Tag: buttermilk

As written on June 20th, 2017:

I didn’t mean to be gone for so long; from the winter solstice to the summer one. Yes, now a few days shy of midsommar, half a year has gone.

Can we pretend that winter is barely over?

In many ways it is. At least for us in the North. Snow has creeped into our sky way into June, and it’s only been a couple of weeks since the birches’ foliage flourished into the lush mantle that now covers every forest. We celebrated the first summer rain a few days ago; and sometimes, I can’t help but wonder how something so mundane can cause such thrill, if it wasn’t for the fact that we almost skipped spring this year, or that our winters are most silent, with the world around us resonating in a felted echo.

I come to you today with a Swedish summer classic: kavring. A soft, slightly sweet bread, traditionally eaten over Midsommar with sill [pickled herring] or gravlax, and even for Easter and Christmas. Yes, in Sweden, the holiday table stays rather unchanged throughout the annual festivities, with only slight variations, like a stronger focus on meat (köttbullar [meat balls], game, julskinka [Christmas ham]) for Christmas, while Easter and Midsummer are all about herring.

I would love to delve into kavring‘s origin and history, but then I would probably have to wait for a year or two before I’d be able to share this recipe with you. One that I’ve worked on for the past few weeks as we changed the menu at the café.

A good starting point, however, is the etymology, which I find especially helpful when it comes to the Nordic countries, where different languages and cultures have inextricably intertwined over the past centuries.

In E. Hellquist’s 1922 Swedish etymology dictionary (Svensk etymologisk ordbok), the origin of the word kavring is a complex one, dating from the early 1500 with the Russian kovríga that became the Danish kavring, which the Swedes embraced with a minor orthographical variation until recent times: kafring.

“Kavring (in the southern Sweden folk dialect), a sort of twice-baked sourdough rye bread or an oven-dried loaf. Kafring, in early modern Swedish, dated from 1544, possibly originating from Norwegian, while the word kavring was first encountered in the early 16th century in the Danish language from the Russian kovríga, a round bread, literally ring or circle in old Russian.”
ー Svensk etymologisk ordbok, Elof Hellquist (1922)

The etymology tells us more than the origin of the word itself, it tells us the story of a bread that travelled through the Nordic countries. Originally a crisp rye bread (which it still is in Norway), kavring then morphed into the soft, sweet and fragrant loaf in the late 1800, mostly in southern Sweden according to Å. Campbell’s The Swedish bread (Det svenska brödet, 1950), a wonderful read that gives an insight into the cultural contrasts in pre-industrial Sweden through bread traditions in its regions.

While I’m not surprised to see two spellings that eventually became one, I find it interesting to note that the Norwegian-originated spelling kafring was used in Swedish as late as 1915, like in this issue of the Idun newspaper where “Folket stegade till drängstugan för att öppna sina byttor och korgar och förtära sin enkla måltid, surmjölk, kafring och smör.” The people hurried towards the workman’s hut to open their boxes and baskets before consuming their simple meal made of sour milk, kavring and butter.