The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson

Author:Margareta Magnusson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Cookbooks and Family Recipes

When my kitchen was larger than it is today, I had a bookshelf reserved for cookbooks. Nowadays I mostly use the Internet when I search for a recipe. I type the name of the dish I want to cook into Google and suddenly I get several possibilities, each with an image more alluring than the one before. Amazing!

These days I now have only two real cookbooks left. By “real,” I mean books you can hold, browse, and ponder as you search for something to make. One of the books I more or less made myself over the years; it is full of recipes that I was given by friends and relatives or had cut out of newspapers. Most of these recipes I have been slowly throwing away, the time-consuming ones and ones for cakes and cookies. I no longer enjoy standing in the kitchen for hours and I am not much of a cookie monster and don’t really like them—though the children certainly loved them.

Some real gems remain, though, such as my mother’s meat loaf, my mother-in-law’s best gaffelkakor (a type of shortbread cookie topped with the imprint of a fork), my old neighbor Andréa’s rosehip marmalade, and a few more favorites that may be of interest to someone else, either because they are so good, or because they are recipes that are not easy to find, or because they have resonant memories to them that my loved ones may want to conjure up in their own kitchens.

Three of the recipes I have saved are ones I found in my father’s kitchen drawer many years ago. The recipes were handwritten neatly by the cook who lived with us when I was a small child. She was very kind, and I remember that I was allowed to sit in the kitchen and watch as she baked. She used to give me treats of raisins, perhaps to keep me quiet, even if only for a moment. Her three recipes are for pickles, deep-fried herring, and french steaks. Every other recipe she cooked was stored safely in her head.

The second cookbook I have saved comes from Singapore, where we lived for six years and where I and many friends gathered recipes for a cookbook that we created and sold for charity. My tattered copy is full of delightful recipes donated by women—and one man—from all over the world. There is ceviche from South America, lamb curry from Malaysia, cake from the Swedish province of Värmland, and directions for how to make a perfect Singapore Sling. (Personally, I think that drink tastes like someone cleaned out the pantry to find the ingredients—but I guess it fits in well with the wide-ranging tastes in the book!)

And there are cookies from Mexico, rye bread from the former Czechoslovakia, and much more. Many of the recipe donors often hosted guests and were obviously very proud to offer something that represented their part of the world. Thus, the amazing wealth of recipes. Browsing the book

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