking over to the newsstand and buying a little candy. Salted licorice for her. Colored sour balls for me.

A
FTER MY PARENTS ADOPTED
A
NNA, MY MOTHER’S PARENTS, WANTING
to be nearby and to help in any way they could, moved to Göteborg from the southern province of Skåne. They bought a small one-bedroom house just a few minutes away by bike, close enough that we crossed paths several times a day. We called Helga and Edvin Jonsson
mormor
and
morfar
—terms of respect that translate to “mother’s mother” and “mother’s father”—and loved them like the adoring set of bonus parents that they were.

At
Mormor
’s, the smell of food was omnipresent: The yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread or the tang of drying rose hips hit you as soon as you walked in. Something was always going on in her
kitchen, and usually several things at once. My grandmother would start chopping vegetables for dinner while sterilizing jars for canning, while stirring a pot of chicken stock or grinding pork for a month’s worth of sausages. If I had to try to pinpoint my earliest food memory it would not be a single taste, but a smell—my grandmother’s house.

Before moving to Göteborg, my grandmother lived where she had grown up, in the province of Skåne. To say a person comes from Skåne carries a lot of meaning for a Swede. At the southernmost tip of the country, Skåne is to Sweden, in many ways, what Provence is to France. With the mildest climate and the most fertile soil in Sweden, it is the country’s chief agricultural region. Not surprisingly, Skåne has always been known for its rich culinary landscape, a landscape that gave birth to a generation of instinctively inventive cooks. My grandmother was no exception. She spent so much of her time at the stove that when I close my eyes and try to remember her, it’s that image of her back that I see first. She would toss smiles and warm welcomes over her shoulder, never fully taking her eyes off the pots she was tending.

Mormor
had the unique experience of being surrounded by luxury despite living in poverty her entire life. Her work as a maid for upper-class Swedish families had kept food on the table for her family through the lean years surrounding the rationing of two World Wars. From the families she worked for, she learned how to make restaurant-worthy meals. This kind of training, coupled with her own thriftiness, meant that she made almost everything we ate from scratch and wasted almost nothing; her larder was so well stocked that I barely remember her shopping. Maybe she’d send me out to get sugar or she’d go to the fishmonger herself, but otherwise, everything she needed seemed to appear, as if by magic, from her pantry or emerge from the garden that she tended with the same careful devotion that she used to prepare our family’s big Saturday suppers.

Mormor
’s one indulgence was wallpaper. The walls of her house were covered in exuberant flowers, exploding colors, and bold vertical stripes. But other than that, her house was simple and quiet, much
quieter than ours. You could open the door and know that no children lived there: There was just the low murmur of my grandfather listening to the news on the radio and my grandmother clanking away in the kitchen. She did all of her prep work by hand and preferred mortar and pestle to the electric mixers and blenders my mother bought her in the hopes of making her life easier. She was suspicious of newfangled inventions. Having cooked most of her adult life on a wood-burning stove, she never entirely warmed to the electric oven in her modern kitchen.

Mormor
treated her house like it was her own little food factory. She made everything herself: jams, pickles, and breads. She bought large cuts of meat or whole chickens and game animals from the butcher and then broke them down into chops and roasts at home. It’s so funny to me how, today, we celebrate braising as some refined, elegant approach, when it’s the same slow cooking method
Mormor
used. Her menus followed a simple logic:

You have bread today because it’s fresh.

You have toast tomorrow because the bread has gone stale.

You make croutons the next day, and whatever bread is left after that gets ground into crumbs that you’ll use to batter fish.

I don’t think I saw a rib-eye steak until my late teens when I started working in restaurants. At home, we ate mostly ground meat that was rolled into balls and stretched even further by ample additions of breadcrumbs. We ate our own Swedish version of a hamburger: pan beef, a patty topped with caramelized onions. Sometimes we ate beef Lindstrom: a hamburger patty mixed with onions, capers, and pickled beets before being seared in butter. That’s comfort food where I come from, and it’s damn good.

