EATING NORWEGIAN

My husband Bill and I sit in To Kokker (Two Cooks), a wood-beamed, wood-paneled restaurant in Bergen Norway. The paneling and beams of the restaurant have been painted rose and the table cloths are a pale pink with napkins folded into shells. This is a fine restaurant,  very Norwegian in its feel, and  I am about to order Whale Carpaccio and Filet of Reindeer, two Norwegian specialties that I have never tasted and am unlikely ever to taste again.

Why whale and reindeer you might ask? My mother was Norwegian, and my imagined relation to Norway, like my real relation to my mother, has always been complex. After a lifetime of choosing not to see Norway, my motherland but also the land of my mother, I thought it time to encounter my heritage. But still uncertain about how I would relate to Norwegian ways, I decided that eating something indisputably Norwegian—whale and reindeer—would be an easy, and also bold, way to enter the culture.

Although I grew up in what might be called a Norwegian home, its relation to Norwegian  cuisine was much diluted. My mother had left North Dakota, and the enclave of Norwegian immigrants to which she was born, moving to Southern California at the age of twenty-six.  In Southern California, ties to the past are quick to fade, and my mother’s cooking was sporadically Norwegian at best. She served us tacos and enchiladas along with a generically Midwestern menu of meat, potatoes, and pies. But she did make Norwegian cookies and breads  at Christmas, when she also served us  lutefisk, a piece of cod preserved in lye, soaked to remove the lye, then boiled to the consistency of Jell-O and doused with butter.  Garrison Keillor described lutefisk as “a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat.” That pretty much sums up lutefisk.

Before leaving on our trip, I read a sprightly book called In Cod We Trust, a Norwegian American’s account of living in Norway for a year. The book had much to say about the prevalence of fish in Norwegian cuisine. Fish (without lye) is the most common dish in Norway and certainly the most common dish in Bergen, a city of 250,000,  that lies on the western coast of Norway right on the water.

 In Cod We Trust also taught me about Norwegian fish cookery, about the practice of boiling “all the flavor out of the fish in a pot of salted water with a dash of vinegar.” In typical Scandinavian fashion, one cookbook maintains that fish “’should have no other flavor than its own’ and warns against adding any spices or seasonings that would ‘diminish the flavor of the fish.’”  One of the author’s Norwegian acquaintances complained, “’You Americans are always asking, ‘Does it taste fishy?’ Of course it tastes fishy; it’s fish.’”  As an American who’d learned to cook by working through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I had always preferred my fish to taste of sauce, preferably one involving wine, butter, shallots, and cream.

Standing in Bergen’s open air fish market, surrounded by bright slabs of salmon, coral mountains of shrimp, and pearly mounds of translucent cod, it dawned on me, with a shock, that my mother had never served us fish. (Except for lutefisk and the occasional fish stick.) This despite the fact that her Scandinavian cookbook contains recipes for anchovy casserole, salmon with sour cream, cod fish balls, creamed codfish, fish pudding, cod casserole, salmon loaf, and escalloped and pickled herring.  And she was pure Norwegian! Had her people lost their taste for fish while living on a farm in North Dakota since the middle of the nineteenth-century?  Or since North Dakota has lakes and streams, after all, as well as a fishing industry, did her people boil fish without seasonings?  Had that put her off her native cuisine? It was my reading and not my childhood experience that prepared me for the omnipresence of Norwegian fish, though it hadn’t prepared me for so much of them.

I  had decided, nonetheless, not to order fish in Norwegian restaurants.  Norway is the most expensive country in Europe thanks to the oil and gas discovered in the 1960s (the revenue from which goes directly into Norway’s enviable social welfare program). And Norway remains relatively untouched by the current economic crisis. It stayed with the Krone and, indeed, never entered the European Union.  In a Norwegian restaurant, a (skimpy) glass of wine costs eighteen to twenty dollars and a piece of cod often runs fifty-five.  I wasn’t going to pay fifty-five dollars for boiled fish! In preparation for the trip my husband and I discussed the price of Norwegian food and decided to splurge on a restaurant that offered whale and reindeer and then to eat a lot of open-faced sandwiches, a Norwegian specialty. We also planned to microwave some frozen dinners in the spartan apartments we’d rented from young Norwegian men.

