What the cold remembers

Cold is a kind of patience

If you are eating well in northern Norway, you are mostly tasting cold water. Even in August, the warmest month for it, the sea off Lofoten is cool enough that a swim is brief. Cold water slows the metabolism of fish and shellfish, and slower growth, in our view and in that of many Norwegian cooks, is a large part of why the seafood here has the flavor and the firm texture it does.

Scallops (Pecten maximus) grow slowly in cold water, and the Norwegian ones are hand-picked by divers rather than dredged. Eaten within a day of landing, they have a sweetness and a firmness under the knife that is worth traveling for.

This is the plain fact behind most of the claims made for Nordic ingredients. It is not marketing, and it is not the somewhat slippery concept of terroir. It is the biology of cold water.

There is a secondary effect that matters for the sourcing: Norway manages its fish stocks through the Institute of Marine Research, which gives the quota advice, and the Directorate of Fisheries. The king crab is a good example of how deliberate that management is, and we come back to it below.

The stockfish question

Tørrfisk - stockfish - is cod, gutted and split, hung on wooden racks (hjell) in the cold, dry coastal wind until it is dry, which takes two to four months. No salt, no smoke, no heat. Just air. Written sources from the 1100s and 1200s already describe it as a valued export, and it goes back to the Viking Age; by the 1300s it made up more than 80 percent of Norway's exports.

The export of stockfish to Bergen - and from Bergen, by Hanseatic ship, to the rest of Europe - was the original economic engine of the Norwegian coast. The German merchants' office on Bryggen, the UNESCO-listed Hanseatic wharf, ran from about 1350 to 1754 with its own leadership and rules, and controlled the grain imports and the stockfish exports, with a monopoly on the trade with northern Norway. The whole edifice of medieval Bergen sat on top of a single ingredient produced in the fishing villages of Lofoten, Vesterålen and the coast further north.

The trade has not stopped. Modern stockfish - produced in essentially the same way as in the Middle Ages, and protected as Tørrfisk fra Lofoten since 2007 - is exported to Italy, still its biggest market, where it is the backbone of dishes like baccalà alla vicentina in the Veneto and stoccafisso in Liguria; to Nigeria, the largest market by volume, where Norwegian stockfish became part of the diet after it was flown in as relief food during the Biafran war of the late 1960s; and to Croatia and the United States in smaller volumes.

For the visitor, the most useful practical information is when and where to see the racks in working operation. The Lofoten cod season - when the racks are loaded with newly-caught skrei (the migratory cod that swims down from the Barents Sea each winter to spawn in the Lofoten waters) - runs from about January to April, with the racks filling through February and March. A drive through the Lofoten villages (Henningsvær in the east, Reine, Å and Sørvågen in the west) in late February or March gives you the unmistakable visual: tens of thousands of cod hanging in the sea breeze, with the peaks of the Lofoten wall behind them. In a softer season, our Lofoten cycling vacation threads through the same villages by bike, with rorbu nights and quiet coast roads. It is one of the more cinematic working landscapes left in Europe.

Eating stockfish in Norway is, perhaps unexpectedly, less common than the export numbers might suggest; most of it leaves the country. Where it does appear on Norwegian tables, it is treated with the seriousness the ingredient deserves, and the Lofoten Stockfish Museum in Å, in an old fish landing at the end of the road, is the best place to see how it is made.

The shellfish and fish you should ask for

What follows is our working short list for anyone traveling to eat. None of these ingredients is exclusive to Norway - most exist in some form in other cold-water fisheries - but each is, in our considered view, at its best in Norwegian waters and worth specifically seeking out.

• Hand-dived scallops (Pecten maximus)

  In Norway nearly every commercial scallop is picked by hand by a diver, one at a time and only above the legal minimum size of 10 centimeters; dredging, the usual method elsewhere, is not in use here. The result is an intact animal and a clean seabed, and in our experience the difference at the table is immediate. Eaten lightly seared, with brown butter and lemon; or raw, with a squeeze of citrus and a pinch of seaweed salt.

• Norway lobster / langoustine (Nephrops norvegicus)

  Caught in pots in deep, cold fjord water. In our view it has a sweetness and a clarity of flavor that are worth seeking out close to where it was landed. Best eaten cold with mayonnaise (the standard Norwegian preparation), or warm with brown butter and a glass of dry Riesling.

• King crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus)

  A controversial ingredient that travelers should know the politics of before ordering. The king crab is not native to the Norwegian coast - Soviet scientists released it in the Barents Sea in the 1960s to build a valuable fishery, and the first one was caught in Norwegian waters in 1977. Norway now runs two regimes side by side: a quota-regulated commercial fishery east of 26 degrees east, near the North Cape, and an open fishery west of that line, meant to slow the crab's spread. The crab itself is spectacular to eat - the leg meat is sweet, dense and distinctively textured - but the ecological cost of the introduction has been significant. Worth knowing the story before you order.

• Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus)

  The salmonid of the cold inland Norwegian lakes. Arctic char is found in mountain lakes from Hardangervidda to Finnmark and tastes somewhere between salmon and trout, with pinkish-orange flesh. Best eaten lightly cured in salt and sugar (the Norwegian gravlax preparation), or simply pan-fried with brown butter. A serious ingredient that is still easy to overlook outside Scandinavia.

• Skrei (the migratory Lofoten cod)

  Not a different species from the standard Atlantic cod, but a specific population: cod that grows up in the Barents Sea and comes down to the coast around Lofoten and Vesterålen each winter to spawn. It is in season from January to April. The quality-marked Skrei is a registered trademark of the Norwegian Seafood Council, and fish that carry it must meet a Norwegian standard (NS 9406) for handling: bled right after the catch, chilled toward 0°C and packed within twelve hours. Eaten poached with mustard sauce and boiled potatoes (the classic Norwegian preparation), or grilled with seaweed butter. The single most distinctive Norwegian fish ingredient.

