The konditori staple that never sees an oven

Rolled oats, butter, sugar, cocoa, a spoonful of strong coffee, rolled into balls and then rolled again in desiccated coconut. It goes in the fridge. It never goes in the oven.

That is a chokladboll, and it is on the counter of every konditori (café-patisserie) in Sweden. It is also the reason the baking calendar on this site is written around the word bakverk rather than around baking. A test that asks whether something was baked throws this out, and anything that throws out the chokladboll is describing a different country.

Where it comes from

Wartime, and the ingredient list shows it.

My earliest trace of it is Danish, from a 1943 cookbook about managing in a time of shortage, under the name havregrynskugler (oat grain balls). A Swedish recipe appeared in a Stockholm newspaper in December of the same year. Neither is quite the modern one.

A recipe matching what Swedes make now — butter, oats, coffee, cocoa — ran in Dagens Nyheter on 21 May 1950, and had been sent in by a twelve-year-old girl from Örebro.

That is a good origin for a thing like this. No confectioner, no bakery, no company. A child's recipe in a newspaper, at exactly the moment when butter and cocoa were available again but nobody had forgotten how to make something out of very little.

The name

Until the seventies and beyond, the usual Swedish name was not chokladboll. It was a word built on neger, and the history of it changing is documented well enough to state plainly.

Sweden's Academy word list included the old name from its 1986 edition. The 2006 edition kept it but added a recommendation to prefer chokladboll. By the 2015 edition it was gone. The Language Council advises against the old term because it is understood as derogatory, and the point at which newspaper Swedish stopped treating it as neutral is usually traced to a 2003 complaint to the discrimination ombudsman about a bakery's signage. The case was closed, but the ombudsman said the word should not be used, and press usage moved.

There is a curiosity underneath all of this that is worth knowing: the name is much older than the sweet. A Stockholm newspaper carried an advertisement using it in 1918, for a chocolate and almond confection that has nothing to do with oats. The word attached to one thing and later transferred to another.

Chokladboll is what it is called. It is also a better name, because it says what is in it.

The day, and the making

Chokladbollens dag is 11 May. An origin story circulates for it that cannot be verified, so the date will have to do on its own.

Practically: use good cocoa, because there is nothing else to hide behind. Use real coffee rather than powder, and use it cold and strong. Butter at room temperature, not melted, or you get an oil slick.

Two finishes are standard, coconut and pärlsocker (pearl sugar), and Swedes have opinions about them. Coconut is the standard. Pearl sugar is better.

Then chill them properly. A warm chokladboll is a bowl of wet oats, and an hour in the fridge is the difference between the two.