National dish

What is the national dish of Sweden?

Sweden has no official national dish, but köttbullar (Swedish meatballs) is the one most often cited: small balls of ground beef and pork bound with soaked breadcrumbs, browned in butter and served with cream sauce, potatoes and lingonberry jam. Other dishes put forward in Swedish debates include ostkaka, pickled herring with potatoes and surströmming.

Updated 2026-10-124 min read

Does Sweden have an official national dish?

No. Sweden has regional dishes for each of its provinces, but no national dish set by law or decree. Köttbullar is the dish that comes up first whenever Swedes argue about it, even though Swedish sources point out that meatballs are eaten in many countries and are not unique to Sweden.

The debate is a real one. In 2004 Margareta Andersson, a Centre Party member of parliament, filed a motion in the Riksdag proposing ostkaka, a Swedish cheesecake, as the national dish. On 8 March 2017 the radio show Morgonpasset on Sveriges Radio P3 informally crowned pickled herring with potatoes. Smörgåstårta, surströmming and even kebab pizza have also had their supporters.

Denmark took a different route and voted for stegt flæsk, fried pork belly with parsley sauce, in 2014. Norway's choice, fårikål, is a lamb and cabbage stew.

What is in Swedish meatballs?

The mix is usually ground beef and pork, with breadcrumbs soaked in milk or cream, an egg and onion, seasoned with salt and white pepper, sometimes allspice. In southern Sweden the mix often leans on pork; further north, more beef is used. Traditional köttbullar are small, about 2 to 4 cm across.

Recipes vary from home to home. Tore Wretman, the chef who championed traditional Swedish home cooking, made his with pork, veal and beef, cream, breadcrumbs, egg and onion. Köttbullar are also one of the main dishes of the Christmas julbord, served there without sauce.

The plate around them matters as much as the meatballs. The usual Swedish way to serve them is:

Potatoes, boiled or mashed.
Gräddsås, a cream sauce made in the pan the meatballs were fried in.
Lingonberry jam, tart enough to cut the cream.
Pressgurka, a pressed cucumber salad.

How köttbullar are made

The breadcrumbs go first: 25 g stirred into 100 ml cream and left 10 minutes to swell. That paste is what keeps the meatballs soft. A finely chopped onion is softened in butter without colouring, cooled, then mixed with 500 g of ground beef and pork, the crumbs, an egg, salt and white pepper until smooth.

With wet hands the mix is rolled into about 30 balls of 3 cm, then browned in batches in butter for 6 to 8 minutes, shaking the pan. The sauce is built in the same pan: butter and flour, then beef stock and cream, simmered 5 minutes until it coats a spoon. The meatballs go back in for a few minutes before serving. The full method is in our köttbullar recipe.

Where Swedish meatballs come from

The word köttbulle first appears in print in 1755, in Cajsa Warg's cookbook. Before that, from the mid-1600s, such balls of meat were more often called frikadeller. Meatballs only became everyday food in Sweden in the mid-1800s, when meat grinders and wood-burning stoves spread through Swedish homes.

The early versions were plainer. Cajsa Warg's recipe used chopped veal (mutton or beef also worked), grated bread and egg, seasoned with pepper, salt and nutmeg. Most Swedish cookbooks left onion out of meatballs until the early 1900s.

In 2018 Sweden's official Twitter account claimed the recipe was brought back from the Ottoman Empire by King Charles XII in 1714. The story went around the world, but food historian Richard Tellström said there was no evidence for it, and the account retracted the claim.

IKEA did more than anyone to spread the dish abroad: it added Swedish meatballs to its cafeterias in 1985 and now serves over a billion a year.

Other dishes to know from Sweden

Gravlax is the other Swedish dish known worldwide. Its name means buried salmon: in the Middle Ages fishermen salted salmon and buried it in the sand above the high-tide line. Today a fillet is cured for 48 hours under weight in sugar, salt and dill, with at least as much sugar as salt, then sliced thin and served with hovmästarsås, a mustard and dill sauce.

The word comes from gräva, to dig, and lax, salmon. Perhaps the oldest written trace is from 1348, in the Norwegian charter collection Diplomatarium Norvegicum, as the nickname of a man named Óláfr.

Toast skagen is a modern classic, created by Stockholm restaurateur Tore Wretman in the 1950s: hand-peeled shrimp folded into dill mayonnaise on butter-fried bread, topped with a spoonful of roe.

Sweden shares much of this food with its neighbours; see our guide to Nordic cuisine. You will find all three dishes, with ingredients and step-by-step methods, on our page about the food of Sweden.

The recipes

Questions people ask

Is köttbullar the official national dish of Sweden?

No. Sweden has no official national dish. Köttbullar is simply the dish most often named when Swedes discuss the question.

What is served with Swedish meatballs?

Boiled or mashed potatoes, cream sauce (gräddsås), lingonberry jam and often pressgurka, a pressed cucumber salad.

Are Swedish meatballs really from Turkey?

A 2018 post by Sweden's official Twitter account said King Charles XII brought the recipe from the Ottoman Empire, but food historian Richard Tellström found no evidence for it and the claim was retracted.

What makes Swedish meatballs different from other meatballs?

They are small, about 2 to 4 cm, bound with breadcrumbs soaked in milk or cream, seasoned with white pepper and served in cream sauce with lingonberry jam rather than tomato sauce.

What other dishes have been called Sweden's national dish?

Ostkaka was proposed in a 2004 parliamentary motion, and pickled herring with potatoes won an informal radio vote in 2017. Surströmming, smörgåstårta and kebab pizza have also been suggested.

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