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

dishes involving freshly picked strawberries, crayfish caught in mountain streams, and a glut of salmon, none of which is available to me. The Icelandic book, Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir’s Icelandic Food and Cookery, makes compelling reading. Rögnvaldardóttir begins by referring to the great change in Icelandic society after the Second World War brought sudden prosperity, Americanisation and, in 1944, full independence from Denmark:

I grew up on a remote farm in northern Iceland in the 1960s. Icelandic society has changed so much since then that it sometimes seems to me this must have been the 1860s, not least in culinary matters. The food of my childhood was partly the old traditional Icelandic food – salted, smoked, whey-preserved, dried, and partly the Danish-influenced cuisine of the home academy my mother attended – heavy sauces, roasts, endless porridge, puddings, and soups.

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I’ll hear more about these ‘home academies’ from my students, many of whose grandmothers attended them in preparation for life as housewives, mostly on farms. Even after 1944, young women were taught to cook more or less adapted Danish food. It sounds like the half-hearted adaptation of English recipes for Indian ingredients and cooking methods under the Raj. The Danish influence on Icelandic food is still apparent in any bakery, where there are yeast-raised pastries and cinnamon biscuits, and in the staples of Icelandic home cooking: roast meat with ‘brown sauce’, layered cream cakes and scones. I want to know what came before that. I want authentic island cooking, even though I know that any cuisine is a miscegenation.

There is no written account of Icelandic food before the eighteenth century. Iceland was uninhabited until settlers arrived from Norway around AD 900. The settlers came up the western side of the British islands where they picked up Irish, Welsh and Scottish wives and servants. The Celts were largely excluded from the traditional narrative of Icelandic history, which is based on the sagas. The sagas are long narrative poems about the settlement years, which were first written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, several hundred years after the events they describe. In the twentieth century, Icelandic historians questioned the status of the sagas as historical truth, and the poems are now widely seen as literary artefacts, but there is still something of the sacred text about them. Many Icelanders can quote the sagas in the way that seventeenth-century Puritans quoted the Bible. Every so often, a discussion in a faculty meeting will end with someone saying something in Icelandic alliterative verse. By the end of the year, I will be able to follow most of what happens in these meetings, but not the poetry. I’ll hiss at Matthew to translate and he’ll reply, with a straight face, something like ‘The fair horse fares fast in frost.’ What? I’ll ask. What? But meanwhile everyone else will be nodding and agreeing, the issue somehow resolved, and I’ll know the sagas have spoken again. They combine the functions of the Bible and the Domesday Book, but offer a narrative of heroic Viking exploration and conquest that skips over the presence of Celts.

In some respects, the foodways of the Hebridean islands from which the slaves came offered a better template for Icelandic subsistence than those of Norway. The Norwegian settlers were used to hunting deer, picking fruit and berries, and relying on nuts and acorns for extra protein. There was no shortage of firewood in Norway, which made it easy to harvest salt to preserve meat and fish, and also meant that it was possible to cook several times a day and to use fuel-intensive methods such as baking. In Iceland, as in the North Atlantic islands from which many of the settlers’ wives and servants came, there were no native mammals except seals, no fruit, few berries, and no nuts. Although Iceland was forested when the settlers arrived, the woods were over-exploited from the beginning and the bare, treeless landscape familiar to Icelanders for most of the last millennium probably emerged in the early centuries of settlement, bringing with it fuel poverty alleviated by peat-cutting as practised in the Western Isles.

Given the length and harshness of Icelandic winters, food preservation was essential for survival. Fish was, and still is, wind-dried in sheds above the beach. Meat could be smoked in the chimney. But most things were preserved in whey. The settlers brought cows with them from Norway, and Icelanders have been heavily dependent on dairy produce from the beginning. There was, oddly, no tradition of cheese-making except the fresh curds called skyr, much like fromage frais and still eaten at least once a day by most Icelanders. The byproduct of skyr is whey, which was often served as a drink but also used, in its fermented form, as a means of preservation akin to pickling. Everything went into barrels of fermented whey:

Fish and cattle bones were sometimes kept in the fermented whey until they softened and then they were boiled and eaten . . . Food that is to be preserved, for example blood puddings, liver sausages, fatty meat, sheep’s head and headcheese, whale blubber, seal flippers, etc., is usually boiled and cooled, then placed in barrels and submerged in fermented whey. It will keep for many months in this manner and gradually acquire a more sour taste. It is sometimes said that all food will eventually taste the same if it is kept in whey for long enough and there is some truth in that.

It was never easy to grow grain in Iceland, and never possible to grow wheat. Ovens were unknown because of the shortage of fuel so, again as in the Western Isles, where grains were eaten they were either in porridge or in flatbreads and bannocks, but most people relied instead on dried fish, which was, and sometimes still is, spread with (unsalted) butter and eaten like bread as a side dish or snack. ‘Iceland moss’, which is a kind of lichen still used to make tea, and seaweed were used to stretch grains,