In the United States, the best-known Swedish dish is meatballs, but pickles and jams connect the dots of Swedish cuisine and make an appearance in almost every meal and dish. At breakfast, we’d pour buttermilk over granola and sweeten it with black-currant jam. A favorite summer dessert was ice cream topped with gooseberry preserves, and a late-night TV snack would be toast with cheese and
jams. Seared herring would be served with lingonberry jam, and liver pâté sandwiches were topped with pickled cucumbers.

Swedes traditionally prefer a pickle that is salty, sour, and quite sweet. To achieve that blend of flavors, we use a solution called 1-2-3: one part vinegar, two parts sugar, three parts water. But for the pickle to be truly Swedish, the vinegar has to be
ättika
, a beechwood-based product that has a sinus-clearing, eye-tearing bite to it, twice as acidic as American vinegars.
Mormor
spent an enormous amount of time pickling and preserving, using the 1-2-3 solution to pickle cauliflowers and cucumbers, herrings and beets, which she stuffed into jars and stored in her pantry.

Pantry
is almost too fancy a word for where
Mormor
stored her food. Hers was a closet at the foot of the basement stairs. A pull-chain light hung from the ceiling and the single bulb revealed a space so small that by the time I was ten years old, it was no longer a viable option for me in our games of hide-and-seek. The closet doubled as a root cellar with burlap sacks of potatoes lining the floor along one wall. Above them were shelves of savory foods—pickled onions, cucumbers, beets, and different types of herring:
strömming, sill
, and the store-bought
matjes
herring, prized for its delicate, less fishy flavor. The far wall held the sweet preserves, which were placed in rows that went back three jars deep. Each was covered with a handwritten label:

Mormor
made jams from the berries she grew in her front yard as well as from what she found in the woods near our house, like lingonberries, the quintessential Swedish fruit, which have a texture and tang similar to cranberries. She preserved cloudberries, black currants, raspberries, and gooseberries; and made jam from apples, pears, and plums, all of which came from her own trees. That dark little closet was my grandmother’s version of a jewelry case, and the bright jellies and jams were her gemstones.

———

I
LOVED
S
ATURDAYS
as a kid. Saturdays meant soccer practice for me, ice-skating and riding lessons for my sisters, and almost without exception, Saturdays meant the best meal we would have all week because dinner was almost always at my grandparents’ house. As soon as I got home from soccer, I would jump on my bike and speed over to
Mormor
’s house. It took me exactly seven minutes to cut across the nature preserve that abutted our property, speed down the road on the other side, and make it up the long driveway to my grandparents’ house. I dumped the bike at the foot of their steps, took the stairs two at a time, and walked as fast as I could to
Mormor
’s kitchen. There was
no
running in my grandmother’s house. She’d look at me standing there out of breath and say, “Ah, there you are. Come. I have a job for you.” She would pull out a stool and set me to string rhubarb or shell peas or pluck a chicken. I’m not sure why my sisters never joined us in our Saturday afternoon cooking sessions; and, at the time, I didn’t care. I was only too happy to have
Mormor
to myself.

Her signature dish was roast chicken, which meant chicken soup the next day. In kid words, it was yummy, the perfect food, warm like the kind of hug only a grandmother can give. Looking back, my grandmother’s food was my introduction to rustic cooking. It had more levels of flavor than a twelve-year-old boy could understand. She didn’t know how to build textures the way chefs build texture, but she got it. In her
body
, she knew how to create those levels.

Growing up in Skåne, my grandmother had learned to kill a chicken old-school style. Grab the bird, knife to the neck. Like, “Come here, boom.” You learn to respect food in a different way when you have to kill it yourself, she would say. I never forgot that lesson, even though when I was a kid we didn’t kill the chickens we ate for dinner. But the fresh birds my grandmother purchased still looked like birds—they had feet and feathers and we had to handle them and pluck them ourselves. It was something I got good at, too, the kind of tedious work that needs to be done carefully and quickly,
that would one day prepare me for the lower levels of professional kitchens.