Sweden

After the day’s filming in Sommarøy, I clambered into a 1951, two-seater Piper Cub with a wooden propeller, and headed for Narvik en route to Kiruna in Sweden where, several kilometres below ground, I cooked chicken with shiitake mushrooms in one of the world’s largest iron-ore mines — it produces sixty to seventy thousand tons of iron ore per day. The mushrooms were provided by a retired mineworker who had discovered that a disused mine shaft provided the perfect environment for mushroom farming. Another cooking sketch completed, I boarded a De Havilland Beaver, fitted with snow skis, on the frozen lake outside Kiruna and flew south to Norrfallsviken, an outrageously pretty, red-roofed, timber-built community where, in front of Sweden’s press and media corps, I was invited to sample the famous Swedish fermented herring known as ‘strumming’; a highly esteemed national dish with such a pungent aroma that you are not allowed to eat it inside. I think it is quite the most awful thing I have ever eaten. I would rather swallow a Good Herrings! Gosh, mouthful of rotten mushrooms washed down with a glass of bleach, but what a lot of fish manfully and heroically, even though I say it myself, I complied with the merry jape.