Names for the Sea Read online

  Matthew takes me to the Icelandic version of B&Q to buy a bin, and to the National Library, where he verifies my unconvincing assertion that I am a member of staff at the university and gets me a card. The top floor of the library looks over the tops of the pine trees waving in the old graveyard to Esja. It’s a close-up version of the view from my desk in the flat, and I soon learn to monitor the weather by looking at the mountain. If you can see all of Esja from Reykjavík, it’s not going to rain, although it doesn’t rain much anyway, during our first month. The sun goes round and round the sky. The light is always changing: the yellow of morning, gone by 7 a.m., the white of day, during which the city’s shadows are a sun-dial, edging round the buildings like wine in a swirled glass, and then the old-gold and pink of a sunset that goes on for hours. When I look up from my book, I can tell from the colour of the light on Esja when it’s time to go home. I colonise a desk by the window and begin to feel like myself again, ensconced in a maze of bookshelves, high above the university. Some of the books I expect to find in anyone’s National or University Library aren’t there, including the Complete Sigmund Freud and a proper edition of Wordsworth, and a flicker of concern for the autumn’s teaching crosses my mind, but for now I have found a refuge. I take a few days to work on my book, and between times, Matthew and Hulda Kristín get together and, over a week, produce a second-hand washing machine, a fridge and a Danish beech high chair. But I thought there was no second-hand market, I say. There isn’t, they reply. Foreigners never understand this. The fridge comes from Hulda Kristín’s step-father’s garage. The washing machine is from her neighbour’s cousin, who was buying a new one and is happy, though surprised, to take some money for the old one. The high chair was in Hulda Kristín’s attic, waiting for a relative to need it. There are very few shops where you can buy second-hand goods, but the same network that produced the right apartment in the right place will, given time and patience, produce white goods. Thank you, I say again. Thank you.

  I am grateful, but I am also uncomfortable with my gratitude. People we have not known long have given us a great deal of time and effort as well as material objects, and I have no way of reciprocating. Don’t worry, says Matthew, as we pace the sculpture garden near his flat, following the children who are hiding in bushes. You’ll have a chance sometime. That’s how it works here: you tell people you’re looking for a car and someone’s uncle’s girlfriend is moving to America so she sells it to you at a good price, and then maybe she needs someone who lives nearby to keep an eye on her apartment while she’s gone. Or you help your second cousin move house and next year he gives your daughter a summer job. (Or a bank loan, I wonder, or a stake in the public utility he’s just decided to sell off?) That’s OK, I say, if you live here and it’s your family, but none of you owes us anything. We’ve all moved here ourselves, he says. You’re right, usually it’s your extended family who looks after you, but Hulda Kristín and Pétur and I all know what it’s like when you land here and you’re a foreigner and you haven’t got anyone. You can’t do anything here without a clan, not without spending insane amounts of money. So we’ll help you and, don’t worry, sometime you’ll be able to do something for us.

  Foreigner, I think. Foreigner, útlendingur. Ausländer. I have joined the Faculty of Foreign Languages. British people of my generation don’t use that word, certainly not as casually as Icelanders. ‘Foreigner’ is a word I associate with the Daily Mail and the British National Party, a term used only by people who understand the world in binary terms of Us and Them. It jars every time I hear someone educated and intelligent say the word here, but people do it all the time. I won’t, I think, however long we stay I won’t inhabit that mindset, I won’t define myself or anyone else as a foreigner. (It’s not ‘that mindset’, Pétur says. ‘That mindset’ is English, imperial, colonial, nothing to do with Iceland. But it takes me months, blinded by my own foreign-ness and by my unexamined sense that the British own English, to understand what he’s telling me: that although almost every Icelander speaks English, it’s not the same language as my native tongue; that ‘foreigner’ may not always mean in Icelandic English what it would mean at home.) Matthew says that he has heard Icelanders refer to English as útlenska, ‘foreignese’, the language of foreigners. Hulda Kristín told me that the property developer required some reassurance about letting his apartment to foreigners. It’s understandable, she adds, there were no drugs in Iceland until the immigrants started to come a few years ago, and you hear some terrible things.

