Fika
Ask a Swede to translate fika and they will tell you it is a coffee break, and then they will immediately tell you that it is not a coffee break. The distinction matters to them. A coffee break is a pause in work to consume caffeine. Fika is a small social ritual, held once or twice a day, in which people stop what they are doing, sit down together with coffee and something sweet, and talk, and it is protected in Swedish workplaces the way lunch is protected elsewhere. Swedes drink more coffee per person than almost any nation on earth, and fika is why. This is where the word came from, what goes on the table, and how to hold one a long way from Stockholm.
The word
Fika is nineteenth-century Swedish slang, most likely a syllable-swap of kaffi, an old form of the word for coffee, in a playful back-slang that turned it into a verb and a noun at once. You can fika, have a fika, invite someone to fika, or ask whether there will be fika at a meeting, to which the answer is expected to be yes. It appears in the language at about the time coffee, banned repeatedly in eighteenth-century Sweden by kings who feared its effects, finally became legal and universal, and the Swedes made up for lost time.
The rules, such as they are
Fika happens mid-morning, around ten, and mid-afternoon, around three, and a workplace that skips it is thought to be doing something wrong. It is taken sitting down, not at a desk. It involves other people; a solitary coffee is a coffee. It involves something to eat, ideally baked, ideally homemade, but a cookie from a tin is fine and a bar of chocolate is acceptable. It lasts fifteen to thirty minutes. Hierarchy is suspended; the boss and the intern take the same bun. Swedish companies defend it as a productivity tool, and Swedish studies have made the case that the daily pause improves both morale and the flow of information in an office, which is a very Swedish way of justifying a cinnamon bun.
What is on the table
The bun. The kanelbulle, the cinnamon bun, is the national fika pastry and has its own day, October 4. Its more refined sibling, the kardemummabulle, the cardamom bun, has overtaken it in the cities: a soft, buttery, knotted dough heavy with freshly ground cardamom and topped with pearl sugar. Both are made with a yeasted dough enriched with butter and cardamom, and the difference between a good one and a supermarket one is the freshness of the spice, a point our spice harvest piece makes at length.
The seven cookies. Swedish hospitality once held that a proper hostess served seven kinds of small cookie, sju sorters kakor, no more and no fewer; fewer was mean and more was showing off. The tradition survives at grandmothers' tables and in the classic cookbook of the same name, and the cookies are small, thin and buttery: chocolate-oat balls, jam thumbprints, almond tuiles, the crisp pepparkakor gingersnaps of December, the dream cookies that shatter. A tin of good butter biscuits from our cracker and biscuit shelf stands in honorably for a Denver fika.
The cake. On a birthday or a Friday, a prinsesstårta, the green marzipan-domed princess cake, or a kladdkaka, the dense sticky chocolate cake that is Sweden's brownie. The kladdkaka is the one to make at home; it is a one-bowl cake that takes twenty minutes and is better slightly underbaked.
The open sandwich. Fika is not always sweet. A smörgås, an open-faced sandwich on rye or crispbread with cheese, cucumber and a little butter, or with shrimp and egg, is a savory fika and the preferred one after three in the afternoon in many offices. Our snack dinner guide would recognize it.
The coffee. Black, strong, filter-brewed and refilled. Swedes drink light-roasted coffee in quantity and a second cup, påtår, is customary and often free in cafés. Tea is tolerated. Espresso is a different occasion.
Saturday fika and the candy
On Saturdays, fika expands, and for children it merges with lördagsgodis, the once-a-week candy tradition our Swedish candy guide describes. A bowl of sour fish, a few licorice pieces and a bar of chocolate appear beside the buns, and a Saturday fika at a Swedish grandmother's table is about as good as childhood gets. For a Denver version, a bag of BonBon fish (shop BonBon fish) and a Lakrids tin (shop Lakrids) beside the coffee is the whole idea.
Hosting a fika
Three in the afternoon, or ten in the morning on a weekend. A pot of good filter coffee and a second pot ready. One baked thing, homemade if possible: cardamom buns if you are ambitious, a kladdkaka if you are not, a plate of good store-bought biscuits if you are honest. A bar of dark chocolate broken into pieces on the table. Real cups, a cloth on the table, a candle lit even in daylight, which is the Swedish signal that this is an occasion. Then sit down, and do not check your phone. Our guide to dessert without baking has the plate for when the bun defeats you.
Why it travels
Fika has spread beyond Sweden because it names something everyone recognizes and few cultures protect: a short, shared pause with a small pleasure in it, built into the day rather than stolen from it. It costs a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies and it makes an afternoon better. The biscuits, chocolate and Saturday candy are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. The coffee, the cardamom and the twenty minutes are yours to supply, and the twenty minutes are the hard part.
