The Food of the North

with Jane Stevenson

The flavours of the European north are mustard, horseradish, vinegar, sour cream, and smoke. Dill, juniper, angelica and liquorice could be added. Beyond flavourings, northern food is governed by glut, famine, and the constriction of the winter. The farther north one goes, the more this is true; the more extreme the contrast grows between starvation and seasonal abundance.

The farther north, the fewer vegetables there are. Northern Europe, the Celtic countries especially, were heavily dependent on kale and root crops for winter food until the twentieth century. There are tracts of northern Europe where the only way of garnering regular food from the land is by eating the meat of grazing animals: cattle, then sheep, and finally reindeer.

This grain-to-meat trend intensifies until, in the arctic, it results in a people, the Inuit, who are physiologically adapted to living on an entirely animal diet. Animal fat, until the twentieth-century arrival of imported food and power, was the essential fuel of the arctic: fire, light, and human energy all came from fat. Fat is essential, virtually sacred, in a climate where it takes 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day to work while retaining body warmth. Hence archaic bloodbaths like the Faroese grind, the annual festival when the migrating pilot whales – herd animals – are slaughtered with what seems like mad profligacy, the harbours red with blood. Francis Spufford advances the theory that the Scott expedition to Antarctica failed because of an inbuilt attitude to inferior races. The Englishmen, prizing restraint, failed to imitate the Inuit practice of feasting whenever a kill was made, and succumbed to malnutrition. The Norwegian expedition, arctic pragmatists, were willing to imitate local custom and triumphed. Nansen managed to put on three kilos while his ship was drifting with the movement of the arctic ice.1

The north is a place of simultaneous scarcity and abundance. On one level, it can support only a small and scattered population; on another, it appears to teem with animals. Arctic creatures breed prolifically, from the plankton at the bottom of the food chain up to the seals and polar bears near the top. But the life that it is possible to make for a human in the far north is that of a hunter-gatherer rather than of an agriculturalist. In effect, humans have to position themselves in the ecosystem at the level of large carnivores; and there are severe limitations on the number of large carnivores which any habitat is able to support.

Fish, until recently, has been one of the north’s most economically significant exports in a world always hungry for protein. The north once produced fish in insane abundance. The apparently endless shoals of herring which were taken out of the northern seas, salted, dried and barrelled, were an ordinary foodstuff everywhere that European sailors went. But in the sixteenth century, the stocks of herring in the Baltic were finally in decline, and along with them declined the profits which had built the cities of the Hanseatic League. Another northern source of food was urgently needed, and the lack was met by another typically arctic fish, the cod. Cod once appeared to be so plentiful that Finnish oral tradition offers, as an explanation for the northern lights, that they are reflections from the scales of the countless fishes of the arctic seas.2

Cod built the economy of Newfoundland and New England, just as herring had built Lübeck and Danzig. Cod was salted and dried and re-exported in huge quantities to southern Europe and further afield: the bacalão which the Portuguese and Venetians still eat, and the saltfish which is nostalgically enjoyed in the West Indies, is North Sea cod. But the efficiency with which cod was cropped, as if it were corn, has turned out to be self-destructive. Though the Grand Banks were once so thick with cod that it looked as if a man could walk on them, we are now facing the extinction of cod as a commercial fish, and quite possibly, as a marine species. The arctic has proved, after all, to be a finite resource.

Northern food shares a distinctive set of features. Preservation: meat and fish are dried, smoked, and salted for storage through the long, lean months. Contrary to the impression given at the grind itself, the pilot whales did not go to waste, any more than did the mountains of cod and herring. In Europe, and pre-colonial North America, and in Hokkaido in northernmost Japan, northern hamlets were surrounded by long drying-racks where fish, especially cod and salmon, were transformed into tough, withered mummies of their former selves which could be stacked like firewood and kept through the winter.

No vegetable oils used to be available in the far north, so animal fats and butter were preserved from rancidity as far as possible. The short growing season also affected fodder crops for animals, making it difficult to get cows and sheep through the winter alive, let alone keep them in milk. Butter and cheese were therefore seasonal luxuries. Once you reach the arctic circle, the relationship between man and animals changes; the Sami do not so much take charge of their herds of feral reindeer – tough, clever beasts who mostly look after themselves – as manage them. The Inuit’s relationship with animals does not involve even this minimal pastoralism: they simply hunt. On certain arctic hilltops, there are placed life-sized arrangements of stones, inuksuit. They are not in a realist mode to human eyes. But though these Inuit-placed stone structures have many significances, these are practical: they are sufficiently representational to deceive migrating reindeer. The herds take note of what they interpret as a hunter watching them from a hilltop, and go a different way, and thus are steered to where the Inuit want them to go.

The meagre grains of the north are oats, rye and barley. Since the climate change of the late Middle Ages, no territory further north than Scotland can produce wheat, but for thousands of years, since the domestication of emmer and einkorn proto-wheats in the neolithic Mediterranean, bread has been the staple food. The Roman Empire and the Christian symbolic use of bread gave leavened wheat a status which cannot be sustained in the north, where bread is not a natural foodstuff. Oats and barley will only make porridge or flat, hard biscuits. The old-fashioned coarse dark rye bread which was the staple of most Russians and north Europeans is barely raised at all – often, the coarsely crushed rye, mixed with water and salt, was gently warmed overnight, which converted some of the starches into sugars; malted it, in fact. Stale bread was recycled, crumbled and cooked in water. Then the malted rye, fresh rye, and old, boiled bread were mixed, baked for a few hours to form a crust, then for another ten to twenty hours in a slow oven. The resulting huge, solid loaves could be kept for a very long time. In some areas of Scandinavia, the dry bannocks, crispbreads and oatcakes were made as few as two or three times a year, in vast quantities, and carefully stored. All cuisines north of the Rhine, like the mountain cultures of central Europe, have some form of dumpling made from stale bread.