  So we begin to settle. The Icelandic school holiday lasts three months in the summer, long enough to go back to the farm and get the harvest in, and Reykjavík in July is like Paris in August: empty of locals, small businesses closed, only tourists moving slowly down the main streets. It’s not time to start our real Icelandic lives yet – we’re still tourists too – but we have a base now. I can take the bus to the city and work in the library when I need to, and meanwhile Anthony can walk with the children to our local pool, or to the swings on the headland along the coast path, or to the beach at the end of the road. We eat fish, which is much cheaper than at home and invariably, even from the cheapest supermarkets where the fruit and vegetables lie in mouldering heaps, perfectly fresh. Pétur tells me that when he first came to Iceland, many of his friends had a fisherman in the family and were supplied by obligation, not for cash. We learn that sticking to greenhouse-grown, Icelandic vegetables and salad is a guarantee of quality as well as being cheaper than imports (also a new situation, Matthew says; it was only during the boom, when wealthy Icelandic travellers started to demand rocket and red peppers instead of turnips and swedes, that Icelandic farmers began to grow salad leaves and greens). Icelandic lamb, we find, is a different beast from its small, fatty English cousin. The meat is like game, dense and with a flavour reminiscent of the turf growing in the sun outside. Icelandic potatoes descended from a particular strain in the nineteenth century, and are sweeter and firmer than English ones. I understand for the first time why the earliest English potato recipes are for custard tarts and puddings. So we eat simply, and notice the basics: fish and potatoes, or lamb and potatoes, with Icelandic salad, and barley flatbreads, flatkökur, with Icelandic cheese, most of which comes in yellow bricks labelled ‘kase’, ‘cheese’, and tastes like a very mild Gouda. Icelanders don’t eat much fruit, says Hulda Kristín, but if you want it, buy frozen, and we find five kilogramme sacks of frozen Polish berries and bring them home stuffed under the pushchair. We try not to think about Kentish fruit, and it doesn’t occur to us to think about what we’ll do for fresh food in winter. Pétur, who has been here forty years, no longer notices what I consider to be the fruit and vegetable problem, even though his wife is vegetarian. I bought a book about Icelandic cuisine when we came in May, and then, hopefully, a book by a Norwegian chef which I thought might help me to do intelligent and authentic things with Icelandic ingredients. The Norwegian book has an excellent pancake recipe, but is otherwise full of bright suggestions for dishes involving freshly picked strawberries, crayfish caught in mountain streams, and a glut of salmon, none of which is available to me. The Icelandic book, Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir’s Icelandic Food and Cookery, makes compelling reading. Rögnvaldardóttir begins by referring to the great change in Icelandic society after the Second World War brought sudden prosperity, Americanisation and, in 1944, full independence from Denmark:

  I grew up on a remote farm in northern Iceland in the 1960s. Icelandic society has changed so much since then that it sometimes seems to me this must have been the 1860s, not least in culinary matters. The food of my childhood was partly the old traditional Icelandic food – salted, smoked, whey-preserved, dried, and partly the Danish-influenced cuisine of the home academy my mother attended – heavy sauces, roasts, endless porridge, puddings, and soups.

  *

  I’ll hear more about these ‘home academies’ from my students, many of whose grandmothers attended them in preparation for life as housew
ives, mostly on farms. Even after 1944, young women were taught to cook more or less adapted Danish food. It sounds like the half-hearted adaptation of English recipes for Indian ingredients and cooking methods under the Raj. The Danish influence on Icelandic food is still apparent in any bakery, where there are yeast-raised pastries and cinnamon biscuits, and in the staples of Icelandic home cooking: roast meat with ‘brown sauce’, layered cream cakes and scones. I want to know what came before that. I want authentic island cooking, even though I know that any cuisine is a miscegenation.

