Smörgås is an interesting word that deserves a closer look. It’s a compound consisting of smör, in English butter, and gås, in English goose. Usually translated into English as sandwich, a basic smörgås is a slice of bread, often baked with rye flour as it is common in our latitudes, topped with butter, or whatever substitute is used nowadays, sliced cheese and / or lunch meat and maybe a few slices of tomato or cucumber. The difference between a smörgås and a sandwich is that a smörgås is only one slice of bread instead of two or more and seldom topped with peanut butter not to mention Nutella.

What on earth has a smörgås got to do with a goose, one might ask. The etymology of smörgås explains the mystery in this way: Refers to a time when people churned their own butter. During the churning process, small lumps of butter appeared on the surface of the milk drifting around like geese. Hmm…... (continua)