Swedish Americans and Coffee

AA Swedish Americans and Coffee Joy K. Lintelman “It always smells of coffee, it smells (for various political and economic reasons), coffee use so svensk [Swedish],” declared Ruth Peter- spread to the lower social classes and across the country’s son in a 1995 interview about her volunteer work in the rural regions. By about 1850, around the time that the Kaffestuga of Minneapolis’s American Swedish Institute decades-long stream of immigration from Sweden to the (ASI), where coffee, sweets, soup, and sandwiches were United States began, coffee was a familiar and coveted periodically available to visitors. She continued: “This is beverage in much of the Swedish countryside as well as my heritage. I get such a good feeling when I come here.” its towns and cities. Minnesotan Christopher Columbus Peterson is hardly alone in associating coffee with Swed- Andrews, the American minister to Sweden from 1869 ish heritage. The beverage appears in Swedish Ameri- through 1877, remarked on Swedes’ penchant for coffee: cans’ writings, activities, and attitudes from the early “Its use is excessive among a good many of the common years of settlement in the United States to the present class, especially among the women. It is most always well day. Though Americans of many cultural backgrounds and strongly made.” A subsequent American minister to and diverse native origins—including other Scandinavian Sweden, William Widgery Thomas, observed in his 1892 countries—have long consumed coffee on a regular basis, book, Sweden and the Swedes, “The Swedes are very fond it is Swedish America that has erected such cultural sym- of coffee; they are continually cooking it, and out in the bols as coffee-pot water towers and sponsored a coffee- country the peasants are not satisfied unless they are able based community festival. Examining how coffee has to drink coffee at least five times a day.” 2 wafted its way along in Swedish America uniquely illus- In spite of these observations, a coffee habit was hard trates representative tastes and enduring values Swedes to sustain in nineteenth-century Sweden, particularly brought with them when they immigrated as well as the for the lower classes. Unlike the other very popular drink development of their ethnic identity in the U.S.1 Coffee first made its appearance in Sweden in the Joy K. Lintelman is a professor of history at Concordia College seventeenth century, gaining popularity within the upper in Moorhead. Among her many publications on Swedish and middle classes by the early eighteenth. After a series immi gration, Minnesota, and local history is Minnesota Book of four government prohibitions between 1756 and 1822 Award Winner I Go to America (2009), about Mina Anderson and the experiences of Swedish immigrant women. Prof. Lintel- man continues to investigate Swedish Americans and coffee facing: Shoulder to shoulder, men, women, and some (and other foods). She welcomes information from readers and children crowd around the metal coffee urns during can be reached at [email protected]. Willmar’s annual Kaffe Fest. Research for this article was funded, in part, by the Dale S. and Elizabeth D. Hanson Fund for Swedish American History. Spring 2013 191 “Morning coffee, afternoon coffee, coffee at every meal . is the rule in Swedish American homes.” among Swedes, brännvin (vodka), which could be home Rhode Island. She and her traveling companions made distilled, coffee was always an imported and expensive friends with a ship steward who provided them with a beverage (and still is). It was thus common to drink coffee pot and ground coffee to prepare their own bever- coffee substitutes made of roasted concoctions includ- age on board. While Swedish immigrants did not directly ing chicory, grains mixed with syrup, or even a dough state that a desire for good coffee motivated their deci- made of rye and potatoes—or to grind these ingredients sion to leave home, that aspiration was likely a part of along with coffee beans to make a household’s supply last the broader goal of improving socioeconomic status that longer. For many of the Swedes of the peasant classes drove many to emigrate. The habit of drinking coffee, who ultimately chose to seek their fortunes in the United along with the taste and desire for the real thing, were States, coffee from coffee beans was a luxury reserved traits many Swedes brought with them to America.4 for special occasions. Recalling his life in Sweden before immigrating in 1886 to Chicago, Karl V. Anderson de- scribed how “coffee was seldom seen from one Christmas Unfortunately for Swedish immigrants who to the next.” John Edor Larson, who immigrated to Ne- settled in rural areas, their distance from general stores, braska as a child in 1901 (and later became a Lutheran combined with limited amounts of cash or tradable farm pastor in Minnesota and North Dakota), wrote, “Only on products, meant that coffee was not always available to festive occasions, like Christmas, Easter, did we have im- them. Settlers in the colony of Swede Point, Iowa, had ported coffee. Otherwise, roasted rye and barley supplied purchased supplies for their first winter in 1846, includ- the ingredients for this drink.” Associations between ing “salt, sugar, soda, and spices, flour, and coffee,” but special holiday and family times and drinking coffee in resorted to making a coffee substitute from roasted corn Sweden helped to link coffee consumption to heritage when their supply ran out and the two-week journey to among Swedish Americans. Beda Erickson already ex- obtain more was not feasible. Describing life in the Wis- hibited nostalgia about Sweden and coffee as she waited consin settlement he established in the late 1840s, Gustaf in Gothenburg to board ship for her journey to Chicago, Unonius recalled walking 30 miles to Milwaukee to claim writing in her diary in 1902: “Now we are all sitting and a letter he hoped contained money that he could then use waiting for the coffee we long for and it may be the last to buy supplies. He remembered envisioning the pleasure time we are offered this favorite drink in Sweden.” 3 of having “sugar instead of syrup [molasses] and real Swedish immigrants were discriminating coffee coffee instead of roasted wheat.” Emma Peterson’s son re- drinkers, despite limited opportunities to enjoy the bev- called that when his mother did not have enough money erage prepared with actual coffee beans. Their travel to purchase coffee in late-nineteenth-century Iowa, she accounts often contained comments regarding the qual- “mixed cornmeal with molasses, parched it, and that was ity of coffee. When it was served on board ship or in their coffee.” 5 England (where immigrants typically spent a day or two Some immigrants found coffee available at their work- waiting to board ocean liners bound to a U.S. harbor), place but not prepared or served to their liking. August it was usually considered substandard. Though Matilda Karlsson wrote home from Illinois, where he worked as a Johansson was satisfied with the food served aboard ship laborer in 1890: “You ask if I get good food. I get just as in 1892, she noted in her diary “the only thing that was good food as a person of rank in Sweden. I eat four eggs bad tasting was their coffee. It was nauseating.” En route every day but I do not get coffee as warm as I am accus- to Salt Lake City in 1907, Swen Magnus Swensson wrote tomed to and wanted it at home because here they cook it about the poor coffee served to him in England, which he in the morning and keep it in a pail. I drink it at midday.” 6 considered “a rather disguised hot water.” Anna Sand had As the immigrants’ economic status improved and better luck on her 1899 journey to meet her boyfriend in the countryside grew more densely populated, coffee 192 Minnesota History beans became more affordable and accessible. For Swed- “Coffee was always sold in the bean—It was always ish American farmers, as for most American farmers in ground at home, and ground only as we used it, so it was the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, coffee was always fresh.” considered a household staple and was consumed from Grinding the beans was a chore that might be as- three to six times a day. A common pattern was coffee signed to children. Linnea Swanson recalled enjoying with breakfast, again at midmorning, then immediately the task during her childhood in Iowa: “It was fun to sit following noon dinner (typically the largest meal of the down with that square box [the coffee mill] gripped be- day), again at midafternoon, and after the evening meal tween your skinny knees and turn the handle and then (supper). Some also drank coffee before bedtime. Writ- peek into the little drawer below to make sure you had ing about Swedish settlers in Grove City, Minnesota, enough [ground coffee].” After helping with the grind- Elizabeth Youngquist stated, “Morning coffee, afternoon ing, Linnea may have shared in the fruits of her labor. coffee, coffee at every meal . is the rule in Swedish Children were served coffee in many Swedish American American homes.” For Swedish Americans, coffee times households, though in some homes it was mixed with were often sacrosanct. Axel W. Erickson related how the milk, with the proportion of milk to coffee decreasing “Swedes clung to their coffee breaks.” When members of over time. For example, Eric V. Youngquist recalled his his threshing crew in rural Kansas suggested skipping the home in Michigan, where “my sisters and I drank coffee, morning coffee break to lighten the tasks of the women diluted with milk, from the time we could sit at the table preparing their food, “It almost broke up our gang.” 7 with the adults.” Axel Erickson’s coffee was not diluted; In the early-nineteenth century, merchants sold only he noted in his memoir, “We children were served cof- green (unroasted) coffee beans.

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