Kåldolmar Period BOrigin theory CVerified

An Ottoman name at the northern table

Kåldolmar is a staple of Swedish home cooking: a filling of rice and minced meat wrapped in boiled, softened cabbage leaves, then simmered or baked. The dish wears its origin in its name. Kål is Swedish for cabbage, and dolmar comes from the Turkish dolma, "stuffed thing", the same name as the eastern Mediterranean dolma, in which a filling is wrapped in vine leaves and the like.

Cabbage, the main ingredient, is an old European vegetable and was familiar in northern kitchens from early on. The rice and meat for the filling could be had as well.

The name dolma, and the practice of wrapping rice-mixed meat in leaves, appear to have reached Sweden from the Ottoman world in the 18th century. Swedish Spoon, a website about Swedish food, describes the dolma in the supplement to the fifth edition (1770) of Cajsa Warg's household manual as meat mixed with rice and wrapped piece by piece in vine leaves, with cabbage leaves to be used if there are no vine leaves. At that point vine leaves still came first and cabbage was the stand-in. How the dish went on from there to become a fixture of Swedish home cooking is not well understood.

The king who brought it home from exile

Charles XII of Sweden, defeated at the Battle of Poltava (1709) in the Great Northern War, fled to Bender in Ottoman territory and stayed on Ottoman soil until 1714. That kåldolmar is something he brought back from this exile is a story widely known in Sweden. In April 2018 the Turkish news agency Anadolu reported Annie Mattson, a researcher at Uppsala University, as saying that the king, on returning home, brought back the recipe for meatballs, coffee beans and stuffed cabbage. No source was given for the statement.

A few days later, Tellström, a food historian at Stockholm University, was interviewed by the Swedish news site The Local. After the claim that Swedish meatballs are Turkish, he was asked about the better-known story that Charles XII brought back kåldolmar, and answered that there was no source for that either. What he set aside was the idea that the king himself brought the dish home; he did not deny that the word dolma came from Turkish.

Guesses about who carried it

Even without a source for the king's story, the origin of the name is clear. W.-E. Scharlipp, writing on the word, holds that dolma entered Swedish directly from Turkish, with no other language in between. Who, then, brought it? The Swedish Academy's dictionary, SAOB, says it is tempting to suppose that the word came straight from Turkey, and names as possible carriers either Charles XII's companions or the king's Ottoman creditors who stayed in Sweden from 1716 to 1732, framing this as a conjecture. Scharlipp, too, says it is not certain that the word came with the king and his soldiers, and goes no further than suggesting that the creditors who came to claim their money might have introduced the dish, with the nobility the first to know it. According to Swedish Spoon, the food historian Swahn also considers the creditors' stay the likely route.

When the name reaches the cookbooks

The year dolma first appears in print is not settled either. The earliest use cited by SAOB comes from a supplement to the household manual of Cajsa Warg, dated 1765. According to Swedish Spoon, however, Swahn places that supplement in the 1756 edition, so the sources disagree on the year.

Warg's first edition of 1755 is also sometimes given as the first appearance. Scharlipp's paper says so too, but that statement rests on Hellquist's etymological dictionary of 1922, not on Warg's book itself. According to Swedish Spoon, the name dolma is not in the 1755 first edition; what appears there instead is Roullade af Kål, cabbage leaves wrapped around chopped cabbage, suet, grated bread and egg and then boiled, a dish without rice.

From Roullade af Kål one can read that wrapping a filling in leaves may already have been known in Sweden before the name dolma arrived. Still, the name dolma and the rice filling that make today's kåldolmar came from the Ottoman side, and the older native roll is best seen as a forerunner in form.