TableYear round

Cellar & Cheese

Cheese that does not travel

Swedish cheese does not travel much, which is why almost nobody outside the country can name one beyond the hard yellow block in the supermarket. The interesting ones are made in small quantities by people who sell most of them within fifty kilometres.

Västerbotten is the famous exception — hard, crystalline, made only at one dairy under conditions nobody has satisfactorily explained, and the load-bearing ingredient in half the country's baking.

Beyond it there is a whole small world: sheep and goat cheeses from Gotland and Skåne, washed rinds from farms that started making them in the last twenty years, and a revival of old recipes that had genuinely died out.

A farm, not a shop

A cellar visit is usually a farm rather than a shop — the maker, the animals, the room where it ages, and a table at the end. Expect an hour of it to be about grass, because everybody making cheese at this level will eventually start talking about grass.

What is poured alongside is more likely to be beer or cider than wine. Sweden makes very good cider in the south and an enormous amount of serious beer everywhere, and both go with this food better than the wine list does.

Year round, and the cheeses differ by season for the obvious reason.

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