To make proper dried cod—called rotskjæringer in Norwegian—you have to remove the backbone so the fish can hang by its tail over a pole, with the boneless fillets draped on either side. This butterflying method is time-consuming, but it produces the best results. Some people hang up whole, cleaned fish, but then there’s a risk the belly will close up, which affects the drying process. Olaus Magnus reports that even back in his day the rotskjæringer were the most valued dried cod and were used for the most flavorful dishes.9
While Hugo does the cutting, it’s my job to tie a line around the base of the tail so the fish won’t fall because of its weight. We also have to treat the liver, roe, and tongues. We put the roe in a basin and sprinkle it with layers of salt. The roe shouldn’t be gotten, as it’s called in Norwegian. At the stage when the eggs are almost ready to spawn, the roe is too jellylike and fatty. Fortunately we have only a few of those. As the roe dries, the salt presses out the liquid, and then Hugo will smoke the roe and make caviar. We also salt some of the skrei, to dry them as klippfisk later on.
We put the livers in a big plastic bucket. Over the course of the next few weeks and months, the livers will separate, and pure cod liver oil will float to the top. Then we’ll mix it with paint to use on the walls of Aasjord Station, wherever needed. Left in the bottom of the bucket will be the graks, an oily waste substance that smells particularly awful when it rots. We’re going to use the graks as chum to catch the Greenland shark. Hugo tells me that in the old days they used to compress the graks into palettes that were then wrapped around pipes to keep them from freezing in the winter. The material created a heat-producing gas.
The oil from cod livers is superbly suited for making paint. But the paint from the oil of a Greenland shark is in a class all by itself. In Lofoten there are still houses that were painted with the stuff fifty years ago. The paint gets so hard that it’s impossible to scrape off, and it’s so smooth that no other paint will stick to it. If you want to change the color of the building, you have to change the boards. They ought to paint spaceships with Greenland shark oil, even though the stench would spread through space and give our planet a bad reputation.
While we’re busy with all this, I happen to think about what I read in today’s Lofotposten. It’s March 25, also known as “Great Liquor Day.” The origin of the name is unclear. This would be around the date when first-time crew members had earned enough to buy their fellow seamen a round of drinks. That’s one possible explanation. Another theory is that the tradition goes all the way back to when Norway was Catholic and has something to do with the Feast of the Annunciation, marking the day the Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would be with child. It’s not known how alcohol came into the picture, but, as they say, God works in mysterious ways. Regardless, I seem to recall that I have a bottle of whisky up in my room. I bought it on the Orkney Islands because they said it was the best “salt” whisky made in Scotland.
Mette comes home with icicles in her hair after taking a swim in the sea. She too has spent all her life in a fishing culture and nods approvingly when she sees us. There are guts, roe, livers, and tongues everywhere, in basins and buckets. With loud slaps, we hang up the gleaming, ice-cold skrei on the drying racks as the day’s light continues to recede around us. When the time comes, some of the dried fish will become lutefisk—dried cod treated with lye—but not like the inferior kind some shops sell. Lutefisk made from third-class dried fish will dissolve in water, but ours will stay firm.
The drying process has always included an element of chance, because the quality of the dried fish depends on the weather. It can’t hang too long in a severe freeze, because then it will split—becoming what the Norwegians call fosfisk. Too much direct sunlight isn’t good either, because the fish may get scorched. Luckily, the Lofoten fishing season occurs during the two months of the year when drying conditions are optimal. If the skrei came to Lofoten later, the temperature would be too warm, and the fish would be ruined by insects, mold, and bacteria. If it was earlier in the winter, the freezing temperatures would stop the drying process, and the fish might turn sour from frost erosion. The fact that for all these years they’ve been able to produce dried fish in Lofoten is due to a combination of fortunate circumstances. Not only do the fish happen to come to this specific location, and in huge numbers in a good year, but the time of year is ideal for drying.
