Work through the list in order. Hide the notes when you know what to do.
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Eat köttbullar with lingonberry
Small meatballs with a cream gravy, mashed potato, lingonberry jam and a pickled cucumber. The lingonberry is not a dessert but the acidity that carries the dish.
All four components are required; without lingonberry and pickle the flavour flattens. The home version binds the mince with bread soaked in milk.
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Try toast Skagen
Small prawns with dill, mayonnaise and lemon on butter-fried bread, topped with a spoon of roe. Invented by a Swedish restaurateur in the 1950s and now a classic.
The prawns should be small and hand-peeled; large tiger prawns do not work. The bread is fried in butter rather than dried in a toaster.
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Try gravlax
Salmon cured in salt, sugar and dill without heat, served with a mustard and dill hovmästarsås. The name means buried salmon; the fish really was once buried to ferment.
The sauce is sweet and mustardy, and without it the dish is incomplete. It differs from smoked salmon in texture: gravlax is firmer and has no smoke.
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Try pickled herring
Herring in a dozen marinades: mustard, dill, onion, sour cream. Eaten with boiled potatoes, hard-boiled egg, sour cream and crisp knäckebröd.
On a festive table herring comes first, traditionally with a snaps. Do not confuse it with surströmming, which is a different, fermented fish.
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Take the dagens lunch
The weekday set lunch: a hot dish, salad bar, bread and butter and coffee at one price. The best value in the city, and it runs until about two.
The salad bar and coffee are included, and salad refills are free. The menu changes daily and is posted by the door.
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Try raggmunk
Potato pancakes fried in butter with crisp bacon and lingonberry. A plain winter dish from husmanskost, the Swedish home repertoire.
The potato is grated raw, which gives the lacy edges. Its menu neighbours are pyttipanna and ärtsoppa, the pea soup traditionally eaten on Thursdays.
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Get a smörgås
An open sandwich on crisp or soft bread with prawns, egg, smoked fish or cheese. The base of a Swedish breakfast and a light lunch.
Knäckebröd is a dry rye crispbread eaten daily and kept for months. The butter goes on thick, and that is not excess.
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Eat crayfish in August
Crayfish boiled with dill and salt, eaten cold with your hands alongside snaps and songs. The season is August, and it is less a dish than a party.
They are eaten cold rather than hot, and you suck the juice from the head, which is part of the ritual. The paper bibs and hats are genuinely worn.
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Try husmanskost
Swedish home cooking: cabbage rolls, salted herring with potato, pork ribs, fish balls. Plain filling food served in older restaurants at lunch.
Look for the word husmanskost on the menu; it signals a traditional kitchen. These places serve lunch and often close early in the evening.
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Get a korv from a kiosk
A boiled or grilled sausage in a roll with mustard, ketchup, fried onion and mashed potato if you ask. Street food that runs late.
The version with mash instead of a roll is a tunnbrödsrulle, wrapped in thin flatbread. It is night food, and the kiosks by stations stay open longest.
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Eat a kanelbulle Desserts and pastries
A yeast bun with cinnamon and cardamom, topped with pearl sugar. The essential partner to fika, and it has its own day in the calendar: the fourth of October.
Cardamom is essential in the Swedish version and separates it from an American cinnamon roll. Fresh it is soft and pulls apart; a day old it dries.
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Try a semla in season Desserts and pastries
A cardamom bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream with a lid on top. The season runs from January to Easter, and outside it they are scarce.
The classic way is in a bowl of hot milk, which is called hetvägg. The filling should be almond paste rather than marzipan.
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Try prinsesstårta Desserts and pastries
Sponge with layers of custard and whipped cream under a dome of green marzipan topped with a rose. A celebration cake sold by the slice in any bakery.
The green marzipan is the signature and the colour is not varied. There is more cream than sponge in it, and it is less sweet than it looks.
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Try filmjölk Non-alcoholic drinks
A cultured milk drink thicker than kefir and milder in flavour, eaten at breakfast with muesli and jam. Supermarkets devote a whole shelf to it.
It is eaten from a bowl with a spoon rather than drunk; the format is closer to yoghurt. Its relative is långfil, a stringy northern version.
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Have coffee with a påtår Non-alcoholic drinks
Swedes are among the world's heaviest coffee drinkers per head, and the second cup is free almost everywhere. The word påtår means exactly that refill.
Ask påtår? at the counter and you will not be refused. The coffee is usually filter and lightly roasted rather than espresso.
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Try snaps Local alcohol
A spirit flavoured with caraway, dill or St John's wort, drunk in small glasses with herring and crayfish, and always preceded by a song.
Spirits are sold only at Systembolaget, which is closed on Sundays. Snaps is not drunk apart from food; it belongs to the table rather than to an aperitif.
