Forget Your Troubles, Come on, Get Hygge

The romantic aesthetics, vs. the material necessities, of the winter season

In 2016, it seemed like the entire world turned its attention to the Danish concept known as “hygge,” pronounced HOO-guh and generally translated to convey a sense of coziness and comfort directly connected with personal well-being. The word itself dates back to the sixteenth-century Norweigan concept of “hugga” or “hyggia”, meaning to comfort or console, which implied a collectivity to the pursuit of a comfortable life. Yet the American lifestyle marketplace, including the cookbook industry, seized upon hygge’s viral aesthetic potential and marketed it to death, branding every Scandi-adjacent form of cooking, decorating, and detoxing as a surefire path to self-improvement. Especially during the onset of the COVID epidemic, hygge became a way to rebrand lockdown as an opportunity of physical and emotional renewal, one that required we buy blankets, candles, and cozy socks in the name of self-preservation. On the food front, the obsession with pandemic sourdough became reframed as proof (lol) of the power of stress baking, and the labor of maintaining a starter was transformed into a “meditative and empowering act.”

Don’t get me wrong—I like thick sweaters, stoneware mugs, and crackling fires as much as the next person. (Sourdough I appreciate, but we used our starter far more for pancakes than for bread-baking, and discarded it as soon as its smell turned from pleasantly funky to straight-up acetone. I’ve stuck to challah ever since.) I’ve lived in cold climates for most of my life, and though the flannel-wearing, snow-crunching of a Massachusetts winter has its own sensorial appeals, it’s a little hard to rebrand the bleak grey skies and frigid winds of January as an opportunity to rest and recharge. In particular, the best North American referents for the aesthetics of winter joy come from pieces of girls’ fiction-turned-popular culture like Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and Little House on the Prairie, which reinforce the notion that our homes were most cozy when women had no recourse but to stay close to home. When we only use the aesthetic referents of the past for homegrown winter happiness, it suggests that the best present-day strategy is to either buy your way in, or go full #tradwife and leave the trappings of modernity behind.

Yet what these manufactured aesthetic moments fail to reckon with is how what passes as #cottagecore today was the meaningful, materially-specific practices of the past. Structures like Orchard House, the childhood home of Louisa May Alcott, had to have roaring fireplaces in each room because they lacked substantial insulation against harsh New England winters. While writing the many fantastical stories of Anne Shirley, author L.M. Montgomery would wake before the fires in her farmhouse were lit, put on her heavy coat, sit on her feet “ to keep them from freezing, and with “fingers so cramped” she could “scarcely hold the pen,” write her “stunt” for the day. And as Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled in her book The Long Winter, documenting the brutal winter of 1880-1881, fuel and food became scarce as blizzards prevented trains from reaching her family’s homestead in the Dakota territory. We forget that for every pan of homemade gingerbread, apple slump, and liniment cake, wood had to be chopped, eggs had to be gathered, and flour had to be milled, all in sub-zero temperatures. The stress baking of the past looked quite a bit different than what we might imagine.

Safely ensconced in the warmth and insulation of a twenty-first century home, it’s easy to romanticize the conditions of the past without remembering the hardship that necessitated them. And while the concept of #hygge may offer a intentional mental framework for making the most of staying indoors, it’s meaningless in a contemporary context without an intentional acknowledgment of what true hardship actually looks like. With the swift advancement of climate collapse, what one things of as a cozy vibe may well become a necessary survival strategy, a way of coping with the genuine environmental uncertainty of the world. So while I’m cradling a cup of tea between my chilled fingers and making baked goods on a whim, I’m also thinking of how fortunate I am to have a shelter to go to, a community to draw upon, and the option to wrap myself in blankets as a matter of taste rather than necessity.

Recommendation: In between various deadlines, it’s been a great week to catch up on my must-see movie list. While I was totally enthralled by Poor Things (and am happy to renew my love affair with Emma Stone, the Buster Keaton of the twenty-first century), I’ve been thinking a lot about my abiding appreciation for Paul Giamatti. Quietly devastating and unexpectedly hilarious, The Holdovers is a stunning film, and it simply wouldn’t work without Giamatti at its center. Even though he often plays total jerks, at his core he’s so obviously a compassionate and intelligent person, you end up rooting for him at every turn. (This obviously means I’ll be writing a piece on the twentieth anniversary of Sideways at some point this year—perhaps with a decent Merlot in hand.)

The Perfect Bite: I don’t get to eat ramen very often, and the bowl I enjoyed this week was perfectly fine (and much improved with the addition of a housemade chile oil). But that passable bowl immediately brought to mind my favorite ramen spot from my New York days, the amazing spicy tonkotsu from Jin Ramen in West Harlem. Jin opened while we were living just around the corner, and my first encounter with tonkotsu—a broth made from slow-cooked pork bones, rich with gelatin and full of flavor—is burned on my brain. As I find more tonkotsu spots in the Boston area, I’ll be more than happy to see if each measures up to Jin-level excellence.

Cooked & Consumed: Some excellent home cooking this week—some more bangers out of Molly Baz’s More is More, including a sizzled seedy tomato salad that I will definitely make again. But the most surprising treat was yesterday’s baking project, a chocolate, buckwheat, and tahini cake from David Lebovitz (adapting a recipe from Aran Goyoaga). Buckwheat is not the most obvious flour for cake-baking, especially if you are put off by its slightly earthy smell. But it’s matched beautifully with cocoa and tahini, and though the recommended chocolate glaze would probably be a great touch, it’s a delicious (and not too sweet) cake all on its own.