Matters of taste

Norway may have given up producing canned fish, but its cuisine is still pretty poor. At the Stavanger fish market you can, however, pick up some very tasty whale meat
July 27, 2007
A short history of fish canning

I love museums of food—the more arcane, the better. My favourite is the Museum (and theme park) of Noodle Soup in Yokohama, with its working replicas of seven of the greatest ramen restaurants from around Japan, its galleries of porcelain soup bowls and—when I was there two years ago—an exhibition of the evolution of instant noodle packet design. I've long planned to visit the New York State Museum of Cheese, about which the New York Times recently wrote a story titled, "Is one museum honoring cheese really enough?" New York Times headline-writers do not do sarcasm, of course.

In June, I went to the Hermetikkmuseum in Stavanger, on Norway's fjord-cracked western coast. This house of treasures has nothing to do with occult philosophy; rather, it's devoted to the more exciting business of canning fish under pressure. It was the French who started commercially preserving fish in sealed metal, around 1830. But by the beginning of the 20th century, Stavanger was Europe's major production centre, chiefly because of the vast quantities of brisling and sild—young herring—in the seas nearby. Jealous, and facing a shortage of fish, the French sought a legal ban on the Norwegians calling their product "sardines," maintaining that the true sardine was the Mediterranean clupea pilchardus, which had been named after Sardinia.

The Norwegians gave in, and so from 1905 their product was known as "smoked brisling," or herring, in Europe—though not outside. The business was unharmed. During the first world war, Norway could answer the demand for easily transported, high-protein food for the millions of men entrenched in Flanders; as a neutral country it sold to both Germans and Allies. By 1915, there were 128 canning factories in Norway, 48 of them in Stavanger. They produced 350m cans—37m kilos of fish—that year.

The Hermetikkmuseum was one of those factories. Its low halls still smell faintly of olive oil; in them you can see the benches where dozens of people worked at brining and threading the fish on to skewers. They were then smoked for an hour, decapitated with scissors and gently packed into the oil-filled cans. That was the most skilled job, exclusively done by women. The men soldered the tins together, by hand until after 1900, when the first of many stamping and sealing machines was introduced.

The most enchanting thing in the museum is the labels: a minor art form driven by the companies' need to produce individual brands for their identical products (not unlike the Japanese noodle packets). In bold colours, the labels depict aeroplanes and Indian rajahs, semi-naked goddesses and the adventures of Nansen and Amundsen. Children used to swap "etiketten" in the playground: now there is a sizable collector's market for the rare ones. But the herring are gone and so is the canning industry—today there are no factories in Stavanger, and just 280 people work in fish canning on Norway's coasts.

Whale and wasabi

Modern Norwegian cuisine's finest moment was probably the day when a Stavanger fish canner hit upon the notion of adding tomato sauce to the tins of sild and brisling. Since then nothing much has happened: you can eat as badly in the coastal towns' smarter restaurants as anywhere else in northern Europe. I found pompous, over-sauced dishes of anonymous provenance at eye-popping expense. This was a disappointment, given the hordes of fresh fish available just a few metres away.

If you want to eat well in Norway, take your own stove. Luckily we had one, on the boat that we had sailed over from Edinburgh on. In the galley, we steamed fjord mussels and sweet red crabs, dressing them with lemon, Hellmann's mayonnaise and chopped wild garlic leaves found beside a stream. We caught young mackerel from the back of the yacht and managed to get the processing of them up to factory speed: off the hook and into the hot pan, fried in butter and oatmeal and on the plate in just under four minutes. They were teeth-creakingly firm and juicy; nothing like the drab ghosts of mackerel you get in supermarkets.

Indeed, you can't buy fresh mackerel in the Stavanger fish market—Norwegians agree that they're worthless if more than a few hours old. But my brother did come back to the boat one day with a bag of wonderfully cheap langoustines and a brick-sized cube of deep maroon-coloured meat, dense and veined creamy-yellow. "What do you think it is?" he asked, looking faintly ashamed. Reindeer liver was the best guess.

It was whale meat. We fried up some slices—they tasted gamey and a bit leathery, like overdone kidneys. A far better solution was to sashimi it. Among the boat's stores were wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger—of course—and we'd been happily eating the fresh mackerel raw in slivers. We tried that with the whale, and it was gorgeous—like the tenderest raw beef fillet, or the prime otoro cut from the belly of bluefin tuna, but with something further in the taste, subtle and not remotely fishy. Was it guilt? We all tucked in, except for my brother. "I just can't: it's so obviously mammal," he said, after one bite. "And I think that noise is David Attenborough crying."