This is a recipe for Greenlandic salad. Three of the five ingredients are meat – ‘mattak’ (whale fat and skin), seal meat, and seal intestines… That’s a salad. Greenlandic cuisine is heavily meat-based, for obvious reasons; there isn’t a lot that grows here. Berries – yes, some mushrooms (though these aren’t popular), and angelica, which is one of the two non-meat ingredients in the salad. The other one is potato. Berries, mushrooms, and angelica appear only over the short summer. So historically, there’s been little choice but to rely on fish, seals, and whale, and over the summer also on reindeer and muskox. Meat is big in Greenland.
On special occassions, my workplace will hold a breakfast or an afternoon tea with Greenlandic food. Dried cod, fish eggs, mattak, smoked whale, or reindeer if you’re lucky. If this happens, the distinctive smell of Greenlandic food assaults your senses the instant you walk through the door.
That exact sensation was ours to relish on National Day this year. We were fortunate to be in the small settlement of Kangaamiut, where we were welcomed by the locals. After a morning of cake and talking in the town hall, we returned in the mid afternoon for singing, Greenlandic polka, traditional games, and drum dancing. As we walked through the front door, we knew there was Greenlandic food. My husband filled his plate with dried cod, smoked whale, and a piece of something gelatanous and pinkish-white that I couldn’t even look at, let alone smell, for fear of a visually offensive display of my cultural ineptitude. But most grimly mesmerising was the baby boy held by the Greenlandic woman sitting before me. In one hand he held the back end of a fish, gnawing studiously on its apparently raw, fleshy middle parts. Now and then he dropped it on the floor, picked it up, and launched back into this apparently delicious feast. I was both horrified and impressed in the same moment. I wish I could get my son to eat a raw fish. But I expect an uphill struggle given my own reaction – a furtive longing for salad, and not a Greenlandic one.
