The thing about driving across Oland is that you convince yourself the bridge is the hard part. It is not the hard part. The hard part is realising, forty minutes later, that your satnav has been cheerfully routing you through a field because you typed "Lottorp" with one too many dots and it panicked.

We arrived at the stuga in Lottorp with the sun already doing that low golden thing it does in late Swedish afternoons, the car full of groceries from the ICA in Borgholm that I had insisted on buying before checking what the kitchen actually contained. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The look that says "you bought three types of herring and we have no can opener." He was not wrong.

The stuga itself was one of those red wooden numbers with white trim, the sort that makes you feel immediately like you should be wearing sensible knitwear and discussing cloudberries. We tumbled in, laughed at the proper coffee percolator on the hob, and immediately began our inventory. Good news: decent knives, plenty of pots, a fridge that hummed with Scandinavian efficiency. Bad news: my ambitious plan for a seafood stew on night one required a blender. There was no blender. There was, however, a potato ricer, which felt like a very specific judgement on my cooking priorities.

We unpacked the ICA haul like archaeologists cataloguing a dig. The Vasterbotten cheese, which I had selected mainly because the packaging looked confident. A lump of smoked salmon that cost more than I care to admit. Pickled everything, because when in Sweden. And those little vacuum-packed packages of gravad lax that I intended to arrange beautifully on a platter with dill and maybe some edible flowers if I could find them, which I could not, because it was September and everything sensible had already gone to seed.

Dinner that first night became what I can only describe as a Nordic tapas situation. Bits of things on plates. The herring situation resolved itself with a pocket knife and some creative swearing. We ate outside on the little wooden deck, wrapped in blankets against a breeze that had clearly not got the memo about summer, and I felt genuinely proud of my chaotic assembly. The Vasterbotten cheese, grated over some buttered crispbread with a dollop of cloudberry jam I found at the back of the cupboard, tasted like something a proper person would serve at a dinner party. I said this out loud. My partner said I was a proper person. We were both slightly drunk on the local beer.

Morning brought the proper discovery. The Lottorp area, it turns out, is quietly serious about its food in that understated Swedish way. We cycled to what I will call the good bakery, the one near the main road where locals actually queue, and bought cardamom buns that were still warm. Proper ones, with that sticky glaze and the intense, almost aggressive amount of cardamom that makes you wonder why we bother with cinnamon in Britain. I ate mine on the bicycle, which was a mistake, because Swedish cardamom buns are structurally designed to flake everywhere and I spent the rest of the ride picking pastry from my jumper like a seabird grooming itself.

The stuga kitchen became our headquarters in a way I had not expected. We fell into a rhythm. Morning coffee with the percolator, which I grew weirdly protective of, refusing to use the little hob kettle even when it would have been faster. Lunch from the local fish smokehouse, somewhere north of Lottorp proper, where an extremely serious man sold us hot-smoked salmon that we ate with our fingers on the beach, getting sand in everything. Dinner became a competitive sport. Could I make something respectable from the limited ingredients and my own limited talent?

One evening I attempted proper pyttipanna, that Swedish hash of potatoes and meat and whatever needs using up. I had no leftover meat, so I used the end of the smoked salmon, which is absolutely not traditional and which I will defend to my grave. It was salty and crispy and wrong in all the right ways. We ate it with a fried egg on top and ketchup from a tube, which feels like something that should be illegal but is somehow very correct in Sweden.

The local market in Borgholm, which we visited on a rainy Thursday, nearly broke me. So many mushrooms. So many varieties of potato that I did not know existed. I bought a bag of something called almond potatoes, purely for the name, and roasted them with dill and butter until they were soft and slightly caramelised at the edges. They tasted like the essence of potato, like someone had distilled the concept into edible form. I became emotional about potatoes, which is not something that happens to me in normal life.

By our final evening, the kitchen had that comfortable, lived-in chaos of a place that has been properly used. Oil splatters near the hob. A sticky patch on the counter from the cloudberry jam incident. The percolator sitting on the draining board like an old friend. I made one last attempt at sophistication, a creamy mushroom sauce from the market fungi over pork fillet, and it curdled slightly because I got impatient with the heat. We ate it anyway, with those ridiculous almond potatoes, and it was perfect in its imperfection.

I keep thinking about that kitchen. About the way holiday cooking strips away all your usual props and shortcuts, leaves you with basic tools and local ingredients and the pressure to make something worth remembering. I thought I would remember Oland for the beaches, the cycling, the strange light. I remember the food. The cardamom in my teeth. The sand in the salmon. The way my partner laughed when I tried to pronounce "Vasterbotten" and got it completely wrong for six days straight.

We left the remaining cloudberry jam in the fridge for the next guests, which felt like the right thing to do. A little gift, a little challenge. Good luck with the percolator, strangers. It took me three days to truly understand it, and I am not sure I can explain what I learned.