Swedish Tuesday tradition
When it comes to eating lunch in Sweden, we don’t only have the pea soup and pancakes Thursday ritual. We have something for Tuesdays as well.
If you walk past a lunch restaurant on a Tuesday, chances are you’ll see it on the menu. It’s been a thing for as long as I can remember: raggmunk med stekt fläsk och lingon (potato pancakes with fried pork and lingonberries).
Nowadays there’s even a Raggmunkens dag (the day of the potato pancakes) on the third Tuesday in November each year. It was introduced in 2017 through an initiative by Raggmunksakademien (the raggmunk academy).
It doesn’t stop there. On Raggmunkens dag, people dress up in clothes made from leftover potato peels. They gather around chanting and singing in devotion to Potatispappan (the mighty Swedish potato papa). Ok, this part wasn’t true, but it all sounded so weird that it might as well have been.
Anyway, once again I had to look up how this odd tradition came to be. It turns out there’s no single starting point, just practical choices repeated over time. It was simply a filling and affordable dish that found its place on Tuesdays, and over time the habit became tradition.
And since I don’t want to break a good tradition, I did my part. This is what lunch looked like today:
