Well, this is a first for a food piece. I am sitting in the office of a minister of His Majesty King Carl XVI of Sweden's government, and the minister is enthusing at length and with great passion about lingonberries.
'They are my "must have",' the minister says, eyes blazing. 'I want them with everything. You can use them with fish, with meat...'
Eskil Erlandsson, the Minister for Rural Affairs (formerly the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries), has summoned me to explain his £27m Sweden: The New Culinary Nation project. Its aim is to raise his country's profile as a gourmet destination, and, I'm guessing, banish forever the spectre of The Muppets' Swedish chef.
So, Herr Minister, why should food lovers come here instead of Copenhagen? 'Oh, we are way better than Denmark!' roars Erlandsson. 'We have the best restaurants in Europe. We are unique. Things grow in a different way here with our long summers, and we have wonderful game. We are also better than the Danes at keeping traditions.' And don't forget, he adds, Sweden has been just as much a part of the New Nordic food revolution of the last decade. Stockholm chef Mathias Dahlgren (mathiasdahlgren.com) was there right at the beginning, helping draft the New Nordic Manifesto of 2004 together with Noma's head chef René Redzepi and others. Today Dahlgren runs Stockholm's two best restaurants, both based in the majestic Grand Hotel overlooking the central harbour. But while Noma famously takes its focus on Nordic ingredients to a logical, almost masochistic extreme — banning olive oil, tomatoes, foie gras and so on — Dahlgren is less rigid.
'I'd been using local ingredients for ten years before we drew up the manifesto,' he tells me as we sit in his kitchen before the evening service. 'But we are not a dogmatic kitchen. We are open to the world.'
In truth, though foie gras and yuzu might make guest appearances on his menus, Dahlgren has done more than any chef to explore the potential of the Swedish larder, finding enticing new ways to serve the finest local game (he is using a new system which stress-tests wild meat, he tells me, the idea being that the more stressed, the lower the quality), wild mushrooms, seafood and berries in his two restaurants: Matsalen (literally 'The Dining Room'), the Grand's haute cuisine dining room with two Michelin stars; and, next door, still in the old part of the hotel, the more casual yet still highly refined Matbaren ('The Food Bar'), which also has a star.
'We always follow nature so that if someone brings in five kilos of forest mushrooms, they will go on the menu,' he says. 'And when we have used them all, the dish comes off. When our suppliers tell us an ingredient is at its best, that's when we use it.'
He talks me through a dessert he serves in Matsalen, which epitomises his analytical focus on Swedish ingredients. It is based on sloe berries, whose only cruel trick as far as I understood it was to lull you into thinking they were blueberries, or to spoil good gin.
'Most of the tannin is in the skin, so we remove that and make a granité from it, and make a sorbet from the flesh of the fruit. Then we roast the stones and use them to infuse a cream. It's all about looking at ingredients with the curiosity of a child, trying to be as open-minded as possible to what you can do with them.'
