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

shop near Laugardalur, which has bacon from pigs reared outdoors and smoked trout and muddy potatoes, and in summer a cornucopia of greenhouse-grown Icelandic tomatoes. Mads and I exchange leads on lime leaves, poppy seeds and miso paste, like addicts following the rumour of a fresh supply. I’ve learnt how to cook here. That’s not the problem. But it seems the coward’s way out, expatriate arrogance, to strain every nerve to realise a simulacrum of what we’d eat at home, like Brits who move to France and then drive miles to buy cheddar. I will try to be more adventurous. As long as it doesn’t involve blood pudding.

At the supermarket, I pick up a cellophane package of what I believe to be reindeer meat. Tobias is pulling on my arm, begging for vanilla skyr and sweet barley cakes. I cook venison often at home, but this is an unfamiliar cut, a slab of dense, dark muscle. It’s only as I put it away at home that I read the label properly. Hvalur, not hreindyr. Whale meat. No wonder it was cheap. What shall we do? I ask Anthony. Imagine what our friends at home would say if they knew we’d eaten whale. Whaling is one of the subjects that Brits in Iceland should be cautious about mentioning. (The others are the Cod War and Gordon Brown’s use of anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Icelandic assets as the banks went down in 2008.) When I discuss whaling with my students, most see it as a problem only inasmuch as the practice might compromise Iceland’s application to join the EU. They don’t understand why anyone who eats meat and fish should have ideological anxieties about catching whales, and point out that Iceland has a much better track record on managing marine stocks than the EU does. I argue that whales are intelligent mammals subject to a particularly brutal and long-drawn-out butchery. I wouldn’t buy or eat whale meat by choice, but since we have now paid for it, I suggest to Anthony, it would be worse to throw it away than to eat it. Let’s eat it, then, he says. Max is always keen to try something new, and hovers in the kitchen trying to decipher the back of the packet. I think you’re supposed to serve it with potatoes and brown sauce, he says. I blench, put it in the freezer and revert to cooking with tinned American chickpeas, cod and smuggled chorizo. I still don’t understand how Icelanders survived Icelandic food before the great post-war shift into the modern world.

I ask Mads, who says that of course many of them didn’t and many of those who did emigrated at the first opportunity, but adds that no-one really knows how much Icelandic moss and seaweed people were eating. I recall the almost complete absence of vegetables from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookbooks; some food historians used to think that this absence showed that people rich enough to buy books didn’t eat vegetables, but it now seems much more likely that eating vegetables was so obvious that no-one bothered to write about it. Maybe people were somehow meeting all their vitamin requirements from cabbage. I suggest this to Matthew, who replies that when he first came, an elderly couple asked him what he missed most from England. Salad, said Matthew, and fruit, and especially spinach. And broccoli. The old man looked him up and down. Sheep food, he said. In Iceland we leave the grass for animals. I ask Pétur, who first came to Iceland in the 1960s and lived on a remote farm, working as a cow-hand, what there was to eat.

‘I had to get over my pickiness,’ he says. When he came to the farm for the first time, he was twenty, he’d been travelling for days and he was hungry. But he arrived on a July afternoon when the farmer was expecting rain, and everyone was working hard to get the hay in before it got wet. He went straight into the fields, and stayed there, working, until late in the bright night, until the work was done and everyone could go up to the house for food and rest. And then, he says, ‘the worst imaginable kind of food I could ever think of was put on the table, steaming salted fish with a terrifying smell to it, and hot sheep fat, and potatoes. That’s all there was. And I knew I was going to be there for six weeks, and I would have to eat it or starve. I told myself, you wanted to come to Iceland, you wanted to find out what it’s like here, you bloody well eat their food, and I forced myself to eat it. And it was delicious, absolutely glorious. It’s one of my favourite dishes today.’

‘Not with the sheep fat?’ I ask.

Messíana is vegetarian. It’s a wheat-free, sugar-free household, with soya milk and olive-oil spread in the fridge (though they will always buy in Coke and ice cream for the grandchildren, and Pétur makes fine buckwheat waffles on Sunday afternoons, served with lots of whipped cream and low-sugar French jam).

‘Oh yes, it’s glorious. I could have had butter, the younger kids were having butter, but I thought I’d try the sheep fat. In the old days people used cod liver oil on the salt fish. I tried that and it was quite palatable, not half as bad as you’d expect. The sheep fat would be hotter than boiling point, so hot you’d pour it over and it would crackle, and there’d be little bits of suet in it, brown and crunchy.’

Rick Stein, I remind myself, cooks chips in beef dripping. I still don’t want to think about suet.

‘Presumably there was no fruit and very few vegetables?’

‘That was exactly the situation.’

‘Then why didn’t people get ill?’

‘Because we ate a lot of fish,’ he says firmly. ‘And Iceland moss, swede, and white cabbage. A lot of white cabbage. It was the fish, though, I