That is the name of the best selling book in Sweden.

 

You find it in more or less worn editions in most Swedish homes, where it has often belonged to several generations. For our grandmother, seven kinds of cookies and cakes was a must for the coffee party. It was several days of baking, and the table was set with the finest tablecloth and china.

Maria's mom is a full-time-working big-city woman and has, like most women of her generation, given up the coffee party tradition and never baked very many cookies. But Lisa's mom has.

In the country, in Sillaröd, people serve afternoon coffee with seven kinds of cookies, just like fifty years ago. Lisa's mom doesn't really have time to bake so much either-she admits it, but it doesn't help.

We went there to throw a coffee party ourselves. We spent two days baking cookies with Lisa's mom as a good advisor, and then we drank coffee with Lisa's parents and their neighbors one Tuesday afternoon.

The long days of baking, setting the table and the nice clothes made it feel a bit formal finally to sit there and nibble on the cookies.

For Maria the coffee party was something entirely new, and for Lisa it was precisely Maria's presence that made it feel different and a little strange for her too.

Since people have stopped meeting like this in our generation, the coffee drinking suddenly felt like a somewhat foreign ritual, where an older generation had to show us how to do it.

Maria Finn & Lisa Strömbeck