“It seems to me,” wrote M. F. K. Fisher in the foreword to her 1943 classic The Gastronomical Me, “that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.” The line aptly summarizes the terrain of Bread and Milk, Karolina Ramqvist’s fifth book and the third to appear in English. Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Bread and Milk is a memoir about the complex nexus where these needs converge, although Ramqvist might be more inclined to call them longings. Her work, in this volume and elsewhere, is shot through with desire—which is to say, with unfulfilled needs—and as a result, often dwells in disappointment or shame.

Appropriately, then, Bread and Milk is not a typical food memoir. Of course, Ramqvist does mine her childhood memories for gustatory pleasures. She does recall her own Proustian madeleine (a savory rice pudding). But the book doesn’t rhapsodize about food, nor does it build toward personal liberation—or, for that matter, a successful restaurant career. The word “nourish” is used sparingly. Rather, it’s an intimate, sometimes even tortured, chronicle of an individual appetite.

A celebrated Northern European writer, Ramqvist is known for tackling the themes of gender, power, freedom, obsession, and inheritance. In her novel The White City, a woman navigates betrayal at the hands of her criminal boyfriend while shouldering the very physical work of raising their daughter during a punishing Swedish winter. In The Bear Woman, a hybrid work of history and memoir, Ramqvist unpacks her obsession with Marguerite de la Rocque, a sixteenth-century French noblewoman, whose life she researches while traveling with her teenage daughter.

Bread and Milk draws on these themes, too. It opens with a scene of unease, with Ramqvist recalling an instance where she devoured a bowl of tangerines as a toddler while her mother worked in another room in their apartment—a childish assertion of will for which a seemingly karmic punishment soon arrives, when she breaks out in hives. The scene is relayed in visceral language—the child “felt the fibers in the flesh with my tongue, probed the membranes with its tip”—which amplifies the drama of getting caught. “What have you done?” her mother asks when she returns to the kitchen for tea and sees all the bright orange peels. This early bolt of pleasure mixed with shame, ripe for psychoanalysis, sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Ramqvist grew up in an apartment outside Stockholm, the only child of a single mother. Her mother worked a lot and Ramqvist was often on her own. She countered the silence with food: “[W]hen I ate something delicious,” she writes, “everything seemed to come alive, inside me and out, and when I’d finished everything, I’d search for more to eat.” When her mother went out, she got scared—“it was as if something in the room turned against me”—and food was often a balm, especially the thin pancakes sprinkled with sugar that her mother would leave for her by the stove. But a plate of them meant her mother was going away, and so “the very smell of them and the sight of that stack in the kitchen would make me ache.”

Ramqvist’s dispassionate prose mirrors the slow, quiet childhood she describes. There’s a repetitive, claustrophobic quality to the impressions and stories gathered here, as the reader waits for the action of the book to move beyond childhood and adolescence. For many pages it doesn’t, but the delay isn’t frustrating—instead, it mimics the rhythms of life, with the days of childhood like small waves lapping the shore again and again, each time a little different.

Ramqvist’s lonely youth is punctuated by visits from loving maternal grandparents, who feed her traditional Swedish dishes and stories about their childhoods during the famine of the First World War. Her absentee father reappears throughout the book, a wealthy stranger whose foreignness and good taste throw her off balance. As she grows older, the pair dine at fancy restaurants and even cook together, but never achieve real intimacy. Ramqvist writes with open contempt about the man her mother takes up with, a boyfriend for whom she feels “disgust mixed with fear.” Eventually she and her mother move in with him, into a big apartment in the city, and she’s forced to confront “his stench of alcohol and something rotten.”

Here, food takes on a more sinister hue, as Ramqvist’s mother and her boyfriend plan menus from bed, host parties, and serve lavish, messy meals, letting the dirty dishes sit in the dishwasher until they smell. The spartan fare of raw vegetables and cottage cheese Ramqvist’s mother once ate now gives way to rich, saucy, meaty dishes cooked in cast-iron pans, served with red wine in heavy crystal glasses. The boyfriend becomes a cautionary tale of appetites run riot, and an example of her mother’s apparently inadvertent abandonment. “It seemed to me that she was more living with him than living with me,” Ramqvist writes.

