Crossing Cultures: Food Misadventures part 3
Enduring herring and other specialties in a spectacular country
The contrast between Norwegian food (abysmal) and most everything else (wondrous) is stark.
Food warning ignored
Trip planning for our summer holiday to Norway included an informative brunch with a Norwegian family on sabbatical in Berkeley. The American wife married a Norwegian, became bilingual, and raised a family outside Oslo. The twins befriended our younger son at school. The family was perfectly lovely: casual, charming, and humorous. Over bagels, smoked salmon (how appropriate!), and fruit salad, they recommended must-see Norwegian locales; described daily life, culture, and the economy; and covered some practical issues like transportation, cost-of-living, and lodging.
At one point, the wife gazed at me intensely and inquired: “You aren’t going for the food, I hope?” I had read about the underwhelming cuisine and assured her we weren’t expecting much. She persisted: “It isn’t anything like the Bay Area; it really isn’t very good.” I dismissed her warning as an exaggeration. I was very wrong.
In a nutshell: I lost about 6 pounds during our two and a half weeks in Norway, almost entirely due to a rapidly vanishing appetite. I was wild about Norway. It was exquisitely beautiful and admirable in so many respects. But the food, with rare exception, ranged from unpalatable to atrocious. My appetite rarely disappears. I love food and take great pleasure in shopping, preparing, sharing, and consuming meals.
Norway: what’s not to love?
Norway is safe and economically thriving. Life is costly, but citizens and residents get high quality free health care and education, jobs that pay a decent wage, unemployment benefits you can live on, generous maternity and paternity leave, and sliding scale childcare. The prison system is an international model of rehabilitation over punishment. Crime is low. Roads are excellent, city public transit options are numerous and dependable.
There are certainly thorny issues and problems, but while the many immigrants we spoke with acknowledged prejudice against outsiders, their appreciation for the country was considerable.
People have a profound sense of the common good and national pride is strong. Norwegians tend toward the reserved but polite, helpful if not exuberant, with an understated sense of humor.
The uncultivated landscape has been subject to the right to roam for centuries: open for public camping and hiking. You may stay two nights on anyone’s land as long as you maintain a distance of 500 feet from the habitation; the landowner can grant longer stays.
Much of the landscape is stunning: a wild ocean, abundant crystalline water filling fjords, lakes, rivers, streams, and waterfalls; mountains encircling fjords, peaks towering over vast expanses of wild land; electric green meadows, dense forests.
Cultural differences
In Bergen, a historic port city on the southwest coast perched on the country’s largest fjord, we dined with a Norwegian family. Our older son befriended the daughter when the family was on a Berkeley sabbatical. We chatted about the profound societal differences between Norway and the U.S. The wife explained, “You mistrust your government and we trust and appreciate ours. We believe they have our best interests in mind.” The Norwegian government plans ahead and sits on an immense financial nest egg. They gather information on every resident in a single database, the envy of public health researchers like me, and it informs how to best care for the population.
A recent event illustrated the gulf between our countries. It was widely covered in the press and the subject of intense hand wringing and outrage. Self-catering huts open to the public dot the countryside and provide overnight accommodation for a low nightly fee. Guests bring bedding and food. Some basics, such as cooking oil and condiments, along with essential kitchenware and candles are provided. American guests had helped themselves to the meager supplies without replacing anything. The honor system is so ingrained in the national psyche, that this was unimaginable. It had never happened before.
My own cultural expectations were upended on our first night in Bergen. After schlepping our baggage on a seemingly endless incline from the main train station to our lodging, we finally located the correct hobbit-like house. It was built into a steep hillside with a small public park immediately across the cobblestone street. I noted a gaggle of older slightly grizzled men seated on a park bench, socializing and drinking beer. Inside the house, I could hear them carousing. I imagined the disruption would continue well into the night, with the men sleeping in the park. Instead, a few hours later the men cleaned up their empty bottles and food wrappers and departed.
