Swedish meatballs: a taste of Ikea at home

It’s thought that meatballs were brought to Sweden by King Charles XII. After a disastrous attempt to invade Russia in 1709, he fled in exile to the Ottoman empire. There he fell for a dish very similar to the Swedish meatballs we now know and, when he returned from exile five years later, he took those meatballs back with him. The meatballs grew in popularity and eventually became so closely associated with the country, that they took on the ‘Swedish’ name. But it would be disingenuous to write about Swedish meatballs and not mention that bastion of storage, that flatpack palace: Ikea.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Ikea brought the Swedish love for meatballs to the rest of the world.

When Ikea restaurants were opened in 1959 (a year after the stores themselves), they focused on serving classic Swedish dishes. Although meatballs didn’t join the menu until 1985, once there they quickly gained a cult following. Today two million meatballs are eaten in Ikea stores every single day. Perhaps that’s less surprising when you learn that 30 per cent of Ikea visitors are there purely for the food rather than the furniture.

To be honest, I’m not surprised. I still have flashbacks to the first trip I took to Ikea with my now-husband when we were trying to furnish our first home together. Arriving at lunchtime, we decided to head to the café first, rather than at the end of the shopping trip. Without that reward to sustain us through the perils of furniture shopping, our relationship encountered various crisis points as we faced down dining chairs we didn’t need (or did we?), dawdled in hallway storage (we barely had a hallway), and tried to pass through the house plant section without bankrupting ourselves (unsuccessful). I would like to say we didn’t have a full-blown argument looking at fold-away beds, but, well, we did.