Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

I am not much encouraged. The barley flatbreads from the Saturday market by the harbour are good, and remind me of the Staffordshire oatcakes that were a childhood treat with cheese or butter. The children like the wind-dried fish, but I can’t get past the smell. We all eat skyr, but I can’t face fermented whey, much less blood pudding or liver sausage. The recipes that make up most of Icelandic Food and Cookery involve covering everything from potatoes to smoked lamb in white sauce, sometimes diluted with ketchup or pineapple juice. Salads are made of cabbage or carrot and lots of mayonnaise. One recipe suggests that I simmer lambs’ hearts in stock until they are tender, before thickening the stock with margarine and flour. How do you manage, I ask Pétur, what do you eat? Oh, he says vaguely, you get used to it all. But if I want to know about Nordic food, I should talk to Mæja’s husband Mads. Mæja? I ask. Yes, Mæja, says Pétur. You know, Mæja. Mæja Garðarsdóttir. Everyone knows Mæja. I don’t, but I soon will.

Mæja is a lecturer in linguistics with a special interest in second language acquisition. She grew up above and around her father’s shop, just round the corner from the university, which makes her unusual in her generation because almost everyone else has childhood memories of life on the farm to which they return at every opportunity. Mæja may be unique among Icelanders in being seven generations off the land. She lives a couple of blocks from that shop with Mads, who is Danish, a trained chef who is now a lecturer in gastronomy at the Nordic House. The Nordic House is a pan-Scandinavian cultural centre, unofficially part of the university, housed in an Alvar Aalto building on the wetland reserve between my office building, Nýi Garður, and the domestic airport. Mads and I arrange to meet there so he can tell me what I want to know about Iceland and new Nordic food.

It’s a hot day, or at least would be a hot day if it weren’t for the wind, which is the kind of thing people say as often in Iceland as northern England. I make my way across the car parks that spread like lakes across the spaces between buildings in this city, and up the shallow slate steps into the Nordic House. It’s one of those buildings that seems to contain more sunlight than there is outside, and there are places to sit and things to read in English and all the Nordic languages. In the atrium there’s an exhibition of knitted and felted hats in dragon shades of green and red, articulated like reptiles, and there’s the menu for Dill, the New Nordic restaurant on site, which I read with envy. Like most of Reykjavík’s restaurants, it’s too expensive for anyone on a public sector salary, but I promise myself that when we find a babysitter and a reason to celebrate, Anthony and I will come at least once. Fish, herbs, berries, wild mushrooms, sorrel: I could learn from that.

Mads approaches, hand outstretched, smile shining from behind his beard and glasses. Welcome, he says. Welcome to the Nordic House; welcome to Iceland. Shall I show you around? We go along broad white corridors with wooden floors, the walls punctuated by framed pen-and-ink drawings. Everyone’s office door is open, letting me peep into rooms full of light and honey-coloured furniture with bright rugs and cushions, where people are working on Nordic literature and art and design. The Nordic House has recently accepted gastronomy as one of the arts, Mads tells me, so all sorts of new projects are beginning now. We go down a flight of white stairs into the library, which is designed more as a workspace for readers and writers than as book storage, with big tables and low chairs. All the furniture, Mads says, was designed by Aalto for this building, even the door handles and light switches. It’s an enviable place to work, I reply.

We come back to the atrium. Shall we go to the café? Mads suggests. I can show you our garden? We go out, across the turf where new goslings are practising walking and their mothers are watching out for intruders. There are vegetable beds, some currant bushes, and even a fruit tree behind what I take to be a greenhouse. This is one of my new projects, Mads tells me. People say you can’t grow apples here, that the winters are too cold, but I think that probably now you can. Some varieties, anyway. The winters are so much shorter and milder than even a few years ago. And here is rhubarb, which is in most people’s gardens. Rhubarb was about the only kind of jam in Iceland until recently. And currants, which you see are fruiting. And then we have Icelandic potatoes, which are genetically different from European ones, and cabbages and onions. Kale, sprouts, cauliflower. I want to grow everything possible. I want to show people how much we can grow in Iceland, even outdoors in the city. And of course, with the greenhouses, everything is possible. Shall we have coffee?

We go into the greenhouse, whose roof is reflecting a lighthouse beam back into the sun. It’s a café as well as a greenhouse. The waitress opens the louvred panels, because it really is hot, and brings us coffee, and almond cakes which are the nicest thing I’ve eaten since we left the farmers’ market in Canterbury. This is lovely, I tell Mads. Your garden, and the Nordic House, and the café. I nibble my cake, relax into the company of someone who understands how I think about food and why it matters so much to me, someone who, being an exile himself, understands emotionally as well as intellectually why it’s hard to shrug off your own cuisine as you shrug off summer