The ferry from Kalmar was meant to be the easy bit of the journey, the calm before the Swedish holiday storm. Instead, I spent twenty minutes rummaging through my rucksack at the ticket booth, convinced I had lost my booking confirmation, only to discover I had been clutching it in my left hand the entire time. The woman in the booth watched this performance with the patient neutrality of someone who had seen far worse, and I boarded with the hot-cheeked humility that only comes from being an obvious tourist in your own car.

Lottorp sits on the northern stretch of Oland, a flat, wind-scoured landscape of farmland and stone walls that feels about as far from my usual Peckham routine as I could reasonably get without actually leaving the planet. The cottage itself, a traditional Swedish stuga with red wooden cladding and white trim, looked exactly as the photographs had promised, which in my experience of holiday lettings is nothing short of miraculous. I dumped my bags and immediately opened the fridge, because I am apparently incapable of entering a new property without first assessing its food storage capabilities. Empty, save for a small jar of lingonberry jam left by a previous guest, which I sampled with my finger and decided was probably the beginning of something beautiful.

My first evening was meant to involve a simple supper. I had grand plans for the kitchen, which turned out to be compact but admirably well-equipped, with a proper gas hob and enough pots to attempt something ambitious. What I actually produced was a sort of deconstructed herring situation involving rye crackers, a tub of graddfil I had misidentified in the supermarket, and some smoked salmon that I ate standing at the counter while staring out at the garden. The graddfil, for the record, is sour cream, and my plan for a creamy pasta sauce died somewhere between the first spoonful and the realisation that Swedish dairy packaging requires more linguistic preparation than I had undertaken.

The following morning I drove the few miles to Borgholm, the nearest town of any size, and found the Thursday market in full swing. This was more like it. Stall after stall of local produce: new potatoes still dusty with Oland soil, bundles of dill that filled the car with their aniseed perfume, cloudberries in small expensive punnets that I eyed with the covetousness of someone who had read about them in cookery books but never actually tasted one. I bought a loaf of vortbrod, that dark sweet rye bread flavoured with brewer's wort, and ate half of it in the car park like a feral animal, tearing pieces off and watching the ferries come and go across the Kalmar Strait.

Back at the cottage, I attempted my first proper Swedish meal. The kitchen became a scene of mild chaos as I tried to recreate something I had eaten at a restaurant in Borgholm the previous evening: fried herring with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. The herring I had purchased from a smokehouse near the harbour, the potatoes were those beautiful early Oland varieties, and the lingonberries came from that initial jar discovery supplemented by a fresh pot from the market. What I produced was recognisably related to the original dish in the way that a child's drawing of a horse is recognisably equine. The herring was overcooked, the potatoes lumpy, and I had added far too much butter in compensation for my nerves. I ate it anyway, sitting on the small wooden deck with a glass of surprisingly decent boxed wine, and felt genuinely proud of my incompetence.

The local shops in Lottorp itself became my daily ritual. There is a small ICA supermarket that stocks everything the self-catering cook might need, including a bewildering array of fish pastes in tubes that I never quite worked up the courage to try. I became peculiarly attached to their filmjolk, a fermented milk drink that tastes like drinkable yoghurt and became my breakfast staple with muesli and those same market strawberries when I could get them. The woman who worked the checkout began to recognise me, and our interactions progressed from polite nods to a sort of wordless understanding that I was the English person who bought too much cheese.

My most successful culinary moment came unexpectedly. I had gathered windfall apples from a tree in the cottage garden, not knowing what variety they were or whether they were even edible. A neighbour, an elderly man who spoke no English and communicated entirely through expressive hand gestures, indicated by mime that I should cook them. I stewed them with cinnamon and a little sugar, served with the local glassbondost, that curious squeaky cheese from the island, and it was honestly one of the best things I ate all week. The neighbour accepted a bowl in return, ate it on his own deck while I pretended not to watch from mine, and gave me a thumbs up that felt better than any restaurant review.

By my final day, the kitchen had become properly lived-in. The spice rack I had brought from home sat mingled with Swedish essentials: the knackebrod, the various herring preparations, a jar of pickled cucumber I had made with vegetables from a roadside honesty box. I cooked one last meal, a simple gravadlax with dill and mustard sauce that actually worked, and ate it slowly, watching the light change over the flat agricultural landscape that had started to feel familiar rather than strange.

I left the remaining lingonberry jam on the counter for the next guest, a small contribution to the cycle of holiday cooking that someone else would begin. The ferry back to Kalmar was calm, and I checked my booking confirmation only three times before boarding, which felt like genuine progress.