Karolina Petersson was nesting. Pregnant with her first child, she stood in the kitchen of her home on the North Fork of Long Island and stirred a pan of cabbage and butter. Her husband, Vincent Catalano, was upstairs painting the baby’s room. Petersson had a bowl of ground meat on the counter beside her, some potatoes, a small glass of cream. It was her grandmother’s recipe she was making, she said, a kind of cabbage meatloaf that she remembered from childhood outside Gothenburg, in Sweden. Kalpudding, it’s called. You serve it with lingonberries. I wanted to eat it right away.

These are hard days for cooking, as winter too slowly gives way to vernal rain and sunshine. Farmers’ markets are bare in many precincts, and for some a kind of fatigue has set in, an exhaustion with soups and stews, with root vegetables and pot roasts, with salads built of factory greens and flavorless tomatoes. Soon there will be strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb, snow peas and watercress, the paschal lamb, the Easter ham. But soon is not now. Early March can leave cooks adrift in home and restaurant kitchens alike, unsure of themselves, desirous of inspiration.

And here was mine. I wasn’t staying for dinner. I had only dropped by for a brief, neighborly check-in before the birth, a what’s-up-Vin and see you soon. But the scent of the cabbage was ambrosial: sweet-bitter, approximating caramel on the razor’s edge of burned. I could imagine the vegetables stirred into and enrobing the meat, and I knew if I couldn’t find lingonberries, I could swap them out for cranberries and be happy with the result. I cooked a kalpudding the next day. I cooked a lot of them after that: ground beef and pork mixed with bread crumbs and some of the caramelized cabbage, formed under a cloak of more cabbage and baked until the top went dark and almost dry at the edges, delicious crunch above the succulent meat. I served them with lingonberry preserves (thanks, Internet!), cut with vinegar and Worcestershire sauce, made velvet with butter, alongside boiled potatoes.

One day in the middle of all this cooking, I called Magnus Nilsson, the chef at Faviken, a restaurant on a large estate in northwestern Sweden that regularly appears on lists of the world’s best. Nilsson is fanatical in his devotion to Nordic cuisine. In 2015, he published “The Nordic Cookbook,” an invaluable guide to the region’s cooking, from the braised guillemot of the Faroe Islands to the taco quiche of suburban Stockholm. He has a recipe for kalpudding in the book. It was as much casserole as meatloaf.

Kalpudding, he told me — “and I’m just theorizing here” — is just an easier-to-make version of the stuffed cabbage the Swedes call kaldolme, a dish Nilsson traces back to the 18th century, a Nordic version of the Turkish dolmas that Swedish soldiers tasted in the Ottoman Empire when they sought refuge there after an unsuccessful military campaign against the Russians. “It’s an infidel’s version, with pork,” he said. “But hard to make, with all that stuffing and rolling. So kalpudding is what you’d make at home.”

Nilsson said he was once particular about the preparation of the dish. When he set out to compile the cookbook, he said, “it was a big documentary project. I was dead set on accuracy. There was no room for adaptation.” But making the recipes work for the regular home cook put the lie to that goal, he said, and so did the hundreds of regional differences in particular dishes prepared in different parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. (What, you don’t have any goose blood around to make the svartsoppa?) Nilsson used as an example the binders that are used in kalpudding, to help the meat hold together. “Historically, there are breadcrumbs in kalpuddings made in Stockholm,” he said. “That’s because there were bakeries there. You don’t see that to the north, where there were no bakeries,” and crushed barley is used instead. Some bind their kalpudding with rice, or shredded potatoes.

That’s good, I said, because Nilsson calls for the use of “golden syrup” to help caramelize his cabbage, and the rest of the world doesn’t easily have access to the Swedish version of that sugar-beet syrup, amber and salty-sweet, very different from our own (the Internet isn’t perfect). Nilsson laughed. “And we don’t use molasses,” he said.


But you can. The result will be no less Nordic, Nilsson said. “Cabbage smells in a very special way when it almost burns,” he told me. “It gets savory, almost like a beef stock. It tastes almost brown and umami yummy.” How you get it to that point, he added, is “what’s interesting, what happens when you cook a dish elsewhere, with what you have available to you. It always, always, makes sense.”