Food - Bee Wilson on the Swedish obsession with mixing salt and sugar
Next time you eat a grapefruit, if you want to make it taste sweeter, try sprinkling it with the merest implication not of sugar, but salt. Odd, but true. Instead of masking the taste, as sugar can, the salt actually brings it out. This also works with pineapple and sour oranges, operating on the same principle that makes a pinch of salt mysteriously enhance the sweetness and flavour of a cake.
Salt-and-sweet is a less heralded combination than sweet-and-sour, but a more far-reaching one. You might expect sugar and salt to cancel each other out in combination, like a positive meeting a negative, but in fact they intensify each other in ways that can become addictive. The 17th-century French chemist Bernard Palissy believed that sugar and salt were analogous substances. In his brashly titled book How to Become Rich and the True Way in which Every Man in France Could Grow and Multiply their Treasury and Possessions, Palissy stated that "sugar is a salt". Wrong, but it is not hard to imagine why he should have made the mistake. Salt brings out the sweetness of sweet things and sugar brings out the saltiness of salt.
In Sweden, the national palate is especially attuned to a whole spectrum of salt-sweet tastes, as Mark Kurlansky describes in his new book, Salt: a world history (Jonathan Cape, £17.99): "There is even a Swedish word for it, sockersaltad, sugar salting, which is also the first ingredient listed on many labels." Gravlax, that sugar-salty, dill-flavoured pickled salmon, is perhaps the sockersaltad dish that has travelled most successfully. Other sockersaltad specialities are probably best left to the Swedes, such as "salt-lakrits, salted licorice candy, which sometimes comes in the shape of herring, sometimes in laces, or in a gumdrop shape, called a salt bomber, with salt sprinkled on top". Another favourite, weirdly, is salty ice cream, a vanilla ice cream stick coated in salt-lakrits. Swedes are said to yearn for these salty ice creams when they are abroad, much as we hanker after Marmite.
Pickled herring is another obvious Swedish sockersaltad food, made by marinating salt herrings with sugar, vinegar and onions. There are many variants on the saltfish-and-sugar theme: mackerel boiled with sugar, bay leaf and salt; piquant herring balls served with a syrupy, molasses-rich dark currant sauce; anchovies marinated in oil, vinegar, salt and sugar. Good Swedish cooks have great faith in the power of the salty-sweet, not only to taste good, but to preserve good health and a strong stomach. Anna Olsson, writing in Good Food from Sweden (1955), claimed of her sugar-laced pickled cucumber recipe: "Try cucumbers after they have been pickled in this way and you never need to worry about indigestion! The sugar seems to remove the indigestibility from the cucumbers . . ."
For some of us, however, the question with sockersaltad is not one of digestibility, but one of nausea. A little gravlax with bread is utterly delicious by itself, but an entire smorgasbord can induce feelings of seasickness and dill fever. Olsson gives one recipe for "herring salad" comprising salt herrings, sweet apples, salt gherkins, sweet sugar, salt cooked meat (any kind) and sweet beetroot. The toing and froing of sweet and salt is enough to make you see why Strindberg's heroines might have cause to be so churned up. Ultimately, to non-Swedish tastes, sockersaltad food seems fine as a novelty, but not as a way of life.
Yet, without thinking about them in these terms, we eat and relish many sockersaltad foods. Lamb and redcurrant jelly. Pancakes with maple syrup and bacon. Red cabbage cooked with vinegar, salt and sugar. Roast pork with apple. Gammon with a brown sugar glaze. The sweet dark meats of Chinatown, hung up in burnished rows in windows. There's something about the caramel edges of roast meat that brings to mind sugar even before you add it. Perhaps sockersaltad is not such a peculiar taste after all. Incidentally, someone once advised me that, when at the cinema, you should always ask for a layered mixture of salty and sweet popcorn, to the annoyance of the people who run the concession stands. Salty popcorn by itself seems to hurt your mouth, which doesn't happen when alternated with sweet. The trouble is, though, that you end up eating far too much.
The most popular "restaurant" food in the world can be seen as an orgy of sockersaltad. Consider the composition of a McDonald's "meal". Sweet hamburger bun, salty hamburger. Salty fries, sweet Coke. Salty-sweet ketchup, salty-sweet processed cheese, salty-sweet dill pickle. It sometimes strikes me how odd it is that a taste as particular as that of food from McDonald's should have conquered the world. Some of those who hate it describe it as bland. But it is the opposite of bland. A Quarter Pounder with cheese is sockersaltad reduced to its crudest, sickliest level.
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