Swedish Customs and Culture - Food

No one visiting Sweden in August can fail to notice how shop window displays from variations on the theme of crayfish.

Nowhere is the crayfish so ardently worshipped as in Sweden. Eating of crayfish has expanded into a ritual meal surrounded by all manner of accessories, preferably with an authentic full moon thrown in. The decorations consist mostly of colored paper lanterns in the form of smiling moon-faces suspended over the table.

A hundred years ago, the catching of crayfish was forbidden except for a couple of months every autumn. At one time the lakes of central Sweden teemed with this black gold, which was exported to the high-class restaurants of Paris, London and Berlin, but over-fishing was threatening to annihilate them.

In 1907 the Swedish crayfish enthusiasts were struck by a disaster: the “crayfish plague” which was a lethal parasitic mould, which eliminated rare crayfish from most of Sweden’s fishing waters. The Swedes imported crayfish, first from Turkey and then from Spain and today from the US. making Sweden the world’s biggest crayfish importer.

Eating crayfish the Swedish way is not easy, but the experience of a crayfish party can very well modify the myth of Swedish uprightness.