Norsk Food

Every August, our hometown of Ålesund holds a matfestival (food festival) right next to the harbor. The best part is watching the chefs compete in making cool looking uncooked food.  Presentation is everything. 

Inside the tents are all kinds of food displays and samplings to be had. If a person actually liked Norwegian food, they’d hit the jackpot by going there – but I’m not particularly fond of all the sausages, cold smoked and jelly-ish salmon, or whale meat.

While walking through the festival tents the year we lived there, I did manage to get a free cup of coffee and a few chocolates that were to my liking, but then I needed to leave quickly to escape the aroma of all the dried fish and sausages.

I swear, you could cram anything in a tube and call it pølse – which is Norwegian for sausage - and Norwegians would eat it. They have every kind of pølse imaginable – even something called “blood sausage” – which doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what it is.  They sell big ol’ coils of lamb sausages in the grocery stores that you just grab and yank off however much you want and pay for it by the kilo. They are as crazy about their pølses as they are about their cakes and vanilla sauce.

I was offered more than one sample of sausage at the festival, and not wanting to offend the vendors, I just responded with, “I don’t eat meat.”  If it were up to me, I’d just eat their breads, cakes, vanilla sauce and cheeses.  Norwegians make a flavored goat cheese with cardamom in it that tastes almost as good as candy.  My husband and son prefer all their dead creatures, however, sliced and diced and stuffed into little packages.

At the festival there was a whaling ship pulled up to the dock selling fresh whale meat right off the boat. A guy nearby was selling stir-fried whale meat to go.  I’m not an adventure-in-eating kinda gal so I’ve never tried it, but my husband, Kory, says it tastes like something between steak and liver.  It’s very lean and high in omega-3s, but I’m still not going for it.

Norway is so proud of the fact that they still kill those majestic creatures, that one of their politicians designed a T-shirt with a drawing of a whale on it that says, “Intelligent people need intelligent food.”

Kory bought ten of those shirts and gave them to a friend from the Makah Indian tribe, back when they were whaling.

Even though whale meat is one of my husband’s favorite foods and he eats it often in Norway, I haven’t noticed it has made him any smarter, however.