Ann-Marie, 53, fixes the players’ food: “Super busy”
Published 11.30
PLANO, TEXAS. Ann-Marie Gustafsson, 53, will make the Swedish national team feel at home during the WC.
With Swedish coffee, caviar – and fifty falu sausages.
– At first I thought: talk about being “spoiled”.
– This, says Ann-Marie Gustafsson and picks up several kilos of chocolate from the shelf.
She nods towards the bags of biscuit chocolate and Plopp.
– …is for the soccer team.
Outside, the rain washes over Plano, a suburb north of Dallas. Inside the store it smells of sour colas and Abba sings “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” in the background.
Wooden Spoon looks as if someone uprooted a Swedish country store from a small town, flew it across the Atlantic and reassembled it in Texas – complete with wooden porch, Dala horse and “welcome” on the door mat.
“Can drive to Chicago myself”
Ann-Marie whizzes between the shelves with jam, cheese and sweets. These are fast days.
The World Cup is just around the corner and the Swedish national team has sent its shopping list to the small Scandinavian store, just a twenty-minute drive from the team’s World Cup base outside Dallas.
The candy is already ready. But one thing is still missing.
The fall sausage.
– If it hasn’t arrived in time, I’ll have to drive to Chicago and pick it up myself, says Ann-Marie.
Texas has very good ingredients, she says. Chicken, meat, good mince. But falu sausage is exotic. The Swedish meat rings must be special ordered, sent from an importer in Chicago and then trucked down to Ann-Marie’s coolers.
No short cut for a sausage.
But it’s also not an ordinary customer who has placed the order.
Stressful
It was in mid-May that the Swedish Football Association contacted Ann-Marie. Could she solve Swedish food for the national team? Above all: could she solve the famous sausage?
It got stressful. But so far everything seems to be on time.
The team has two chefs with them who will cook for the team. During three weeks in Texas, they wanted to be able to mix up a sausage stroganoff on the spot.
– At first I thought, why can’t Swedish players be here for three weeks without Swedish food? I just, “talk about being spoiled”, she says, laughing.
It’s high season for food in the store at Christmas. So this special order is one of the rare.
Why do you think they need sausage stroganoff in particular?
– I don’t understand that either. They’re only supposed to be here for three weeks. It’s not like they’re going to move.
Then she comes to herself.
– Although I’m a bit the same too. My husband and I have almost everything Swedish.
But the national team’s shopping list does not stop at falu sausage.
Coffee and caviar
Is there Swedish coffee in the hotel?
The old line from the cult classic The company trip still sits deep in the Swedish public soul. And if anyone in the national team wonders the same thing in Dallas, the answer is yes, Ann-Marie will arrange it.
Then: caviar.
Quantities of tubes for close to a hundred kroner each.
And then the candy: biscuit chocolate, Plopp. Milk chocolate. Several kilos.
Ann-Marie puts one of the large bags on the scale. It lands at around $105 – plus tax.
Ann-Marie hasn’t had time to add up the bill yet. But just the sausage is enough to make KD leader Ebba Busch, who once made it the symbol of Swedish food prices, baxna: 170 kroner per ring it costs in Texas.
And then it is about half as big as at home in Sweden.
With over 50 falu sausages, only the sausage costs more than SEK 8,000. But – it’s a pittance compared to what other Swedish sports stars have shopped for in the store.
Bought Swedish food for SEK 100,000
Ann-Marie has worked in the Scandinavian store for 26 years. She came from Stockholm to Texas because of her husband’s work, stepped into the store by chance – and was asked if she wanted to start working there. On the wall hang photographs from more than twenty years ago.
Ann-Marie points to a picture of herself and Ulf Dahlén, who then played in the NHL team Dallas Stars. It was the first Christmas she worked here, in 2002. At that time, several Swedish hockey players lived in the area.
The players often had entire families visiting from Sweden. Then it wasn’t about a few individual bags of Plopp to be purchased. It could be ten, twenty trays of Christmas must. Five, six Christmas hams. Mulled wine, cheese, prince sausage, chocolate boxes. Everything ordered months in advance. All imported.
– Every Christmas they came and bought for like 10,000 dollars each.
So: close to 100,000 Swedish kronor.
Sacks of Swedish candy
At the back of the store, a vacuum cleaner hums.
Workers put the finishing touches on a Swedish cafeteria, painted in blue-yellow colors. There, Ann-Marie hopes to be able to serve cinnamon buns during the WC. Around the shop, she has decorated with footballs, Swedish tablecloths, napkins, blue-yellow details and a small football field.
– So this will be “super busy”. I have hired another person just to be here for three weeks, says Ann-Marie.
The national team will live in Frisco, at a luxury resort, and train at the FC Dallas facility. Wooden Spoon is only about twenty minutes from the hotel.
And the players are not the only ones who are expected to be hungry for something Swedish.
Swedish sweets have gone viral in the US. After school and on weekends, youngsters can queue for Bubs, skulls and pacifiers in huge bags. Sometimes Ann-Marie sells sweets for the equivalent of SEK 10,000 a day.
She makes a sweeping motion towards the shelf where six candy bags, the size of sacks of potatoes, lie.
– That is nothing – it is sold in a week, says Ann-Marie.
But the WC will be a completely different level, she predicts.
Swedish fans are expected to fly in by the thousands. She is proud to have the national team in place nearby. Sweden also finishes the group stage against Japan outside Dallas at the end of June.
– I hope we get to see them, she says.
That remains to be seen.
But five days later it is clear: the falu sausage has in any case arrived on time.
The national team’s shopping list
25 kilos of falu sausage (over 50 rings)
Coffee
Called caviar
Biscuit chocolate
Plop
Milk chocolate
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