Norwegian gravlax

and talk of frozen fish and cloudberries in the Artic tundra

Freezing rather than cooking as a method of conservation was a practical response to the need to preserve summer's glut against the hardships of winter in the cold lands of the north, where the sun scarcely dips above the horizon for half the year.

Norway’s salmon-rivers, recorded as late as the 1920’s as teeming with enormous fish whose size would dwarf anything caught today, were an important source of winter stores. At the end of the fishing season on the North Cape, a pit was dug in the sandy shore and lined with pine-branches so that what couldn’t be carried was buried for retrieval after the spring thaw. The sea-edge freezes solid right through the Arctic winter, so there's enough salt concentrated in the sand to control a natural process of fermentation, preserving the flesh while enhancing the flavour.

When carving gravlax, slice vertically in slender wedges towards the skin, rather than horizontally and slivered, as for smoked salmon. Save the skin, scissor into narrow strips and drop fat-side down onto a hot, dry pan till crisp (don’t let them burn) for the sake of the chewy texture and to concentrate the flavour.  Provide a pile of crispbreads and a dish of plain-cooked new potatoes - preferably the little yellow-fleshed almond-shaped first-earlies traditionally flavoured with dill-flowers.  Accompany with a dill-flavoured remoulade - gravlaxsås - a Franco-German refinement. The appropriate refreshment is beer with an aquavit chaser taken while locking eye-to-eye with your drinking-companion, just in case. Viking habits die hard.

 

For dessert, summer berries from the uplands - tiny wild strawberries or Arctic raspberries or cranberries or lingonberries or (most prized of all) cloudberries. Berries are small enough to ripen in double-quick time in twenty-four hour summer sunshin - bud to berry in a fortnight. The crop is traditional preserved for winter as jams, cordials and (in the old days) added to the aquavit quietly fermenting beneath the stabur - an outdoor larder raised on stilts.

Aquavit was - in the old days (perish the thought that this might still be so) - potato liquor prepared with potatoes left in the ground to freeze and soften. The rest - well, all you really need is a source of cold water and a pressure-cooker. Fermentation could be speeded up by burying the barrel under the cowshed so that the warmth of the manure kept everything warm and even - a process, incidentally, that discouraged inspection by any exciseman took an overly keen interest in Norway’s traditional winter stores.

August is the best time for gathering cloudberries - you’ll find them on moorland in Britain, though they rarely ripen completely - though in Norway, it wouldn’t be wise to pick on anyone’s patch, as I discovered from Elisabeth Andreasson on her family farm on a fjord some two hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle. Land-owners in northern Norway is - or was in 1985 - calculated vertically from shoreline to mountain-top, allowing for three annual crops: inshore fishing; wheat-fields, orchard and pasture on the lower, middle and upper slopes; mountaintops for the berry-harvest and lake-fish.

The cloudberry is a flowering plant (most berry-bearers are shrubs), a paid-up member of the rose family, a single white blossom on a tall, bare stalk and a pair of strawberry-shaped leaves.  The fruit forms quickly after flowering - first as a large, hard, orange berry (much like a nearly-ripe blackberry, just to confuse), striped with scarlet in places not covered by the sepals. The fruit ripens from scarlet back to yellow to produce a mass of sunny golden globulets, fragrant and full of amber juice. The flavour is delicately sweet with a faint scent of pine-needles. Picked when ripe and stored in water in a barrel through an Arctic winter, the fruit will be fresh as a daisy in spring.

p.s. Beloved paid-subscribers will shortly be provided with a recipe for nordic fishcakes - nothing fancy, just fresh fish, cream and a pinch of nutmeg.

p.p.s. next week, a trip to the Lofoten Islands for the cod-harvest, klipfisk, skrei-molje and a properly epic nordic sing-along.