Posted on 10/26/2013 3:50:55 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Norwegian cuisine is generally sneered at by the country's Scandinavian neighbours. This is unfair, as some of it is very tasty. But here's a list The Local has put together of 15 dishes foreigners find particularly challenging.
The list, available here, mixes outlandish dishes made from things like sheeps' heads or fermented fish, with the boring but unpalatable, drawing on a group of Oslo expats for their opinions.
Feel free to comment on any glaring omissions or complain about unfairly maligned favourites.
One has to wonder how people came up with some of these dishes.
For the first decade of our marriage, niteowl77 and I lived just out of smelling distance of a town that had a food processing facility that made regular runs of sauerkraut in considerable quantity. The first year, a co-worker warned me that driving through said town at certain times of the year would be like "driving through the world's biggest fart." Human nature being what it is, I had to find out if I was being "greened" and didn't have long to wait.
It was a reasonably accurate description, and the novelty of the experience wore thin very quickly.
Mr. niteowl77
I contest the location and source of the world’s biggest fart. In my exposure it’s located in Bayonne, New Jersey and has nothing to do with sauerkraut fermenting.
These places should have some sort of competition for the ignominy of the title. Don’t expect help from the local Chamber Of Commerce or tourism board though, lol.
Bizarre as it sounds, the town I referenced used to have a sort of festival once a year that celebrated the humble fermented cabbage. I wouldn't say they embraced the stench itself, but in the spirit of the old-time farmer standing in his noisome barnyard, they collectively shrugged their shoulders and observed that it was the smell of money.
The little burg I (mostly) grew up in had a sizable contingent of both Norwegians and Swedes, inheritors of an odd sort of unspoken apartheid that a non-scandinavian like myself found both incomprehensible and funny. I couldn't tell a dime's worth of difference between them, but woe be unto anyone who got them mixed them up back in those days. How Lutefisk X was any less repellent than Lutefisk Y escapes me, but there were some fine points in the food arguments of of those days. If someone had gotten the bright idea of sauerkraut and lutefisk suppers, they'd have been responsible for olfactory misery beyond endurance.
(During and after.)
Mr. niteowl77
There is a town in the NC mountains with a large paper mill that is an olfactory assault, Canton. People from Canton would shrug and as you say, respond “smells like money.”
The odor entered into local weather lore, and it was hilariously accurate. If you saw people rushing to the grocery in winter despite no forecast of snow or ice, it’s because they could smell Canton in Waynesville. It always snowed when that happened. May still.
I accidentally tasted a spoonful of that once. It was a pinkish color mixed in sour cream and I mistook it for a fruit and whipped cream salad. The entire spoonful was immediately returned to the plate. My father loves the stuff, though. That and gammelost which is the most foul smelling stuff I’ve ever run into - after Japanese nattoh, that is - something the paternal unit is also fond of.
I love pickled tongue. My Mom made it often. It was much easier to peel after she pressure-cooked it. We could hardly wait for it to pickle before we talked her into cutting off slices for us. Yum!
Thinking about the current foodie interest in umami and organ meats, I believe our current meat supply has been bred to such blandness that people are desperate for the satisfying taste of red meat.
I have noticed something similar in people who eat properly prepared venison for the first time. Just the odor of the raw meat is so iron-rich that it is noticeable.
All these meats are really low fat, as well.
The one in Godley?
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