Icelandic Food: the Singed and the Rotten

A couple of years ago I did a presentation on the 10 most disgusting foods on earth for my Toastmasters club. Little did I know that a day will come and I try one of those!

Iceland is a very remote corner of the earth with harsh climate and little vegetation and fauna. Life was hard, winters were long, and people had to get really creative to have something that would pass as edible. As I read somewhere, they ate leather shoes and an odd manuscript to get by.

What made matters even worse, was lack and expensiveness of salt, making lots of food-preserving techniques unavailable for them. 

The food might be awful, but they sure know (nowadays) how to serve it:

So some of the icelandic foods are... drumroll, please... 

...singed, boiled sheep's head, usually served whole, to be eaten with a pocketknife, looking it in the eye. Thankfully, we were served sheep's head in jellied form on a bread, as a sandwich. It was really good and quite similar to traditional jellied meats in Russia.

This is what svith (Svið) should look like:

(photo taken from: eatmyglobe.blogspot.com)

Much worse is rotten shark (call it fermented if you wish - the fact remains that it's rotten). The thing about sharks is that they don't have kidneys, so uric acid accumulates in its flesh and can be fatal if eaten fresh. So Icelanders used to bury sharks in sand for a few months to allow rotting to break down the acids. They helped along this process by urinating on the buried shark. Thankfully, these days there's no need to urinate on it anymore (you can get ammonia in a less disgusting way) and shark is not being buried but closed in vats. But it still is... well, rotten. And soaked in ammonia.

And we ate it! Looks innocent, doesn't it?

The secret is: do not smell it. Just take a deep breath before eating it, take a bite, chew and swallow - all without breathing. Then breathe out, breathe in - you've done it! Take a shot of Black Death. Or not :)

Anyhow, it tasted similar to infamous Russian salted herring. Maybe the taste was a bit more harsh...

The rest of Icelandic foods were a breeze: the puffin (a bird with a big colourful beak), a whale, a dried fish...

And really, who cares if apple pie is called kaka? :)