3 days ago
INSIDE SWEDEN: Northvolt and how NOT to prepare for a crayfish party
The Local's Nordic Editor Richard Orange rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter... and makes a confession.
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It's time for crayfish parties or kräftskivor, which I'd argue are more of a rite of passage in Sweden even midsommar. At the very least, managing to devour a pile of succulent salty crayfish and knock back snaps while keeping your dignity is a challenge, as our reporter Lee Roden found back in the day.
As your Swedish hosts will inform you, you start by pulling off the heads and tails, then peel the shell off the back, discarding the bits in a bowl. At this point, if you like, you can suck out the salty juices through the trailing legs. In my experience a Swedish person, mostly likely a man, will demonstrate this manoeuvre to you, while telling you it's their favourite part. Some will also suck out the contents of the crayfish's head.
You then pull off the legs, and eat the meat, normally laying flesh from several crayfish on a slice of buttered bread, and eating them like an open sandwich.
Eating the crayfish is far from the only challenge, however, as at a kräftskiva it is also customary for guests to bring their own crayfish, and perhaps another dish in a kind of potluck dinner or knytkalas, which leads me to my confession (which you'll find at the end of the newsletter).
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Crayfish aren't the only reason for celebration.
On Thursday, the bankrupt Swedish battery company Northvolt finally found a rescuer, something I admit I'd given up on. US battery start-up Lyten announced that it had agreed to buy almost all the company's remaining assets, restart its factory in Skellefteå and research laboratory in Västerås, and rehire workers who have been laid off.
There's a lot that still needs to happen, but I went through the main things that came out in the press conference in this explainer. Next week, I'm hoping to interview unions and others about how many of the company's international employees are still in the country and how many could get rehired.
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Sticking to the subject of employment, we got a fantastic response to our survey on how readers got their first job. It seems like when hiring internationally, Swedish companies still primarily use job advertisements or recruiters, but once inside Sweden, networking appears more important. Read some of the interesting insights readers provided here.
There was bad news this week on the economy, with employment still rising, inflation increasing, and growth forecasts downgraded. I made a chart showing where in Sweden unemployment has risen the most. I also wrote an article on whether foreigners living in southern Sweden, which has the highest unemployment rate in Sweden, should look for jobs in Copenhagen, where there's a major shortage of workers.
When it comes to social life and leisure, Paul O'Mahony wrote a great article about how joining his local chess club had helped him put down deeper roots in Sweden. He also provided some brilliant phrases in Swedish to help you get back in the groove on returning to work after the summer.
Finally, he today picked out the highlights of the three free music and culture festivals happening in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö in the coming weeks, which has inspired me to go to Malmö's crayfish event.
When it comes to migration, Eric Peterson, the computer programmer turned citizenship campaigner, published an op-ed with us on why plans to tighten citizenship rules are incompatible with Sweden's need to attract high-skilled labour. The Migration Agency also provided us with some figures showing that it has so far carried out 3,500 of the 'in-person appearances' now required as the final stage in a citizenship application.
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Finally, it's time for my confession, which will hopefully prevent other foreigners committing similar social crimes.
Ahead of the first crayfish party I was invited to, I bought my frozen pack of crayfish too late, I think on the actual morning of the party or perhaps the evening before. So to speed up the defrosting I left the box out in my kitchen rather than in the fridge. I don't know if it was an unusually hot autumn that year, but by the time I arrived at the summer house out in the Skåne countryside, I was starting to worry about whether they were safe.
To solve the problem, I buried my box right at the back of the fridge under some salad, hoping no one would spot them, and sat down.
To my horror, five minutes later one of the women at the party came in to the room carrying two large trays artfully laid out with crayfish, combining all the crayfish everyone had contributed - including my own.
I wanted to confess there and then but felt I couldn't as there was no way of knowing which crayfish were mine, so it would have meant none for anyone.
The dinner started off fine, but after a while, one of the women started to complain. One of the crayfish she had eaten, she said, had tasted a little funny. There followed a debate during which I kept resolutely shtum. Most people carried on eating and the crayfish party continued as before, but the woman who had complained ended up leaving early. I'm not sure if my crayfish were to blame.
In the end, everything worked out more or less OK. No one got food poisoning. But it does mean that nowadays I am quite obsessive about timing when defrosting crayfish.
Should I have confessed and brought the event to an early and disappointing finish? Tell us in the comments below.
