There are many Faroese folk who live in Greenland and our family are friends with some of these lovely people. The Faroese have many wonderful attributes, but their cuisine is perhaps not their highest cultural achievement. Faroese food could best be described as “challenging”, though to be fair I can attest that it does have its good moments. Their food is probably best understood by considering the environment in which these people have lived for the past thousand years or so. The Faroe Islands are a cluster of tiny, cliffed-walled islands in the middle of a freezing sea, more than 250 miles from mainland Scotland and over 400 miles from Iceland. The summers are cold and wet and the winters are colder and wetter. There is so much rainfall, in fact, that the rich nutrients in the volcanic soil have long since been flushed into the sea and next to nothing grows, save the hardy sheep that graze across inconceivably steep slopes, or on seaweed washed onto the rocky shores.
Here is where Faroese cuisine was born. It is largely based on sheep, fish, and whale. All of these are variably dried to provide stores to last the winter, though it is difficult to really dry something in a climate like this. Instead, what has evolved, through necessity, is a kind of fermentation process, where mutton is hung in a cold humid environment. It partly dries and it partly ferments and is then eaten in uncooked slices laid on heavy bread. Sometimes it is also cooked but in the process it does not lose its characteristic odour – the smell of something recently dead. I am being serious.
The first time I ate this meat was at our friend’s house. She opened a kitchen cupboard revealing the intense smell of dead sheep. Similarly, attending a special Faroese dinner, I entered the building and was immediately accosted by the smell. The next day I found that all my clothes reeked with the odour of dead things.
The Faroese, it seems to a foreigner, will eat anything. I am sure they would dispute this, but let’s look at what they will eat: whale blubber soaked for several months in salt water and then sliced thinly on bread, uncooked fermented mutton, sea birds…including puffins. In Scotland tourists travel to remote corners of the landscape to see these endangered and beautiful birds. But apparently they’re also tasty. We discussed this rather challenging issue of the protected nature of puffins with our Faroese friend.
“Well, we use the whole bird” she offered in defence.
“Perhaps” she suggested “ if we also stuffed them afterwards for display – they are beautiful. We could mount them above a little plaque that reads – ‘We ate the inside’”.
