In the November issue 2013 Richard Scholz shared his story and some of his historical recipes he has been collecting.

I was born 26 years ago in the Swedish city of Härnösand and was raised in a family where tradition and culture have always played a big part of everyday life. I studied at restaurant school and at the same time began to work at Murberget, an open air museum  in Västernorrland. 

The work included a great deal of traditional Swedish cooking – not meatballs and pancakes, but the food culture that existed long before that. I dug deeper into the subject, started to learn about cooking and the traditions around it and became fascinated by the folklore around food culture. 

I’ve been collecting historical recipes for ten years now. Many of them are ‘secret’ and I’m not even allowed to write them down, so I have to remember them and test them until I know them by heart. Although I live most of the year in Gothenburg, where I work as a freelance designer and milliner, for the past three years I’ve worked summer seasons at Norra Berget museum in Sundsvall. 

There, I get to practice my cooking skills out in a pasture, using lots of milk, cream and butter to demonstrate how important dairy products are in traditional Swedish food culture.

Richard Scholz