The cooking is so different from either English or French cooking, so bad, I must really say, that it requires a great deal of fortitude and a certain amount of health to endure it. The bread is nearly all flavored with aniseed, that is, all the softer kind of bread. There is a rye bread, however, of which they eat a great deal, which is thin, full of holes, and hard as sailers’ biscuit. Perhaps it is; at any rate, good teeth are required to bite it. I noticed a great many soups — for without soup no Swede would imagine he had dined, and in families who live moderately very little in the way of substantial food comes afterward. There were sweet fruit soups, curds-and-whey soup sweetened, many white soups, with vegetables prettily cut up, and some gravy soups that seemed as if they ought to be nice, but they were spoilt for an English palate by the introduction of some uncongenial flavor; dumplings, for example, which we think good in broth, they perfume with peach-water or some kind of scent, and put into gravy soup. The habits at table, even of people of good birth and education, strike an English person oddly. The great rapidity of eating, the perpetual approach of the knife to the mouth, the fork held up in the air, and the elbows thrust out, are scarcely reconcilable to our ideas of civilization. I must in justice say, however, that I noticed many persons very particular in this respect. At supper nobody attempts to sit down, but each person takes a fork and a piece of bread, and plunges his fork into a half a dozen dishes, taking a little piece from each, and puttitng it on the same piece of bread; meat, fish, sweets, and cheese seemed alike acceptable. I was told by one of my English acquaintances that a Swede had said to him, “that the correct behavior of English people at table fidgeted him to death.” — Temple Bar.
The Cicil Whig, Elkton, MD, April 12, 1873
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