  There is no written account of Icelandic food before the eighteenth century. Iceland was uninhabited until settlers arrived from Norway around AD 900. The settlers came up the western side of the British islands where they picked up Irish, Welsh and Scottish wives and servants. The Celts were largely excluded from the traditional narrative of Icelandic history, which is based on the sagas. The sagas are long narrative poems about the settlement years, which were first written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, several hundred years after the events they describe. In the twentieth century, Icelandic historians questioned the status of the sagas as historical truth, and the poems are now widely seen as literary artefacts, but there is still something of the sacred text about them. Many Icelanders can quote the sagas in the way that seventeenth-century Puritans quoted the Bible. Every so often, a discussion in a faculty meeting will end with someone saying something in Icelandic alliterative verse. By the end of the year, I will be able to follow most of what happens in these meetings, but not the poetry. I’ll hiss at Matthew to translate and he’ll reply, with a straight face, something like ‘The fair horse fares fast in frost.’ What? I’ll ask. What? But meanwhile everyone else will be nodding and agreeing, the issue somehow resolved, and I’ll know the sagas have spoken again. They combine the functions of the Bible and the Domesday Book, but offer a narrative of heroic Viking exploration and conquest that skips over the presence of Celts.

  In some respects, the foodways of the Hebridean islands from which the slaves came offered a better template for Icelandic subsistence than those of Norway. The Norwegian settlers were used to hunting deer, picking fruit and berries, and relying on nuts and acorns for extra protein. There was no shortage of firewood in Norway, which made it easy to harvest salt to preserve meat and fish, and also meant that it was possible to cook several times a day and to use fuel-intensive methods such as baking. In Iceland, as in the North Atlantic islands from which many of the settlers’ wives and servants came, there were no native mammals except seals, no fruit, few berries, and no nuts. Although Iceland was forested when the settlers arrived, the woods were over-exploited from the beginning and the bare, treeless landscape familiar to Icelanders for most of the last millennium probably emerged in the early centuries of settlement, bringing with it fuel poverty alleviated by peat-cutting as practised in the Western Isles.

  Given the length and harshness of Icelandic winters, food preservation was essential for survival. Fish was, and still is, wind-dried in sheds above the beach. Meat could be smoked in the chimney. But most things were preserved in whey. The settlers brought cows with them from Norway, and Icelanders have been heavily dependent on dairy produce from the beginning. There was, oddly, no tradition of cheese-making except the fresh curds called skyr, much like fromage frais and still eaten at least once a day by most Icelanders. The byproduct of skyr is whey, which was often served as a drink but also used, in its fermented form, as a means of preservation akin to pickling. Everything went into barrels of fermented whey:

  Fish and cattle bones were sometimes kept in the fermented whey until they softened and then they were boiled and eaten . . . Food that is to be preserved, for example blood puddings, liver sausages, fatty meat, sheep’s head and headcheese, whale blubber, seal flippers, etc., is usually boiled and cooled, then placed in barrels and submerged in fermented whey. It will keep for many months in this manner and gradually acquire a more sour taste. It is sometimes said that all food will eventually taste the same if it is kept in whey for long enough and there is some truth in that.

  It was never easy to grow grain in Iceland, and never possible to grow wheat. Ovens were unknown because of the shortage of fuel so, again as in the Western Isles, where grains were eaten they were either in porridge or in flatbreads and bannocks, but most people relied instead on dried fish, which was, and sometimes still is, spread with (unsalted) butter and eaten like bread as a side dish or snack. ‘Iceland moss’, which is a kind of lichen still used to make tea, and seaweed were used to stretch grains, and also seem to have been the only source of vitamin C.

  I am not much encouraged. The barley flatbreads from the Saturday market by the harbour are good, and remind me of the Staffordshire oatcakes that were a childhood treat with cheese or butter. The children like the wind-dried fish, but I can’t get past the smell. We all eat skyr, but I can’t face fermented whey, much less blood pudding or liver sausage. The recipes that make up most of Icelandic Food and Cookery involve covering everything from potatoes to smoked lamb in white sauce, sometimes diluted with ketchup or pineapple juice. Salads are made of cabbage or carrot and lots of mayonnaise. One recipe suggests that I simmer lambs’ hearts in stock until they are tender, before thickening the stock with margarine and flour. How do you manage, I ask Pétur, what do you eat? Oh, he says vaguely, you get used to it all. But if I want to know about Nordic food, I should talk to Mæja’s husband Mads. Mæja? I ask. Yes, Mæja, says Pétur. You know, Mæja. Mæja Garðarsdóttir. Everyone knows Mæja. I don’t, but I soon will.

