The drive up to Malung took the best part of a day, winding through forests that grew thicker and more properly Scandinavian the further north we went. My partner had done the sensible thing and booked us a proper timber cottage through Novasol, one of those red-painted stugas with white trim that looks exactly like the Sweden you imagine as a child. I, meanwhile, had done the less sensible thing of insisting I could navigate us there using nothing but my phone and sheer optimism. Three wrong turns and one accidental tour of a logging road later, we finally found it tucked among birch trees, smoke curling from its chimney like something from a Christmas card.

Our first evening was meant to be simple. The cottage had a proper kitchen with a wood-burning stove, and I had grand plans of cooking something rustic and impressive. The local ICA supermarket in Malung town had seemed so promising, aisles of unfamiliar packaging and proper Swedish cheese. I bought what I thought was cream, what I believed to be a decent cut of pork, and something in a jar that looked like lingonberry jam. The mishap, when it came, was entirely of my own making. I had not, it turned out, bought cream. I had bought filmjolk, that fermented sour milk that Swedes pour over cereal. I discovered this only after pouring it into a pan with butter, where it promptly separated into something that looked like cottage cheese having an existential crisis. My partner walked in to find me stirring this disaster, muttering about how the Vikings had managed perfectly well without proper dairy labelling.

We ate knackebrod with cheese that night, and I learned my first lesson about Swedish food shopping: read the labels properly, or at least take someone who can.

The morning market in Malung proper became our salvation. Held in the square near the old wooden buildings, it was a proper local affair, not touristy in the slightest. An elderly woman sold cloudberries from a folding table, their amber colour almost glowing against the grey morning. I bought a small jar of honey from a man who kept bees near the river, and proper Vasterbotten cheese that crumbled like good Parmesan but tasted of somewhere specific, somewhere northern and clean. The butcher's van parked nearby had falukorv, that thick sausage Swedes slice into everything, and I bought more than we needed because the butcher was chatty and I wanted to seem like someone who knew what they were doing.

Back at the cottage, I attempted proper Swedish home cooking with more humility this time. The wood stove took mastering, that particular rhythm of feeding it birch logs and waiting for the temperature to settle. I fried falukorv slices with onions and served them with mashed potato and the lingonberry jam I had actually managed to buy correctly. It was not sophisticated food, but eaten at the wooden table with rain against the windows, it tasted exactly of where we were. The filmjolk, I later learned, was excellent with the honey and some of the rough muesli we found in the back of a kitchen cupboard.

By our third day, I had developed a routine. Morning coffee on the porch, strong and black, with a slice of the dense rye bread from the bakery near the tourist office. Then a walk, perhaps down to where the river moved sluggish and brown, working up an appetite for whatever market find we would attempt that evening. One afternoon I tried making kroppkakor, those potato dumplings stuffed with pork and onion that Dalarna is known for. They fell apart in the boiling water, becoming something more like potato soup with ambition. We ate them anyway, drunk on local beer from the Systembolaget run, and laughed until our sides hurt.

The self-catering became the holiday, really. Not just the eating, but the small negotiations with unfamiliar ingredients, the way cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen forces you to pay attention. I burned the first batch of pancakes because Swedish stoves run hotter than British ones. I undercooked some freshwater fish from the local seller because I was too proud to ask how long it needed. Each mistake was edible, more or less, and each taught me something about the place.

On our final evening, I managed something approaching a proper Dalarna meal. Grilled pork with a mustard glaze, new potatoes from the market boiled with dill, a simple salad of cucumber in vinegar, and that Vasterbotten cheese to finish with the last of the cloudberry jam. We ate slowly, the midnight light still grey-blue through the birch trees, and I realised how much of understanding a place comes through its food. Not the restaurant versions, but the home cooking, the market stalls, the mistakes you make in a strange kitchen and laugh about later.

I left Malung with a bag of knackebrod, a jar of that honey, and a new respect for filmjolk, which I now buy deliberately back home and eat properly, with muesli, like someone who has learned their lesson.