Food shopping
We engaged in our fair share of food shopping and meal preparation since most of our accommodation was in rented cottages, apartments, and homes. I usually love scrutinizing groceries, especially in foreign places, and can spend a lot of time examining banal items.
The large supermarkets were impressive: brightly lit, anodyne but not off-putting, and well stocked, even in small towns. Besides the extraordinarily high food prices (two to three times the cost at home), the preponderance of Norwegian goods and dearth of imports was noteworthy. The abundance of some foods, such as crackers and seafood, and near absence of others, was also remarkable.
Knekkebrød, the beloved dry rectangular cracker often pocked by evenly spaced divets, usually occupied significant real estate: at least half of a lengthy aisle and multiple shelves. My father was a big fan of Knekkebrød, frequently proffering one for a snack. I never took a shine to the Wasa Knekkebrød, the kind we always had at home. It was extraordinarily dry and tasted like a mouthful of desiccated cardboard. In Norway, the Knekkebrød came in countless brands and flavors, including Wasa: artisanal, seeded, gluten free, pizza-flavored. We discovered two scrumptious labels, one of the few food items we sought out. The other varieties were reminiscent of my childhood and we struggled to consume them. I was charmed to see Knekkebrød sold in vending machines where you could purchase packets of thin Knekkebrød sandwiches.
The quantity of seafood, much of it frozen and completely unidentifiable, was impressive. We consume seafood infrequently, so the abundance was largely wasted on us. There were other options of course, like reindeer and whale, (which we steered clear of), but also plentiful mutton, lamb, and pork (none of which we consume). We asked our sons to shop for and prepare several dinners. They struggled to find something requiring minimal preparation and landed on Fiskeboller, or fish balls. After consuming several fish balls we ultimately discarded the remainder. They had an unpleasant chewy texture and a mildly but distinctly off-putting taste that seemed more suited for a pet dog or cat.
The dearth of snack, junk, and fast food was striking. The only exception was frozen pizza, which was abundant, with many of a breathtakingly large size. Pasta, produce, and cheese were much more limited than at home. We managed to find good if not inspired produce, completely forgettable pasta, and one cheese that was marginally edible.
I struggled mightily to plan meals and keep my ravenous boys, then ages 14 and 16, fed. Grocery shopping was time-consuming as I repeatedly circled the store, wondering what to cook. I cannot recall a single delicious meal I prepared, the polar opposite of my experience at home.
Kaching!
It did not take long to become acquainted with high prices. Our first morning, the boys set off by foot to purchase shampoo in downtown Oslo. They returned from the expedition $40 poorer, with a modest bottle of shampoo and a canister of mango body scrub they had to have. I was in shock; my husband was more sanguine about the expense. I don’t know if it was the dearth of satisfying, abundant, and tasty food, or just the boys being teenagers, but Eli convinced Zev that the body scrub was edible and Zev ate some, to his great dismay.
Unwilling to dine at the more established and prohibitively costly restaurants, for one of our rare dinners out we patronized a local hole in the wall Shwarma joint. It proved no bargain: 4 medium sized Shwarmas stuffed with French fries and mayonnaise totaled about $100. Several days later, Zev beseeched us for snack money. He had spotted a small Asian restaurant close by our apartment and purchased a miniscule bowl of ramen noodles with several packets of soy sauce. The cost: $20. He declared it utterly delicious, likely more for the contrast with our diet than anything else.
Smørbrød is a ubiquitous and popular open-faced sandwich. They are esthetically pleasing: thin artfully curled slices of salmon or a small heap of mayonnaise infused baby shrimp topped with sliced hard-boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, and a sprig of dill or parsley. It seemed like a good option when we ate lunch out at one of the superb museums on an island off Oslo. The sandwich was beautiful but just edible, cost over $20, and left you hungry.
Herring, herring, herring, and other treats
On the few occasions we stayed in a hotel, I was delighted to be served breakfast. One breakfast spread stands out. We had barely made a series of train connections that included a highly unusual breakdown and arrived hours late, exhausted and fretful at the base of a steep mountain gorge nestled along the skinny finger of a fjord. It was a treat to wake up in such a beautiful setting and have only to roll out of bed for breakfast.
