My twin daughters were the cause of a huge classroom argument at school. It was them against the rest of the Swedish class. It got pretty rowdy. And I couldn’t be more proud.
The cause of the dispute? Potatoes. Or more specifically, potato-based snack products.
No, they weren’t fighting over a bag of sour cream and onion OLW. They were arguing about the names given to these products.
Swedes and Americans use the word "chips" for what British and Irish people call "crisps." And, obviously, us English and Irish are correct as the first-ever recipe for crisps was in an 1822 English cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle.
To make it even more confusing, “chips” in the UK and Ireland are a fried potato snack found in fish and chip shops.
These chips are chunky, often hand-cut, and fried twice. They're typically served hot and generously salted, often with a big splash of malt vinegar.
They’re delicious and I miss them deeply. Give me a few seconds to drool nostalgically.
OK, I’m back. So, why was I pleased that my girls generated a schoolroom squabble over backing “crisps” instead of “chips”?
It’s because of a cultural ache. My girls are thoroughly Swedified now, and I’m happy about that. Their Swedish is very good, both spoken and written, they follow ice hockey, have close Swedish friends, love meatballs, the whole deal. They even love Mello.
But I don’t want their Anglo-Irishness to be completely buried. I also want them to be proud of their heritage – I want their Swedishness to be liberally seasoned by their parents’ cultures.
They also seem to want that. They love it when we expose them to culture from the British Isles, such as the comedy of Father Ted, Bob Mortimer, Fawlty Towers, and Detectorists, the books of J.K. Rowling and Roald Dahl, and slightly odd food (to Swedes) such as bacon sandwiches.
I’ve also made these sandwiches for their visiting Swedish friends and was met with puzzled, slightly panicked looks (“Are we supposed to eat this?”).
Heaven knows what would happen if I cooked the Swedes a full Irish breakfast, replete with black and white pudding, bubble and squeak and soda bread – they’d likely run and never be seen again.
Yet I like to think that, as well as terrifying them with our food, we’re also broadening these Skellefteå kids’ world-views. Cultural exchanges should be a two-way street.
Except when it comes to “chips” and “crisps”. According to the girls we’re not ever budging on that.
This is a column and the views are the author's own.