The one they call a vacuum cleaner

There are two names for it and Swedes use both. Punschrulle is the older and more formal one, attested since the sixties. Dammsugare (vacuum cleaner) is the colloquial one, and it only shows up in the dictionary record around 1990.

That split is usually described as regional. One name in Stockholm, the other in Gothenburg, or north against south. There is no dialect survey behind that, and the institute that would have collected one has nothing on it. The difference is chronological rather than geographic: an older formal word and a newer everyday one, both current, neither wrong.

What is in it

Cake. Specifically cake crumbs, offcuts and leftovers, bound with butter and cocoa and flavoured with punsch, then rolled in green marzipan with both ends dipped in dark chocolate.

Swedish punsch is worth its own paragraph. It is built on arrack, a barrel-aged spirit distilled from rice, sugar cane and palm sap at around seventy per cent, which arrived in Gothenburg on the first Swedish East Indiaman in 1733. The Swedish drink is arrack cut with sugar, water, tea and lemon; one of the earliest recipes is Cajsa Warg's, from 1755. So the flavour in the middle of this pastry came off the ships that made Gothenburg a trading port, even if the cardamom story usually attached to those same ships does not survive a look at the manifests.

Nobody knows why it is called that

Two explanations circulate.

One is that it looks like an early cylindrical vacuum cleaner. The other is that it vacuums up the bakery's leftover cake, with the punsch covering for crumbs that were past their best.

Both are folk etymology. Neither is better documented than the other, and Swedish sources present them side by side without choosing. There is also a man who has claimed he coined the word during military service in 1968, which is at least consistent with a spoken word taking twenty years to reach a dictionary, but it is a single self-report.

Almost everywhere, the second explanation is repeated as though it were settled, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not. It is a good story. It is not a known fact.

The pastry has a small museum of other names, mostly workshop slang: arraksrulle, trådrulle the cotton reel, filmrulle the film roll, and, from somebody with an electronics background, 150-ohmare, after the resistor colour code. Green, brown, black.

Punschrullens dag is 7 March, and it began with a Facebook post in 2013. That is the whole provenance.

The making of it

This is the one classic Swedish pastry that is a use for something rather than a recipe in its own right, and it is much better when you treat it that way. Cake trimmings, a dry sponge, the ends of a rulltårta nobody ate. It was invented by bakeries to stop throwing things out.

Which means the honest version needs leftover cake, and a kitchen that bakes to a list does not generate much. Some things are only worth making when the conditions that produced them turn up.