The vegetables of the north are restricted to roots and brassicas. Onions, and the toughest species of cabbage – the kales – are also important. Highlanders substituted nettles for kale, and were probably not the only people to do so. Kale will stand in the ground through the winter and the leaves can be pulled off for consumption even when it is frozen; hard white and red cabbages keep better than green. Swedish turnips will stand the winter in the ground without deteriorating. Root vegetables will store, in cellars, lofts, or clamps. Cabbage can be fermented or pickled, with or without vinegar and salt: German sauerkraut and Korean kimchi are variations on this theme.

Without imports, northern food is essentially based on soup or porridge, which may involve root vegetables, hard bread, and when circumstances allow, preserved fish or meat. The delights of northern food – the foods of the north that anyone would choose to remember or replicate – have to be seen in the context of the memory of the winter months of smoked and dried food and stored roots. This explains why freshness is the quality most desired in the food of the northern summer.

The perfect dish of sillocks (‘coley’, in English) must be caught and cooked by the consumers:

The saucepan or frying pan on the boat, a fire in a ring of stones on the shore, or by the side of the burn, fish that is in the pan within a minute or so of leaving the water, is one of the remembered pleasures of the north. By the Spey in high summer, with the loud water running over the rocks below the Victorian white-painted metal bridges distributed lavishly along the river, the archaeologies of just such fishermen’s picnics are found on every level stony space. Brown trout, salmon, pike, shrimp, and crayfish are among the creatures best caught and eaten on the spot. Extreme freshness gives the sweetness which is elusive in the foods of the north. Mushrooms and berries are both the focus of social rituals, small compensations at the turn of summer to autumn.

Pleasure in absolutely seasonal food, as an immediate and whole-hearted response to the turning of the year, is most often associated with Japanese cooking. Yet the crayfish parties of Sweden are a distillation of northern summer eating. Crayfish from the rivers are boiled in a mixture of water, salt, sugar, dill and beer, and eaten ceremonially with beer and schnapps. They are accompanied by both bread and cheese, the cheese an extravagance, an index of summer plenty. Or, in north Sweden, there is surströmming, fermented herring. Although they are preserved, they are the light preserves of summer. They have their precise moment, because selling them is restricted until the third Thursday of August, just when the summer is beginning to move towards autumn. They are eaten also with all that the northern summer can produce: fresh potatoes, thin unleavened bread, butter, chopped red onions.

The summer fruits of the north are all berries. Raspberries, strawberries, brambles, cloudberries, redcurrants, bilberries, picked from amongst their aromatic leaves. Eaten, when possible, with cream – itself an extravagance in the north, since every drop ought to be turned into butter and preserved for the winter. Soft fruits dry badly, so before sugar was cheap and readily available, they all had to be eaten in midsummer feasts. Since sugar came into northern Europe in the late eighteenth century, berries have been preserved by being made into jam, which joins the mountain of preserved foodstuffs in the cellars of the north. Tove Jansson’s Moomins seem to have kept jars of preserved, pasteurised raspberry juice, perhaps for drinking or for making rodgrød, berry juice thickened with starch. Given enough sugar, every berry of the north could used, even the sourest: the rowan berries, wild service, rosehips, elders, sloes and geans. In old-fashioned houses in Scotland these tannic, sour jellies are still eaten with mutton and game.

In territories where the frosts linger late, apples, pears and plums will not set fruit. In the old north before the days of imported exotics, the annual berry-feasts provided the only fruit that there was at all. During the rest of the year, parsnips were the only even faintly sweet food apart from honey, always a luxury in places where the winter temperatures are low enough to kill a hive of bees.

Now, volcanic heat warms the glasshouses of Iceland, and super-markets everywhere in northern Europe ‘offer an approximation of Mediterranean food that was once available only in Soho’,4 in the elegantly sour phrase of the filmmaker Patrick Keiller. And they offer it all the year round.

The old foods of the north, the foods of glut, dearth and necessity, like all precisely seasonal foods, have become luxuries, difficult to replicate for the mass market, and thus rendered all the more desirable. Sweet black bread, summer butter, smoked fish; wood strawberries and wild raspberries; wild mushrooms and young kale. All have acquired the status which readily overtakes northern things with their all-important fugacity, the externally desirable conditions of authenticity and pastness, which attend the seasonal gleanings of remote places.

Autumn draws on, and the life of the house gathers into the kitchen, drawn by the warmth of its range. Late abundance of windfalls is laid out on broad tables. We are far enough to the north that only the latest-flowering varieties of apples will set fruit. Shining jars on shelves. Onions and spices stewing with the last spoils of the cold greenhouse. The last chrysanthemums brought in, smelling of earth, and the leaves beginning to fall over the kitchen garden.

And the sweetnesses of wild raspberry and elderflower stored against the winter.

1 Francis Spufford, I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 194–7.

2 Mark Kurlansky, Cod (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), pp. 48–9.

3 Marian McNeill, The Scots Kitchen, reprint (London: Granada, 1974), p. 151.

4 Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 235.