Dave Wood

Over the years I’ve discovered that my Norwegian ancestors have taken a bad rap in the international culinary world for their passion for that dreaded dish—Lutefisk, created long ago to preserve stockfish by gutting it and hanging it out to dry in the sun, then bringing it back to life in a solution of water and wood ashes, then rinsing  it in many changes of spring water, then poaching it gently so it doesn’t fall apart, then serving it with huge quantities of salt, pepper and melted butter. So what’s so awful about that? Even TV’s Andreas Viestad makes fun of it on his popular show about modern Scandinavian cooking.  

In my travels around the world, I’ve run across lots of dishes every bit as weird or tedious as this slippery aquatic gift to gastronomy. The Swedes do their best to ruin Norway’s gift to the groaning board by dousing it with gloppy white sauce and serving it with sickeningly sweet limpa Rye, rather than speckled potato lefse. Horrors! (little wonder that “Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian/ The dust from the weeds made snoose for the Swedes in the Battle of Copenhagen!”)

Recently Viestad’s show sent him out of Oslo to Iceland, where he raved about the Icelandic way with goat shanks, even after he found out these shanks were smoked with dried goat manure. (Watch out Kingsford charcoal briquets!)

When Charles W.  Bailey hired me to work at the Minneapolis Tribune as its writing coach, he treated me to lunch at the very exclusive Minneapolis Club. I was expecting lobster Newburgh, but was surprised when all the city’s movers and shakers were dining on creamed salt cod on toast points, a meal my mom served every night until my father’s late milk check arrived from the creamery. Why salt cod, Mom? Because when you soak the salt cod properly, a pound will serve 100 hungry Vikings, and those Ivy Leaguers at the club figured they were dining high on the cod!

Wait! I’m not finished.

Beautiful Wife and I have made several tours of La Belle France where the citizens eat lots of preparations far weirder than snails baked in garlic butter, which we found out when we went to the bullfights in Arles. After the fights we retired to an outdoor beer garden, where an Arab gentleman was grilling shish kebabs on a makeshift oil drum barbecue contraption. The price tag of 50 cents for a footlong skewer of succulent chunks of meat on a whole baguette appealed so we each ate one. Unbelievably delicious! In fact, encroyable! So we both ordered another and the waiter said, “You like??”

“You bet. What kind of meat is the Arab gentleman using?”

“Le couer et le livre de le cheval, monsieur! (The heart and liver of a horse, sir). Merci!’”as he deftly swept all my change off the table with his apron.

When I received my Master’s, one of my profs suggested I could make more money teaching rich kids in Turkey than getting a state college appointment here in the U.S. I applied for a job at Robert College in Istanbul. When I informed the kindly prof, he vetted me on what to expect, which included eating the eyeball of a camel if a rich parent offered this delicacy.

So I never got to Turkey until years later when I discovered that every convenience store featured a rotisserie, on which were skewered a dozen baby goat heads, surrounded by a gaggle of hungry Turks waiting to be served. So you still think Norwegians eat weird stuff?