• Salt-cod and the wider salted-fish tradition

  Beyond stockfish, the Norwegian coast supports a substantial tradition of salt-cured fish (klippfisk), produced by salting and drying cod on flat coastal rocks. It is the fish behind the Portuguese bacalhau and the Spanish bacalao. Kristiansund, on the Nordmøre coast, became the center of the Norwegian klippfisk trade after the Dutchman Jappe Ippes set it up there in the 1690s and the Scot John Ramsay built it into the town's main industry in the 1700s; the Norwegian Klippfisk Museum is there today.

Berries, lichen and game from the highlands

Above the treeline, the larder narrows and intensifies. The short mountain summer produces a small but distinctive set of ingredients: cloudberries, reindeer, mountain lamb, and the berries that the Sami food tradition has worked with for centuries.

Cloudberries (multer in Norwegian, Rubus chamaemorus in Latin) are the defining berry of the northern summer. They grow on bogs and in the mountains, and have a flavor that is genuinely difficult to describe in writing - somewhere between honey, apricot and a faintly resinous mountain herb. They ripen in late July and August, are foraged by Norwegians who guard their family patches with real seriousness (in Nordland, Troms and Finnmark a landowner may even reserve the cloudberries on his land), and are essentially unavailable as a fresh ingredient outside Scandinavia. They are unrivaled on a slice of brown cheese (brunost) on dark rye bread, or stirred into whipped cream as a dessert.

Cloudberries remain difficult to find as a fresh ingredient outside the country and outside the season; in August, a mountain lodge or a market in the north is the place to look.

Reindeer (rein in Norwegian) is the other distinctive highland protein. The animals graze on lichen, grass and shrubs on the mountain plateaus; the resulting meat is lean and mineral - the closest analogue we can think of in international cooking is good grass-fed lamb, but the comparison is imperfect. Inside the Sami reindeer-herding area, which covers about 40 percent of mainland Norway, herding is a Sami livelihood by law; the Sami are the indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

A specifically Sami meal - bidos (a traditional reindeer stew) or suovas (cold-smoked reindeer) - is one of the more genuinely distinctive things a visitor to Norway can eat, and the best place for it is with a Sami family business in the north that takes visitors.

Wild lamb from the western coast - particularly the lamb that grazes the high seter pastures in summer and the salt-marsh sheep on the outer coast - is a serious ingredient in its own right, and western Norwegian kitchens treat it as a regional specialty.

The cider revival in the Hardangerfjord

The steep slopes of the Hardangerfjord - the long, narrow fjord cutting inland between Bergen and Stavanger - have grown fruit since around 1200, when Cistercian monks from Lyse Abbey near Bergen set up a farm at Opedal in Ullensvang and planted the first apples, pears and plums in Hardanger. From there fruit growing spread along the fjord, and by around 1750 it was a common second income on many farms. The combination of steep slopes, the light off the fjord and cool mountain nights gives the fruit the acidity that the cider makers work with.

Cider pressing in Hardanger is documented from the late 1700s, and it had a heyday from around 1890 to the 1920s, with factories at places like Aga and Lutro. The modern craft revival is recent: producers such as Aga Sideri, Alde and Ulvik Frukt og Cideri now make dry and sparkling ciders from the region's own fruit. In our view the best of them bear comparison with serious Normandy cider.

Sider frå Hardanger holds a Norwegian protected geographical indication, and was the first alcoholic product in the country to get one. Growing the apples, pressing, fermenting and storing must all happen in Hardanger, and only cider made there from the region's apples can carry the name. More than 20 approved cider makers work in the region today.

A guided tasting at one of the cider producers in Ulvik fits into the free day of our Hardanger cycling week, and it combines well with the boat from Ulvik to Eidfjord on the inner Hardangerfjord.

Coffee, beer and the wider drinking culture

It is impossible to write seriously about Norwegian eating without mentioning coffee. Only the Finns drink more of it per person, according to Norsk Kaffeinformasjon. The coffee culture is genuinely serious, not casual, and Oslo has been one of the capitals of what the industry calls third-wave specialty coffee - light roasts, single-origin beans, very serious filter brewing - since Java opened on St. Hanshaugen in 1997.

Tim Wendelboe's espresso bar and roastery in Grünerløkka, Oslo, is the obvious destination for any coffee-curious visitor. Wendelboe, the 2004 World Barista Champion, opened it in 2007. Supreme Roastworks, Fuglen, Talormade and Java are the other names worth seeking out in Oslo. A morning spent moving between two or three of them is among the most quietly rewarding small-scale things Oslo offers.

The Norwegian craft beer scene has also matured considerably. Nøgne Ø in Grimstad, founded in January 2002, has been on RateBeer's list of the world's top 100 breweries in most years since 2006, and Lervig in Stavanger is, in our view, the other brewery to look for. Kveik, the old Norwegian farmhouse yeasts handed down through families, has become one of the more interesting raw materials in craft brewing, and a small number of producers are working with it.

On spirits: aquavit (in Norway a potato-based spirit, flavored with caraway and other botanicals) is the national drink and is taken seriously in the country in a way that surprises some visitors. Linie Aquavit, which matures in sherry casks on a four-month sea voyage that crosses the equator twice, is the most famous; smaller producers such as Det Norske Brenneri in Grimstad and the historic Atlungstad distillery by Lake Mjøsa, founded by local farmers in 1855, are arguably more interesting. A serious Norwegian Christmas dinner without aquavit is essentially incomplete.