  Mæja is a lecturer in linguistics with a special interest in second language acquisition. She grew up above and around her father’s shop, just round the corner from the university, which makes her unusual in her generation because almost everyone else has childhood memories of life on the farm to which they return at every opportunity. Mæja may be unique among Icelanders in being seven generations off the land. She lives a couple of blocks from that shop with Mads, who is Danish, a trained chef who is now a lecturer in gastronomy at the Nordic House. The Nordic House is a pan-Scandinavian cultural centre, unofficially part of the university, housed in an Alvar Aalto building on the wetland reserve between my office building, Nýi Garður, and the domestic airport. Mads and I arrange to meet there so he can tell me what I want to know about Iceland and new Nordic food.

  It’s a hot day, or at least would be a hot day if it weren’t for the wind, which is the kind of thing people say as often in Iceland as northern England. I make my way across the car parks that spread like lakes across the spaces between buildings in this city, and up the shallow slate steps into the Nordic House. It’s one of those buildings that seems to contain more sunlight than there is outside, and there are places to sit and things to read in English and all the Nordic languages. In the atrium there’s an exhibition of knitted and felted hats in dragon shades of green and red, articulated like reptiles, and there’s the menu for Dill, the New Nordic restaurant on site, which I read with envy. Like most of Reykjavík’s restaurants, it’s too expensive for anyone on a public sector salary, but I promise myself that when we find a babysitter and a reason to celebrate, Anthony and I will come at least once. Fish, herbs, berries, wild mushrooms, sorrel: I could learn from that.

  Mads approaches, hand outstretched, smile shining from behind his beard and glasses. Welcome, he says. Welcome to the Nordic House; welcome to Iceland. Shall I show you around? We go along broad white corridors with wooden floors, the walls punctuated by framed pen-and-ink drawings. Everyone’s office door is open, letting me peep into rooms full of light and honey-coloured furniture with bright rugs and cushions, where people are working on Nordic literature and art and design. The Nordic House has recently accepted gastronomy as one of the arts, Mads tells me, so all sorts of new projects are beginning now. We go down a flight of white stairs into the library, which is designed more as a workspace for readers and writers than as book storage, with big tables and low chairs. All
the furniture, Mads says, was designed by Aalto for this building, even the door handles and light switches. It’s an enviable place to work, I reply.

  We come back to the atrium. Shall we go to the café? Mads suggests. I can show you our garden? We go out, across the turf where new goslings are practising walking and their mothers are watching out for intruders. There are vegetable beds, some currant bushes, and even a fruit tree behind what I take to be a greenhouse. This is one of my new projects, Mads tells me. People say you can’t grow apples here, that the winters are too cold, but I think that probably now you can. Some varieties, anyway. The winters are so much shorter and milder than even a few years ago. And here is rhubarb, which is in most people’s gardens. Rhubarb was about the only kind of jam in Iceland until recently. And currants, which you see are fruiting. And then we have Icelandic potatoes, which are genetically different from European ones, and cabbages and onions. Kale, sprouts, cauliflower. I want to grow everything possible. I want to show people how much we can grow in Iceland, even outdoors in the city. And of course, with the greenhouses, everything is possible. Shall we have coffee?

  We go into the greenhouse, whose roof is reflecting a lighthouse beam back into the sun. It’s a café as well as a greenhouse. The waitress opens the louvred panels, because it really is hot, and brings us coffee, and almond cakes which are the nicest thing I’ve eaten since we left the farmers’ market in Canterbury. This is lovely, I tell Mads. Your garden, and the Nordic House, and the café. I nibble my cake, relax into the company of someone who understands how I think about food and why it matters so much to me, someone who, being an exile himself, understands emotionally as well as intellectually why it’s hard to shrug off your own cuisine as you shrug off summer clothes and English newspapers. I thought this didn’t exist in Iceland, I say. I thought nobody here was interested in where food comes from.