Diaspora
Dinners

Signe Johansen

Hot-Smoked Trout, Dill-Butter Potatoes and Quick-Pickle Cucumber

As summer winds down, I find myself drawn to the smoked and cured flavours of the food I grew up eating in Norway, especially the simple, understated dishes my grandparents prepared when we all decamped to their summer fruit farm.

Nestled in a steep valley close to the western fjords, a river separated the prized Gravenstein apple orchard from the rest of the property. We spent long midsummer days hiking, swimming in the nearby fjord, and picking both wild and cultivated berries as each variety came into season.

Boredom was not an option. If we weren’t active outdoors, or helping my farfar (paternal grandfather) Julius sell or barter berries during their prime, we were conscripted into the weeks-long pickling and preserving marathon as commanded by Oddny, my farmor (paternal grandmother) who worried about developing scurvy in midwinter, long after the risk of it ceased to be a problem in Norway.

It was commonly understood that the hunting and fishing rights associated with the farm was where the real value of the property lay. Our family preferred fishing to hunting, partly because we find fish more versatile to cook than game, but also because of the quietude and meditative quality of sitting on a boat in a high mountain lake for hours.

Or as Ron Swanson, the outdoorsy, libertarian bureaucrat played by Nick Offerman in the sitcom Parks and Recreation said, “fishing relaxes me. It’s like yoga, except I still get to kill something”.

Communing with nature, and taking responsibility for sourcing our food aside, this spirit of self-reliance was as much about steeling ourselves against the long winter ahead, as it was about sport.

When bright orange cloudberries appeared in tightly-guarded, secret patches up the mountainside, mountain trout fishing season began in earnest.

Noted fishing enthusiast and Prime Minister William Gladstone visited the village in the 1880s and reportedly caught plenty of salmon in the local river. History does not record, however, if he also ventured up the steep roads to the lakes high above the river and fjord in pursuit of trout. More’s the pity because Norwegian mountain trout is arguably a greater delicacy than salmon.

The task of catching, salting, and hot-smoking the trout every year fell to my father and his old school friends who make it their mission to catch and preserve as many fish as possible in a lake only accessible via our friend Kjetil, whose fjellhytte (mountain cabin) has sole fishing rights.

Sadly, we haven’t been fishing together at the lake in a few years – hence this dish, which requires an economy of effort to prepare, and is a tribute to all that is wholesome and delicious about Norwegian food culture.