Food och dylikt

Have you ever tried to eat in a foreign country? In Sweden, it's not so difficult. Even in restaurants where there isn't an English version in the menu, I've generally been able to deduce the general idea of most dishes from a combination of my limited Swedish vocabulary and cognates. When I'm really confused, I just ask the waiter, who invariably speaks flawless English.
Living and cooking on your own, however, leads to a whole new set of considerations. I have made several excursions to Swedish grocery stores, however, and each trip has left me severely bewildered in some way or another.

Take, for instance, soap.* Soap should be easy enough to find. It should be in a section full of bottles of cleany-things, and it comes in a handy little bar. A bar of soap has a fairly unique appearance, so I figured that, even though I didn't know the word for soap, I shouldn't have much difficulty finding it.

*Admittedly not a food, but bear with me

Turns out that we Americans are considered rather archaic in the rest of the world for our fondness of solid soap. Apparently Europe switched over to liquid soap years ago. So I was looking around for a friendly little bar, preferably labelled with a word that looked something like "soap". And it didn't exist. Anywhere. I combed up and down the aisles. I found an aisle that I was pretty sure had shampoo and conditioner in it, but I couldn't find soap anywhere.

Eventually I gave up, went home, and took a shower the next morning with dishwashing fluid.

I'm not kidding.

I eventually found soap (which, in Swedish, is tvål, in case it ever comes up). Alas, however, the confusion continued. For example, on my first trip to the grocery store I bought something called "Yoghurt", which I cleverly knew was the Swedish word for "Yogurt". However, the next day I had to go back for something I had forgotten. This time around, in the yogurt section, I saw something called "Mat Yoghurt", meaning "Food Yogurt".

Had I bought non-food yogurt the day before? In the US, all our yogurt is food yogurt, but I'm not familiar with Swedish culture. Do they use their yogurt for cleaning? For laundry? Could the non-food yogurt I'd bought actually be the ever-elusive soap I'd been looking for?

After talking to real live Swedes, I discovered that, believe it or not, all yogurt in Sweden is edible, and that "Mat Yoghurt" is generally used for cooking. I was glad to hear it, because by then I'd already eaten all my yogurt.

Today, I conquered a whole new frontier by making a recipe from a Swedish cookbook. Although there were a few hitches along the way (namely, the confusion that a vanilla bean poses to someone used to vanilla extract, and the step that I'm quite certain instructed me to "turn the sour cream into cheese"), I managed to follow, more or less, the recipe for a cheesecake ("cheesecake", in Swedish). It looks and smells like a cheesecake, and may even be edible.

I wouldn't be too sure, though. After all, the recipe wasn't for Mat Cheesecake.