Swedish-Italian Cookbook Throwback - “Ät och njut med Slow Food” by Carlo Barsotti

I spent most of my adult life in Sweden, but I did grow up in Italy.

While that leaves me quite confused when it comes to my identity and my place in the world, having the chance to experience the approach to Italian food in Sweden first-hand played a major part in the development of my interest in world food cultures and in my decision to delve deeper in the food world.

(Hansson och Lundvall Förlag, 2003)

Cookbooks often offer a fun snapshot into a specific point in a country’s culinary history - or, in the case of the one I’ll be looking at now, of two culinary countries colliding and blending into each other, with a side of cooking cream.

Carlo Barsotti’s Ät och njut med Slow Food isn’t in print anymore, but it’s still quite easy to find on shelves at second-hand stores dotted around Stockholm, and I find it a great example of how a cookbook can go beyond recipes or concepts to allow readers to familiarise themselves with approaches to food that might be unfamiliar to them.

Having moved to Sweden in the late 60s, Carlo Barsotti first gained popularity in the country as a theatre actor, playwright and director. Barsotti’s long-term collaborator, Dario Fo, eventually introduced him to Carlo Petrini, with whom Barsotti quickly found a common ground in the passion they shared for quality and the good things in life. He was involved in the first talks before the foundation of Slow Food and went on to establish the Swedish branch of Slow Food right from the very beginning of the movement’s international expansion.

His first cookbook was published in 2003.

“Ät och njut med Slow Food” directly translates to “Eat and Relish with Slow Food”, an interesting testament to how times were changing, both when it came to Slow Food as a movement gaining popularity and to the Swedish society’s approach to Italy and its food culture.

A quick search on the Swedish Royal Library catalogue shows how, up until the early 2000s, Italian cookbooks in Sweden had not veered far from the travel literature genre. They often combined recipes with very specific geographical descriptions and usually focused on the travel experience one could get or the author’s authority in the food landscape.

Somewhat surprisingly given the large influx of Italian immigrants to Stockholm during the 50s, Italian food was for the most part widely linked to pasta for the good part of the 20th century, starting to evolve relatively late compared to other European countries.

Focusing on pasta would probably be a good starting point to compile a very quick introduction to the status of Italian food in Sweden. The most widely adopted Italian food in the country was pasta, albeit paired with sauces that would not have been widely accepted in Italy.

The dairy-heavy Nordic diet found a good match with French preparation methods (possibly due to the Swedish Royal Family’s French heritage), pairing pasta with heavy, cream-based sauces. The growing popularity of crème fraîche in the country quickly introduced a new player to the Swedish-Italian canon. It made its way into pasta staples in Sweden, thinning down sauces that often relied on the addition of shrimp and vegetables, as well as more Italianly unorthodox ingredients such as salmon, chicken and sliced beef steak.

Classic cream-based stews are still popular when paired with pasta, slightly reworked as sauces

Variations on the term “makaroner” were used to describe pasta from as early as the 1600s showing pasta had been widely adopted in the country already in the early 20th century. The most widely available shape by the mid-20th century was snabbmakaroner, quick maccheroni, appealing to the public with their cooking time of less than 3 minutes. Spaghetti were also often served as school meals as early as in the 50s, most typically paired with köttfärssås. Not far from a ragù, the recipe is a spin on a quick tomato sauce with ground meat, often enriched with cream, mushrooms, sometimes using wheat flour as a thickener. 

The 1980s saw a push towards a broader landscape in the pasta department. Knorr launched pre-packaged lasagne in supermarkets, marketing them as a modern, quick and easy option, targeting young consumers. Around the same time, vongole start making their way onto Swedish-Italian restaurant tables, together with squid ink pasta, still seen as a novelty. It will take until the 90s for new pasta shapes to start gaining popularity, leading to a surge in Italian restaurants and pizzerias in major cities.

Barsotti builds on the rising awareness around Italian food and his book represents one of the first of its kind in Sweden and possibly in the Nordics (more research would be needed). The focus on Slow Food, still a relatively new concept in Sweden at the time, is clear from the introductory chapter, in which the movement is briefly described. On top of a basic overview of the movement, Barsotti puts a philosophical spin on what “Slow” could mean, effectively pushing the boundaries of how Italian food had been marketed and perceived up until that time. The Slow Food concept is presented not necessarily as linked to the Italianness of the recipes, but rather to a different way to enjoy communal rituals around the table, an experience that Barsotti considers seminal for a person’s development from the very early stages of one’s life.

The book cover already shifts the focus from “the experience in Italy” most cookbooks had portrayed up until that point to food in a more familiar setting as a cultural experience.  Barsotti stresses the importance of the classic måltid, the meal, and the ritual surrounding a family get-together, as the core of the Slow Food experience, rather than recipes that take a long time to make. Family experience and the memories built through communality around the dining room table are described as the driving force behind his writing, and as the core of a big part of the Italian food culture.

The book presents the family meal as a curated set of recipes that adapt throughout the year to serve a clear purpose. This is reflected in the structure of the book, presenting three core chapters focusing on the three main meal types in Italian culture: everyday meals, typical weekend roasts and menus often associated with festivities. Most interestingly, the weekend meals are described as those that would be the least familiar to the average Swedish reader. The tradition of a weekend communal meal is said to have been a Swedish household, but it seems it vanished throughout the years. While Barsotti recognizes the fact that a modern lifestyle is hardly compatible with large weekly gatherings, he tries to cater to the Swedish reader by suggesting a decrease in the quantity of food and a focus on quality and exciting flavours to “inspire table-side chatting and satisfaction” for the whole family.

While not backed by a major publishing house and not widely recognized as a core example of Italian food writing in Sweden, 20 years after the first edition Barsotti’s Ät och njut med Slow Food still offers a fascinating snapshot of times changing. To a certain degree, the Slow Food movement played into how Swedish-Italian food was perceived in Sweden, evolving as the views of Italian food shifted, from quick and easy staples to recognised expression of a food culture that would quickly take over some of the most prestigious buildings in central Stockholm and dominate the restaurant scene.