Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.09.2019, Blaðsíða 41

The Icelandic
Sauce Universe
Can’t decide what sauce to pick?
What’s to decide? Have them all.
Words: Ragnar Egilsson Photos: Art Bicnick
Whenever we talk about food in
Iceland, there’s an elephant in the
room and that elephant is sauce. So
much sauce. Sauce on everything.
Like a pachyderm bathing itself in
a lake of béarnaise. Like a dolphin
porpoising through a cresting
wave of mayonnaise.
Sauce's early years
The sauce tradition in the west
was born out of the need to mask
the aroma of sub-par ingredients.
Much like how we came up with the
cocktail to make dodgy bathtub gin
potable.
The advent of sauce is usually
attributed to France with their five
mother sauces of béchamel, esp-
agnole, velouté, tomato sauce and
hollandaise. Add to that the French
invention of mayonnaise and it’s
clear Icelanders owe them a serious
debt.
Because it is from three French
sauces that Iceland’s drippy food
pyramid rises: béchamel, béar-
naise, and mayonnaise.
The unholy trinity
Béchamel is the simple combina-
tion of flour of butter, thinned
out with milk until it forms a
thick white sauce. In Iceland it is
known as “jafningur.” Without jaf-
ningur, the 70s in Iceland simply
wouldn’t have been the same. Still
to this day, it’s difficult to imagine
smoked lamb, bjúga (greasy lamb
sausages), salted horse or Christ-
mas potatoes with-
out a white blanket
of béchamel.
Béarnaise, mean-
while, is nearly al-
ways spelled “ber-
naise” in Icelandic
and wh i le it ha s
always had a follow-
ing in Iceland, it has
seen an explosion in
popularity in recent
years. Now, you can
expect to find it any-
where from high-
end steakhouses to
late-night take-outs.
It’s drizzled over steaks, burgers,
fries and pizza without a second
thought.
We got the
cocktail sauce!
Although it literally means “cock-
tail sauce,” Iceland’s kokteilsósa
has nothing in common with the
tomato-based dipping sauce you’ll
find lurking under a prawn cock-
tail. No, no. This is our old friend
“Too Much Mayonnaise” married
to a teaspoon of ketchup and a drop
of Worcestershire sauce. Ordering
french fries in Iceland without
kokteilsósa will get you placed in
the stocks in the town square and
pelted with tiny aluminium-cov-
ered tubs of the stuff.
From kokteilsósa we get the de-
rivative “hamborgarasósa” (ham-
burger sauce) which is literally the
exact same thing as kokteilsósa
except maybe with a pinch of pa-
prika? No really knows and no one
dares recreated it. You buy that
thing in a squeezy bottle, put it on
a burger and never look back.
Digestive slip'n slide
Where does this national sauce
craving come from? One could
understand the need to cover food
back when Icelanders knew only
two spices: salt and
time. The process
would always be the
same: grab some
mutton or fish, salt
it and/or leave it
somewhere for as
long as it took to de-
velop flavour or rise
from the grave. This,
of course, didn’t do
the meal any favours
a p p e a r a n c e -w i s e
so hiding it under
some sauce seemed
sensible.
In 2019, we have
access to new fangled things like
“fresh ingredients,” “herbs” and
“spices,” so why does the over-
saucing persist? My personal
theory is that due to Iceland’s wet
climate, it is important to reach a
liquid equilibrium by ingesting a
lot of dripping wet food.
We laugh at mainland Europe-
ans coughing their way through
a dust storm of a baguette with
nothing but a slice of ham and a
quarter wheel of cheese in it. Sure
you may not want a sandwich to be
the consistency of baby food, but
nobody wants papercuts in their
oesophagus either—put some
sauce on that sub!
Icelanders may have too much
damn sauce—but at least it’s too
much damn something.
41The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17— 2019
Zomming in on the sauce
"Sure you may
not want a
sandwich to
be the con-
sistency of
baby food, but
nobody wants
paper cuts in
their oesopha-
gus either."
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