The savory half of the Swedish table, from the illustrator who drew and cowrote Fika. Where that book handled coffee and cake, this one handles everything you put out when people arrive: rye bread, cured trout with elderflower, chicken liver pate, fresh cheese, Swedish deviled eggs, buttery red cabbage and aquavit you infuse yourself.

Johanna Kindvall divides her time between Brooklyn and Skane, and she draws every step by hand rather than photographing it, which turns out to be the clearer way to show a lattice of rye or the fold of a cured fillet. Publishers Weekly quoted a bookseller calling it beyond beautiful, with all the elements of hygge in it and a new way of thinking about small plates.

A hundred and seventy six pages in hardcover. Cook one recipe and you have a snack. Cook five and you have a party that runs itself, which is the whole idea of a smorgasbord and the reason this one earns its counter space in December.