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Our local grocery store – we have several, actually, but I mean the one I usually go to – has been moving things around recently. Bread is now where there used to be napkins and candles, there’s Tex Mex food where bread used to be, and now, in the latest move, a vaguely Middle Eastern\/Balkan-inspired section has appeared where the Tex Mex stuff was before. Dry beans, four different grades of bulgur (cracked wheat), tahini, stuffed vine leaves, fig jam, roasted aubergine puree, etc.<\/p>\n
The Tex Mex and Asian food here is all large European brands – Santa Maria, Blue Dragon. In this new section, the dominant brand is Midyat, which I’d never heard of. I thought at first that Coop have actually gone to a Middle Eastern supplier, but Google told me that Midyat is a small company based in S\u00f6dert\u00e4lje, a small town just south of Stockholm. So technically Swedish, although I’d guess the sourcing of the food isn’t.<\/p>\n
I might have just walked past the new section without paying much attention to the details, but Ingrid sent me a picture. They sell halva<\/i>!<\/p>\n
Halva<\/i> is one of my childhood nostalgia foods that I sometimes still miss. It’s not a traditional Estonian food at all, but that was one of the few benefits of being in the Soviet Union: exposure to the “brother nations'” food and drink. We had Caucasian \u0161a\u0161l\u00f5kk<\/i>\/shashlik and Russian seljanka<\/i>, Ukrainian bor\u0161<\/i>\/borsht. We had s\u00f5rnik<\/i>\/syrnik and pelmeenid<\/i>\/pelmeni. And halva<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Sesame halva<\/i> is the most common sort on the internet, but my favourite childhood halva<\/i> was peanut-based. Dense, crumbly and chewy. Like a dry, grainy, sweet version of peanut butter. I’ve never found anything quite like it in Sweden. Occasionally I’ve tried other kinds, even one that I bought in a Baltic speciality grocery shop in Stockholm, but always been disappointed. (The one from the Baltic shop tasted so wrong that I ended up throwing out.)<\/p>\n
Mostly to make Ingrid happy, I gave this one a try. To my great surprise, I actually liked it. A lot! It’s almost half sugar but somehow the nuttiness of sesame makes it easy to just take one more bite. I couldn’t eat Nutella with a spoon, and milk chocolate is disgustingly sweet, but not this.<\/p>\n
I’m now entertaining vague thoughts of making my own peanut halva<\/i>. It’s such a traditional food that surely it can’t be difficult – if they’ve made it since medieval times, the process can’t be too finicky about exact temperature and such. Or… I just hold out until the summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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