/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>14056955
Historically, Swedish sailors would bring back spices and ingredients from faraway places, like nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper, citrus, and port wine, and their wives or mothers (tfw no fat scandi mommy 2 make snus 4 u :[) would add these to snus.
Other flavors came from what was available in Sweden (lingonberry, juniper, herbs, elderflower, wood), and other flavors came from snus's history as a derivative product of nasal snuff (rose, jasmine, violet).
Local flavors won out, probably because they were what swedes were used to, and because the Swedish crown banned importation of tobacco but allowed and encouraged unsupervised farming of tobacco on Swedish farms (this was super fucking uncommon in Europe). Combine local Swedish tobacco with abundant local ingredients and the advent of industry and Ljunglöv's process, and you have the beginnings of the golden age of snus - hundreds of local brands unique to each region. No need for mommy to ferment snus for you anymore.
Bergamot probably hung around because it was traded in huge volumes across Europe by perfumers and confectioners, and would have been a commonly known aroma despite not originating nor being growable in large volumes, even in Skåne, Sweden's sunny south. Colonization probably made more basic southeast asian spices available too.
After WWII, Sweden monopolized the snus industry, and all flavors of snus were brought to a panel of judges who were forced to choose their favorites for the new tobacco monopoly to manufacture. General, the spicy bergamot snus, was one of these, and bergamot was forever cemented in many Swedes minds as "the" snus.
There might be some nutmeg in General, is what I'm getting at. Makes sense historically.