Breakfast was served in a weathered building set in a garden full of columbine and roses. Sunshine streamed in through the lace curtains (we hit an unprecedented two weeks of perfect weather that was preceded by torrential rains and high winds). Countless Norwegian specialties were set out on long tables.
There were so many choices; I wasn’t sure where to start. I opted for the herring. My mother was a great herring fan. For her, there was nothing more delectable than opening a squat glass jar of pickled herring, tightly packed alongside some sprigs of dill and peppercorns, the fish skin glinting silver and greyish blue. I was never crazy about pickled herring, but retained a fondness by association, learning to appreciate the yielding meaty texture and briny flavor. Years later I sampled raw herring sandwiches on Texel, a Friesan island known for the snack. The taste was much stronger than the pickled herring of my childhood, the smell extraordinarily fishy and hard to wash off my hands.
I helped myself to small portions of nearly everything. There were numerous preparations of herring: plain pickled herring, herring in mayonnaise, herring in mayonnaise with peas, herring in mayonnaise with beets (this gave the dish a pretty pinkish hue), herring with sour cream, herring with crumbled hard-boiled egg, herring with canned pineapple… A single bite of the mayonnaise infused herring dishes sufficed; I found them repulsive. Salmon also made multiple appearances, presented in various guises. I enjoyed the Gravlax, the Scandinavian version of Ceviche, thinly sliced marinated raw salmon with capers and dill. It was tasty, if not stupendous. Tiny shrimp were also available but like the herring, often drowned in mayonnaise. Plates of thinly sliced cheeses looked enticing, but the cheese tasted of nothing at all and had the texture of soft candle wax. The exception was a rectangular loaf of brown cheese called Brunost, warmed so that it was partially melted, to be scraped carefully onto a cracker or slice of bread. It was sickly sweet, completely at odds with my expectation and enjoyment of cheese. The breads, including some dark thinly sliced pumpernickel, were deceiving. Like the cheese, they tasted of little. And there was the ubiquitous Knekkebrød, but of the cardboard variety.
In the Arctic Circle
From Oslo we travelled north by train and ferry and arrived in the Lofoten Islands, near the Arctic Circle. Every island, whether miniscule or substantial, was crowded with mountains that jostled for space and reflected the light in an ever-changing palette ranging from orange and red to purple and grey. It seemed a waste to try to sleep at night, night being a brief sort of dusk. Instead, we ventured out of our former fisherman’s cabin and greedily took in as much of the landscape as possible.
Across from us was a pumpkin colored clapboard building on high stilts at the end of a pier where, in days gone by, fishermen brought their daily catch for weighing and payment. The building had become a small market offering tourists local delicacies, proffering several samples for tasting. A dehydrated, tough, and exceedingly salty fish jerky was on offer (Harðfiskur), as well as preserved whale. The jerky required hours of chewing and had the texture of dense wood shavings. I avoided the whale. We purchased a small bag of the Harðfiskur and even bought several brands during our stay, but they remained largely uneaten.
A gustatory highlight involved seasonal fruit. After glorious walks, hikes, and drives around the islands, one afternoon we rented bicycles. Each bend we rounded revealed yet another jaw dropping set of mountains, an enchanted inlet, the ocean. One of the roads we pedaled down ended at a pier, a ferry stop. We rested on a bench and ate some food we’d packed. A young woman arrived, bearing small containers of freshly picked raspberries. We bought a container and rapidly, greedily, devoured the berries, then purchased a second, a third, and ultimately a fourth. It was such a welcome contrast to the less than stellar food.
Home sweet home
Once home, shopping, cooking, and eating were glorious. We exclaimed over the bounty, the variety, the sublime flavors. But I missed the breathtaking scenery and the comfort of a country so well run and cared for. I often wondered and wonder still how our country could get closer to the Norwegian model. I try to picture myself in the endless light of summer or the endless darkness of winter. And I wonder what I would cook.
