Norrland's flatbread, rolled thin and baked fast

Sweden keeps a national inventory of living intangible heritage, maintained by the Institute for Language and Folklore together with Nordiska museet. Tunnbrödsbakning (thin-bread baking) is on it.

That listing is also where the useful technical detail lives. The dough is wheat, rye or barley flour with water or milk. It is rolled to between half a millimetre and three millimetres. It is perforated with a dedicated spiked tool, and it bakes at three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty degrees for twenty to forty-five seconds.

Soft or hard is a decision made afterwards

This is the detail that changes how you think about the bread, and it is not the one most people expect.

Soft tunnbröd and hard tunnbröd are not two recipes. They come off the same oven floor. The bread that is going to be soft is cooled briefly and packed; the bread that is going to be hard is dried immediately. The difference is what happens in the minutes after baking.

Soft and hard divide by region, and not simply into Norrland and the rest. Hard tunnbröd dominates in Hälsingland, Medelpad, Ångermanland, Västerbotten and Norrbotten. Soft is the norm in Dalarna, Jämtland and Härjedalen. The heritage listing describes the tradition as running from Dalarna northward.

Barley first

Tunnbröd has been baked in Sweden since at least the fifteen hundreds and probably a good deal longer, and until then it was baked exclusively on barley. Barley and oats were what grew that far north; rye and wheat are the modern arrangement, not the old one.

Baking was women's work, done in a bake-house in large batches, with men brought in to help mix a heavy dough and keep the fire supplied. The woman who did it had a job title that changed with the district: bakstra in Jämtland, baku-kuno in Norrbotten, bakkärring more generally.

Industrial production started in Ångermanland in the nineteen twenties and had reached the rest of the north by the forties. Home baking is now mostly something people do for pleasure, and interest in it has been climbing since the eighties.

The roll

By far the most eaten form of tunnbröd in Sweden today is fast food. A tunnbrödsrulle is soft flatbread wrapped around sausage, mashed potato, mustard, ketchup and pickles, and it was invented in 1965 by Elov Bråtfors at a grill kiosk in Stuvsta, outside Stockholm. He came from the Torne Valley, where soft flatbread was ordinary food, and he had a new machine for mashed potato. The two facts met.

What it is not

You may read that Norrlandic tunnbröd carries EU protected designation status. It does not. No tunnbröd appears anywhere on the Swedish register of protected designations.

It has been formally identified as a candidate that could apply, and the obstacle is named in the assessment: the production area is too large for a geographic indication to work. Which is a nicer fact than the protection would have been. The bread is made across too much of Sweden to be pinned to a place.

Sweden's living-heritage listing is the real status, and the better one to cite.

Tunnbrödets dag is the second Saturday in May, first observed in 2017.