Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.07.2011, Qupperneq 21

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20
the reykjavík grapevine
Issue 9 — 2011
Food | Icelandic
Sound appetizing? There are numerous restaurants in
Reykjavík that can serve you the foodstuffs mentioned in
this article. Don't be afraid, it's mostly harmless...
“Offal”, she says, “on a limited once-in-a
-year-offer”.
“Beg your pardon?”.
“Sheep offal: guts, intestines, stom-
ach lining, tripe, kidney, liver, heart,
some cubes of fat and a bag of frozen
blood, to be more precise”.
A few ladies have made it to the front
of the queue, rolling their carts—now
full with white shoeboxes piled one on
top of the other. One of them squeaks
by with a bag of frozen sheep heads. The
sheep eyes glare as she passes.
“You’re not really expecting me to
eat that, are you?”.
“Just you wait”, says Aunt Freyja.
“With a little elfin magic, offal tastes
like ambrosia. And even you’ll like the
jellied sheep head”.
You see, she plans to turn much of
this slátur (this offal box) into Icelandic
liver sausage (lifrapylsa) and blood pud-
ding (blóðmör); and then, as she tells
me later, since due to the economic crisis,
we’ve got to cut our luxuries, we’re to eat
this with rice pudding every Saturday for
next few months.
You can’t imagine my horror—or
maybe you can. Do you eat the liver sau-
sage and the blood pudding on the side,
or what?
More recently I had a conversation
with Solla, Iceland’s resident vegan food-
ie, in which she told me that as a child
growing up even she ate rice pudding
most Saturdays (one wonders why she be-
came a vegan). Aunt Freyja tells me that
her family didn’t eat rice pudding every
Saturday, possibly every second. “Some-
times, on Saturday, we ate salted cod”, she
says with a smile. I get the feeling that
she gets a kick out of my unease.
I ask her: “Freyja, you’re kidding
about the rice pudding with liver sausage,
right?”.
She gives me the raised eyebrow
then says very seriously, “You know we
can get twenty meals or more out of this
box. Since those bankers lost everything,
we’ve got to start tightening our belts”.
Apparently Uncle Guðmundur eats it
on top. That’s right, sweet rice pudding
with reams of cinnamon and brown sug-
ar, and a couple of slices of liver sausage
and blood pudding plonked on top. The
savoury-sour balances the sweet; and all
of it, the rice pudding, the sausage and
the blood pudding are so packed full of
protein that our hardy Icelandic fisher-
man and farmers can handle Iceland’s
winter winds—or so Uncle Guðmundur
tells me when he arrives from Minnesota
the following January, knife and fork at
the ready for þorrablót (the traditional
mid-winter festival).
One woman somewhere near the
head of the queue starts shouting.
There’s about to be a discounted-offal-
free-for-all but Aunt Freyja, sensible as
she is, tells me to wait with the shopping
cart. Things have soon died down.
“What did you tell her?”.
“I told her that there was enough for
everyone. The rule is everyone only gets
one offal set”.
I look behind us, and the queue of
women and supermarket carts is now
around the corner. There clearly isn’t
enough for all. The white boxes will soon
be finished. We make it to the front of
the line by the skin of our teeth. There
are only five boxes left. Aunt Freyja takes
the lot. Then looks back at the heavy-set
woman behind us, smiles and puts three
back.
“Here take this”. She hands me one.
“You go into a separate line”, she whis-
pers, and swooshes along the canned
goods aisle, throwing in a few cans of Ora
peas, a jar of Danish red cabbage. On the
way home, we stop in at Vínbúð and pick
up a three bottles of Brennivín (Icelandic
aquavit or schnapps).
I can already start to smell the defrost-
ing blood. “You’d better put on some old
clothes for this”, she says, rolling up her
sleeves and pulling out a semi-coagulated
plastic bag full of blood.
Three shots of Brennivín later, the
whole thing doesn’t seem quite that re-
pulsive. I mean, Scotland has haggis,
England and Ireland have black (blood)
pudding and the Spaniards fry blood in
the pan or mix it in with scrambled eggs.
I’m designated the blood pudding
maker. All I have to do is sieve the blood,
mix in a bowl with salt, pepper, rye, oats
and a generous portion of chopped sheep
fat; then comes the best part: you mix this
stuff together with your hands until it’s
the right consistency to be poured into
a sheep’s stomach. Aunt Freyja takes on
the job of sewing the stomach up with
cotton, boiling the Frankenstein-looking
balls, and dunking them in the sour
whey mixture.
Months later in January, the morn-
ing before Uncle Guðmundur’s arrival,
Freyja takes me on another shopping
spree. On this trip, she picks up a little
sour whale blubber, a jelly-loaf-pate made
with ram’s testicles, a tub of fermented
shark or hákarl (believe me, an acquired
taste), some head cheese, and a few bags
of harðfiskur (wind-dried fish)—her par-
ticular preference is haddock for its har-
dier flavour.
I believe we’re nearly ready for Uncle
Guðmundur’s arrival feast, but Aunt
Freyja tells me we need to stop off one
more place first. We end up at a friend’s
home in the middle of nowhere, and you
won’t believe it, but somewhere from the
larder this friend produces something
else jellied.
Back in the car, I ask Aunt Freyja,
“What did you just pick up?”.
“Selshreifar”, she says. “You can hard-
ly get it anymore”. Jellied seal fins. I can
only shake my head.
Of course, it is understandable that all
this weird food comes from the old days
when Icelanders had to make do with
whatever was available. During the years
when merchant vessels couldn’t get to the
country a bit of jellied seal flipper might
have been just the ticket, but now? Why
in God’s name would you eat it now?
“We’re creatures of habit”, says Aunt
Freyja, pouring me a shot of Brennivín
and handing me a desert fork to spear
myself a cube of fermented shark—an
Icelandic tapas-style appetizer.
Freyja has laid on a buffet for Viking
kings. Not only has she brought out the
blood pudding and liver sausage that we
made in September—now truly soured
in whey, she’s defrosted and boiled the
singed sheep heads and, as in the super-
market months before, they glare at me
from the table. When Uncle Guðmundur
arrives he surveys the table licking his
chops, but pays particular attention to the
sheep heads.
“Wait until everyone arrives!” shouts
Aunt Freyja from the kitchen. “Don’t
start picking, Guðmundur. I know what
you’re like”.
But Uncle Guðmundur winks at me,
and reaches over, plucks out one of the
sheep’s eyes and pops it in his mouth.
“That’s the best part”, he says, then pours
himself a shot of Brennivín.
Next time: I find out the bitter truth
about Iceland’s vegetables.
a Box Full of offal, a Bag Full of Blood
How Icelanders eat, PART II
Words
Marc Vincenz
illustration
Megan Herbert
... WE’LL EAT LIKE
KINGS FOR WEEKS!
It’s a brisk September day and
despite the winds Icelandic
housewives, mothers, aunties,
grandmothers have come out in
droves and are queuing in the
food section of Hagkaup. I’ve
never seen so many women in a
single Icelandic supermarket at
the same time. The queue seems
that much longer as they’re all
lining up with empty shopping
carts, bumper to bum. I ask Great
Aunt Freyja what we’re lining up
for and what’s the rush.