Basically, fika is a twice-daily break, a time for a small something sweet, a coffee and conversation. It feels as if only about everybody in Sweden fikas — a word is both a noun and a noun. School kids fika, despite with milk, and business people fika. In some corporations, display adult to a fika is a requirement. You can fika during home or in a cafe, on weekdays and on weekends, when, as my beam to all things fika, Mia Ohrn, said: “Having people in for a fika is so doable. It’s only coffee and cake. You hardly have to put out chairs.”
Ohrn is a fritter chef, a food stylist and a cookbook author. She is also a mom of dual small boys, that is one reason she loves fikas: They can embody children, she told me. We were in her sun-filled baking studio for a fika of French-press coffee and apple cake, only out of a oven, perfumed with cinnamon and cardamom. Cutting it into hand-holdable squares, she said, “I can’t always lift together a full dinner, though we can always bake a cake like this.”
And, according to Ohrn, lots of other people do too. “We’re a republic of home bakers,” she said, an thought I’d already gotten from reading “Fika: The Swedish Way,” a cookbook that hasn’t been out of imitation in Swedish given it was initial published in 1945 to applaud a lapse of butter, sugar, eggs and flour to a markets and bakers to their ovens after World War II. In a nation of 10 million, a book — a “Joy of Cooking” for bakers — has sole some-more than 3.8 million copies; when people say, as Ohrn did, “every residence has it,” we trust them.