SC - Aw, the Joys of the Florilegium -OT

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

>
>> Yeah, well, I'm finding more and more interesting things in the Greenland
>> cookbook all the time ...
>
>I must have missed this. Details, please?

I've just bought a rather interesting book called Neri ... Mad Food
(allright, for you English speakers, "mad" means food in Danish, so the
title is really Food Food Food) - this is a trilingual book and the full
English title is "Food in Southern Greenland for 1000 Years". It is a
cookbook/food history/cultural history of Southern Greenland from the Norse
settlement onwards. The book is almost 300 pages and illustrated in color
throughout, with many very interesting food-related photos - most of them
are, I believe, part of a 10-year photo-project by one of the authors.

There are dozens of recipes; some are (reconstructed) "Norse" recipes, some
are traditional Inuit recipes, some date from the colonial period (up to
1980 or so) and some are quite modern but make use of Greenlandic
ingredients, such as seal, musk ox or razorbill.

There are a couple of passages in the introduction that I thought might be
relevant to the current baklava discussion on the list:

"On the other hand, some methods of food preparation have survived through
hundreds of years, while other methods, which today are thought of as "proto
Greenlandic", may not be more than a couple of hundred years old - or even
less!
It is difficult to define the origin today, because to eat Greenlandic
food - and appreciate it - is part of the Greenlandic identity. This has not
made us try to reconstruct a tradition, because there is no such _one_
tradition. Traditions change over time, because culture is a vessel of
remembrance as wll as of forgetfulness. New ways are chosen and/or
introduced - and they eventually become part of the tradition. This takes
place as an on-going process, which produces a result normally thought of as
inherited; but in this process things are forgotten just as well as
remembered."

I have sometimes said that Iceland is - or used to be - at the very edge of
the habitable world. Greenland could be described as a little bit over the
edge. Which is why the following lines ring very true to me:
"The most essential element of life in Greenland is the everlasting quest
for survival. Naturally food and the attitude towards food is closely
connected to that of survival. Hunger and hardship have always been very
real threats. Therefore a festive occasionis the same as an abundance of
food, being able to eat a great deal and to revel in the abundance. Hardly
anything is despised as long as it fills you up. This does not mean that
gastronomical specialities do not exist, quite the opposite, variations and
elaborations are primarily derived from the combination of fresh, old and
dried."

Oh yes, the book is published by Hovedland in Denmark (www.hovedland.dk) and
the authors are Finn Larsen and Rie Oldenburg.

Nuannisarluarisi.

Nanna