Recipes from Norway

As Norway approaches the 100th anniversary of her separation from Sweden, Bergen will be coming up to its 1000th birthday as a city. The Hanseatic merchants’ houses beside the fishing port in Bergen remind us that this city has been for centuries, as it is today, Norway’s fish capital.

I am told that Bergen’s open-air fish market is but a vestige of its former self, that as the city has grown it has shrunk, that there used to be ten times as many tanks for live fish, and so on. But it still seems to me to be a marvellous place, unique in my own experience. At one end are the surviving fish tanks, with live cod and saithe, a sight which I have not seen elsewhere, although it was usual enough in England a hundred years ago. Then come the stalls on which lie great white halibut, one steak from which serves six; regal salmon barely out of the water; and the glistening mackerel to which Norwegians are so partial. Third, in logical succession, come the stalls of cured fish, where salmon, mackerel and cod reappear in new guises, to be scrutinized by the discriminating Bergensers. (I told one Bergen lady that I planned to buy a piece of local smoked salmon for my family. She was aghast to hear that I proposed to set out solo on this errand. ‘Of course,’ she admitted, ‘all of it is good, but to have the best you must go to the best shop, which is a small one known to me, where the man does his own smoking, and to have the very best you must be accompanied by a Bergenser who will discuss the purchase on your behalf. In short, I must take you.’ Which she did.)