I had been dreaming about Swedish meatballs for the better part of six months, so when our train pulled into Strangnas, my stomach was practically doing the announcing. The journey from Stockholm had been smooth enough, a gentle glide through pine forests and past lakes that looked like spilled ink in the evening light. My partner, ever the organised one, had printed directions to our holiday home. I, ever the hungry one, had spent the last hour scrolling through pictures of local food on my phone. Between us, we managed to miss the stop entirely.

There is a particular flavour of panic that comes from realising you are now heading towards Eskilstuna when your dinner ingredients are waiting in a fridge twenty miles behind you. We scrambled off at the next station, laughed until our eyes watered at our own uselessness, then caught a taxi back. The driver, a cheerful man called Lars who spoke better English than I do after three pints, found our predicament hilarious. "You come for the food, you miss the station," he chuckled. "Very Swedish problem."

The holiday home itself sat tucked along a quiet lane, a traditional wooden house painted that warm Falun red that seems to glow against the greenery. My first impression was not of the architecture, however, but of the kitchen. It was enormous. A proper cook's kitchen with a vast wooden table, shelves of earthenware bowls, and a window overlooking the garden where herbs grew in organised rows. I felt something shift in my chest, a recognition that this was where I would be spending most of the week.

We had planned to eat out extensively, to sample every local restaurant and cafe. The reality proved rather different. The morning after our arrival, we walked into Strangnas proper and found the weekly market in full swing on the main square. I have never been good with restraint when faced with good produce. Before my partner could intervene, I had purchased enough to feed a small village: smoked reindeer from a Laplander with a twinkling eye, cloudberries in a little cardboard punnet, new potatoes still dusty with soil, and a wheel of Vasterbotten cheese that the seller insisted was the king of Swedish cheeses. I believed him instantly.

That first evening I attempted something I called "interpretive Swedish cooking." The reindeer became a stew with juniper berries and cream. The potatoes were boiled and dressed simply with butter and dill from the garden. I opened a bottle of beer from a local brewery and felt extraordinarily pleased with myself. The stew was slightly too salty. The potatoes were slightly underdone. We ate every scrap and sat in the garden until eleven, when the sky finally began to darken, talking about nothing in particular.

The following days developed a rhythm built around meals. Breakfasts were leisurely affairs of crispbread, cheese, and cloudberry jam, eaten while planning the day's foraging. We discovered a bakery on Storgatan where the cardamom buns were so fragrant they drew you in from the street like a cartoon scent trail. I developed a minor obsession with pickled herring, purchasing several varieties from the market and conducting elaborate taste tests with aquavit. My partner drew the line at the more pungent preparations, retreating to the garden with a book while I made faces of serious culinary analysis.

One afternoon I attempted to recreate a proper smorgasbord. The table groaned with my efforts: gravlax that I had cured myself using dill and sugar and a recipe I only half understood, meatballs that I shaped with excessive concentration, a beetroot salad that turned my fingers purple for two days. Standing back to survey my work, I felt a curious mixture of pride and absurdity. Here I was, a man from Birmingham, presuming to serve a Swedish feast in a Swedish kitchen to one other person who had seen me in my pyjamas that very morning.

The gravlax was excellent, if I say so myself. The meatballs were dense as golf balls. We ate them anyway, washed down with too much beer, and laughed about my ambition versus my execution. That night I lay in bed listening to the silence of the countryside and thought about how holidays reveal us to ourselves. I am a person who overbuys at markets, who cannot resist a kitchen, who will attempt elaborate meals with insufficient skill and excessive enthusiasm. There are worse things to be.

On our final morning, I made pancakes with the last of the cloudberries. They were slightly burned, because I was attempting to pack simultaneously and because I am always slightly distracted when cooking. We ate them on the wooden table with the morning sun coming through the window, and I felt genuinely sad to be leaving. Not because of the place itself, though it was lovely, but because of the version of myself I had been there: slower, hungrier, more willing to fail at cooking and laugh about it.

The taxi to the station was driven by a different man, less chatty than Lars. I sat with a bag of leftover Vasterbotten cheese on my lap, already planning what I might cook with it when we got home, already knowing it would not taste the same. Some things belong to the places where they happen. That salty reindeer stew, those dense meatballs, those purple fingers: they were Strangnas things, holiday things, slightly foolish things that I will remember with more fondness than many more accomplished meals.