Like all good books about food, Bread and Milk is sensuous and evocative. Saskia Vogel, one of the foremost translators of contemporary Swedish literature, carefully renders both the breadth and the specificity of the book’s culinary language, to cornucopian effect. Tea leaves smell of muscatel and osmanthus. Ramqvist’s grandmother sends her fragrant spring flowers and freshly baked cookies (called sugar dreams) in the mail. As if to drive home how food hovers over everything, Ramqvist eats breakfast each morning beneath a large still-life poster of vegetables: pumpkins, black salsify (a root vegetable that I had to look up), beets, and cabbage. 

Swedish dishes figure prominently: “white polar flat-bread” and “dark sour rye bread,” fittamad (or bread spread with lard), Kalops beef stew, and pyttipanna with pickled beets and fried eggs. (“Pyttipanna” means little pieces in a pan, and the dish, often made with leftovers, is similar to a breakfast hash.) There are fried donut-like cookies called rosettes, “white-and-jade-green salty licorice sticks,” and rosehip soup (which is actually a dessert, served with almond cookies and whipped cream). The curious reader might google the Polkagris candy canes that Ramqvist’s grandfather likes and discover that the still-popular peppermint sticks were invented in the town of Gränna in 1859, by a destitute widow who’d used peppermint to soothe her only surviving child.

In short, good food is abundant and Ramqvist enjoys it. Still, from the very first pages, she hints at a dark, even disordered, quality to her own relationship with food. She eats to self-soothe or blot out loneliness, sometimes rather mechanically. “With food,” she writes, “I didn’t have to be anyone or accomplish anything. I could simply be a mouth and a pair of hands, a hole to fill, a rhythm.” The blankness that attends these scenes, which are more like sessions than meals, is haunting. An unnamed chorus, in a tone more common to substance abuse memoirs, urges her to be honest about it: “Tell my story, they said, it’s the only way to get free.”

But free of what, exactly? Ramqvist refers to a “problem,” but it remains nameless for most of the book. She indicates it through oblique phrases: “as soon as something felt difficult, food came to mind,” for instance. Even when she uses more concrete, medicalized terminology—compulsive eating, bulimia—and mentions recovery groups, there’s no sense of a big reveal. It’s clear Ramqvist doesn’t identify with a single diagnosis, or at least chooses not to use one to anchor this particular narrative. She does have a kind of rock-bottom moment, and from there she does grow, but the book includes little of the anguished struggle we’ve come to expect from illness memoirs, and Ramqvist resists redemption or closure. Instead, readers get the sense of something hazy coming into slightly better focus. This might seem like a problem to those who prefer a tidier story. But others—like myself—will find the ambiguity welcome, particularly in a literary climate that favors diagnoses and pat resolutions.

Throughout her adolescence and early adulthood, Ramqvist reads cookbooks. Later, she finds that cooking “imparted a sense of calm” and offered “a kind of protection.” Cooking for others, she writes, is an “opportunity to participate and yet not, to spend time together while keeping your distance.” It’s also a means of exerting control. Once she becomes a mother—at first, in an echo of her own childhood, a single mother, living with her daughter in an apartment, feeding her at the same white table she grew up with—she takes great care to make healthy food, despite her exhaustion from working three jobs. She writes of the enjoyment of preparing quinoa porridge with grated apple, roasted hazelnuts, and almond milk for her daughter every morning. At another point, a feeling of futility comes over her. “I had the feeling that my insatiability had devoured all that was around and inside me,” she writes. “Nothing had come of all that I’d intended to give her.”

In later adulthood, as a mother to two more children, Ramqvist loses herself in exacting, complicated baking projects. Baking is a removal from so-called real life, but also a vehicle for pleasure, and a luxury of its own—Ramqvist writes that she loves how “the production of a magnificent cake was kind of the opposite of cooking, because it was never really needed.” 

She manages indecision and shame even about this, however. Ramqvist worries that her connection to the kitchen is part of “the old conventions of femininity,” an “embarrassing attraction to the home, to what was considered maternal and feminine.” Growing up with strong female role models in a culture proud of its pursuit of egalitarianism, she writes that “the last thing I was meant to become was a housewife.”

She loves to cook, but isn’t sure she should. It’s just another of the contradictions that make up the gastronomical Ramqvist and, by extension, this impressionistic, challenging, and often beautiful book. There’s no overarching message, save perhaps the truism that food is powerful. It can bring comfort or pain. It can set one’s world atilt and one can use it to set things right again. “I don’t want to turn this into a good story,” Ramqvist writes at the beginning of the book. Fortunately for the reader, it’s an intention she keeps.