A victuals primer, vol. 1: Embrace the brødskive
Random notes & travel tips! So you plan on travelling Norway (only the only the fourth most expensive country to visit!) on one or two shoestrings, which means you're going to avoid eating out and instead rely on supermarkets.
At this point you may be wondering to yourself, what kinds of exotic foodstuffs will I need to sort through to feed myself? How will I know what everything is? Is it going to be a bunch of weird stuff with names like out of the Ikea catalog?
Don't worry, it's not shelf upon shelf of Lutefisk and fermented trout. Most of what you see will be perfectly familiar. We'll get you through this. Let's start with the most Norwegian of Norwegian staples: Brød. Bread!
Understand this. Internalize this. Norwegians live on bread. Bread is the default meal. Breakfast? Bread. Lunch? Bread. (Eating out … don't be effete, you urban elite, you.) Dinner? Maybe something else. Late-night snack? Bread. The ur-Norwegian brødskive, the ubiquitous open-face sandwich, is modest, trusty, and versatile. The nation runs on brødskiver, and when in Norway so should you, because the fixings are available everywhere, in the tiniest store in the tiniest place in the farthest corner of the farthest fjord.
You, too, can easily learn to create and enjoy one. Here are the universal instructions for creating a Norwegian brødskive:
- Take a slice of bread.
- Spread butter on slice of bread.
- Place toppings on slice of bread.
Preparation time 2 minutes or less.
Toppings include …
- Ost: Cheese. Pick any cheese you like, and buy it already sliced if you don't have a cheese slicer about you. (Americans: Sorry, you're unlikely to find the orange stuff called ”cheddar“.)
- Norvegia, Jarlsberg, and simply Gulost are ubiquitous. ”Gulost“ is aptly named, because gulost in Norwegian means simply ”yellow cheese“, which is to distinguish it from …
- Brunost! You may have heard of it. Brunost is not strictly speaking cheese. It's caramelized whey. Norway is its birthplace and the only place anyone really eats this stuff, so to compensate we've practically made it a national food. It is delicious with butter on bread or waffles. Gudbrandsdalsost and Fløtemysost are sweetish, while more traditional varieties, including Ekte Geitost, is made from all or mostly goats' milk and has a sharper flavor.
- Kjøttpålegg: Meats. Oh boy. Here you'll have a lot of choices in even the smallest grocery store, sliced, packaged, and ready to go: Traditional cured sausage, the darker, the gamier (fair warning, this is usually made of mutton); salami (the kids love the danish-style soft, red stuff we call dansk salami or danskepølse; skinke — ham, cooked or cured (look for spekeskinke; and the prize of prizes if you like lamb — fenalår, which is cured leg of lamb.
- Syltetøy: Jams, preserves, and jellies. It's what you'd expect. Try blåbær. Norwegian blueberries have more concentrated flavor, and the preserves are seriously good.
- Smøreost: Spreadable cheese in a tube! This stuff is so versatile I devoted an entire post to it.
- Prim: Spreadable brunost. It looks and spreads like peanut butter, but it's caramelized, sweet, and excellent on bread. When I'm back in Norway I go through tubs of it.
- Leverpostei: Liver paste. Kind of like French paté, only, yech, that would be giving it too much credit. Hey, if you like liver, have at it, but I do not.
- Kaviar: Cod roe in a tube. No, really. It's mushed into kind of a paste. Salty, and, well, sort of caviar-ish. If you're into that sort of thing. Goes well with sliced, hard-boiled egg, actually. Really.
- Flykræsj: Plane crash! No, sorry, it's actually called makrell i tomatsaus — mackerel fillets in tomato sauce. This is one of my absolute favorites. I can down tins of this several times a day. Now … you need to like fish. I mean, really like fishy fish. If you don't, this is not for you.
Morning bliss with plane crash and mayonnaise.
Embellishments! This is where Norwegians get creative. Majones, mayo, and sliced agurk, cucumber, pair well with meats. Sliced paprika, which in Norwegian means the fruit as well as the spice, on cheese. Yellow cheese, not brown cheese. Yech. Sliced tomato on ham. All of these things are available in any grocery store.
The bread itself is usually fresh daily except maybe on Sunday. The staples are all whole grain. Norwegians care so much about being regular that the packaging, usually simply a paper sack, includes a label specifying how much fiber you'll be pushing through your system.
Fint is fine, in other words white, and grovt means, literally, rough. If in doubt, just go straight down the middle and get trusty old kneip. It should have a good crust on it and keeps well for a couple-three days.
A word on how to buy bread. You could just grab a loaf and go pay for it, but a couple of steps will improve your brødskive experience while on the road. Almost every store has a bread slicing machine. It's dead simple. Just drop your loaf (that was intentional) in the opening at the top, horizontally, and the machine starts automatically, so you don't have to stand there feeling like a dummy looking for the on-switch. (Also, don't shove your hand in there.) Now, there's a narrow tray poking out. What's that for? To bag your loaf, of course! Set the sliced loaf on that little tray, grab one of the supplied plastic bags, and pull it over the bread like a condom over a banana. Presto: Now your bread won't dry out. Keep the original paper bag so they can ring it up at the cash register, or put your plastic-bagged loaf in it, doesn't matter.
The base of any good brødskive is butter, so grab a tub of smør (butter) — look for lettsaltet or setertype, both of which are lightly salted. If you're of the margarine persuasion, get Bremykt, which is a seriously convincing butter substitute.
Now all you need is some paper plates and butter knives; cheese slicer, unless you get pre-sliced; a cooler; and a picnic table.
And there you go. Norwegian road trip meal.
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