As it turned out, the microwaves in both apartments were broken or missing in action, and, at any rate, the frozen food section of our local market offered little more than pizza and fish—fish filets, fish cakes, something that looked (unpromisingly) like fish mixed with potatoes.  As it turned out, too, the sandwiches most easily available to us, consisted of fish and their fishy cousins–salmon and cucumber on a baguette, salmon mixed with something that seemed to be bits of butter and cheese, salmon on sliced, hard-boiled egg, shrimp piled so high on a baguette that you couldn’t see the baguette at all. Soon, we were eating fish twice a day.

We had fishcakes from the fish market–ground cod mixed with flour and herbs and fried into a rather dense and chewy patty. At a waterside café, we savored a creamy fish soup with a mix of salmon, mussels, and shrimp. And back at our apartment, my husband dutifully made sandwiches for dinner by layering mackerel canned in tomato sauce on a whole wheat roll. (I drew the line at mackerel in tomato sauce and made my own sandwiches out of Norwegian Jarlsberg cheese on a roll thickly spread with Norwegian butter. Norwegian butter, umm. ) I also drew the line at fish pudding, fish jerky, and rotfisk  (rotten fish) which was traditionally made by covering trout with sugar and salt and burying it for three or four months until it was, well, rotten.  Nowadays, rotfisk is more delicately referred to as “fermented trout” and is made by letting the trout sit around in its own juices for a few days.  Still, even without the rotfisk, we were “eating Norwegian” long before the whale and reindeer moment.

Our blonde, blue-eyed waitress laughs when I order reindeer. I guess Americans don’t order reindeer all that much.  Or maybe she laughs because I order reindeer right after I order whale. I tell her I am conducting an experiment. She nods and smiles and says “They’re really good.”  And yes, I know I’m not supposed to be eating whale. Norway’s insistence on whaling is one reason it never joined the EU.   But Norwegians tend to go their own way.  I eat the whale. It’s a Norwegian thing to do. The whale has been smoked and tastes like ham, but it is dark in color and has a smooth texture, the kind of texture you’d expect from a seagoing mammal. The reindeer is very tender and strangely smooth, as well. It tastes like meat but not like any meat I’ve ever eaten. I’m glad for the dark, plumy game sauce that covers it. Later, I learn that Norwegians eat very little whale or reindeer. Those dishes are for special occasions or for dinners out in tony restaurants that specialize in traditional cuisine.

It is in Oslo, in another beamed restaurant, that I eat the best meal of the trip. Stortorvets Gjaestgiveri is a homey restaurant with an expensive fine dining menu and a cheaper café one.  We debate about going in, fearful that the affordable café menu is just for the afternoon. We are near the end of our trip and we’re low on funds, but we’re also tired of  fish sandwiches so we enter and are delighted to find that the café menu is still good.  We order, and for only thirty dollars I am served a piece of tender salmon in a pool of butter sauce. The salmon melts in my mouth, tasting of salmon but not in a fishy way. The Norwegian butter sauce is sublime, and the same dish costs more than fifty dollars on the fine dining menu.  At last, I’m eating Norwegian and it feels just right.

 

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Quotations from Eric Dregni, In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream. The University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

 

 

 

 

 

judith
Based in the Bay Area, Judith is an author and Professor Emerita at U.C. Davis

6 Comments

  1. I love fish and your description is tantalizing. I never understand when travelers don’t partake in the local food customs. I think it really adds to the enjoyment and appreciation for the culture.

    1. Hi Lynne, thanks for stopping by! I think dining is always a door into a culture. I felt I really understood something about my ancestors after I ate fish twice a day for seven days straight! And the whale, well eating it, despite my qualms, was the most Norwegian thing I did.

  2. Wow, the whale and reindeer sound great, but I don’t know about the fermented trout. I understand that some of the rooms in the To Kokker restaurant were used during World War II as a secret meeting place for Norwegian resistance fighters who used a short wave radio to broadcast information against the Nazi occupiers. What a contrast – haute cuisine and life-and-death drama. I wonder what they would have thought.

    1. Wow, Brad I didn’t know that about the restaurant. I thought it was just next door to the Resistance Rooms. Anyway, the restaurant is down a tiny alleyway and it would have made a good hiding place.

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