As for the skrei we’re now hanging up to dry, we hope for a mild and slightly damp breeze, as well as a lot of light, but no heat—a couple of degrees above freezing—so the fish will dry and mature at the proper pace. A little rain won’t hurt, but a lot of rain over an extended period wouldn’t be good. The professionals prefer to hang the fish with the backs to the southwest, so that no rain will get inside the belly. The air shouldn’t be too dry, either. Warm, stagnant air results in poor quality. Luckily, Skrova is seldom bothered by that type of weather.
If the drying goes well, we’ll end up with the most long-lasting, flexible, good-tasting, and protein-rich foodstuff I can think of. Cod is a lean fish, and in dried condition it retains all its nutrients in concentrated form. Through the years cod has been Norway’s most valuable export item. In Egil’s Saga, Torolv Kveldulvsson is said to have exported dried fish from Lofoten to England as far back as AD 875. The oldest verifiable historical sources reveal that the then market town of Vágar on Austvågøy just north of Skrova was the first to export dried fish.
—
When dried fish sorters evaluate fish for the export market, they consider a number of factors, one by one: color, smell, length, thickness, consistency, and appearance all play a role. Does the fish have gaff marks? Bloodlines and blood spots? Or maybe traces of its own liver on the neck or belly because it hasn’t been properly cleaned? Have birds been at the fish? And of course there can’t be any trace of mold or mildew. In the centuries that have passed since dried fish sorting was made mandatory by royal decree in 1444, the sorters have developed their own language. Sources from the mid-1700s in the Hanseatic town of Bergen, which was largely built on the production and sale of dried fish, reveal the widespread consumption of cod. Various qualities were described as lübsk zartfisk, hollender zartfisk, hamburger høkerfisk, lübsk losfisk, and so on.
The dried fish sorters operate today with thirty different levels of quality, some of which are carryovers from the Hanseatic period. The three main categories are prima, sekunda, and Africa. The Italians pay the most for the sorting called ragno, a thin and flawless fish longer than two feet. The belly has to be open for inspection. All sortings within the categories of prima and sekunda are initially intended for the Italian market. Other, cheaper sortings often go to Africa.
On the plane to Bodø, I happened to sit next to a Nigerian gentleman living in Manchester. He was a fish broker, and he was on his way to Lofoten to contract for futures, as he said, with the dried fish producers. Dried skrei heads, in particular, are highly valued in some West African countries, where they make delicious stews and curries from them. Late in the spring he would sell to Africa the dried skrei heads, which at the moment hadn’t even been pulled out of the sea.
—
For supper we have little burgers of skrei cheek fillets. You fry the cheeks with the skin side down. This meat is somewhat different from the rest of the body. It’s firmer with slightly coarser fiber, and has a shellfish-like taste.
While we eat, Hugo tells me a strange—no, a grotesque—story. When he was a boy, in the mid-1960s, three big pyramidal hjeller, or drying racks, were built in Helnessund. Tens of thousands of pollock were hung on the racks in the middle of summer. In northern Norway, pollock are not normally hung up to dry, but these fish were intended for a different market. Civil wars were raging in several places in Africa, bringing catastrophic famine.
But flies got into the fish. So before the fish were exported, men in white hazmat suits sprayed the fish with DDT, a strong, toxic insecticide. Fortunately, as Hugo remembers, the exp
ort of dried pollock to war-ravaged developing countries in Africa stopped after a couple of years.
—
My last thought before I fall asleep with my clothes on is that someone ought to keep watch so mink don’t come and help themselves to the skrei.
25
The next morning I get a cup of coffee and go out to the wharf. The skrei are intact, but an otter out in the bay comes swimming past Aasjord Station, right up to the floating dock. The otter isn’t exactly trying to be discreet, because it leaps through the water like it thinks it’s a dolphin. Suddenly it stops, rubs its tiny paws together, and stares up at me. Hugo comes out to the wharf, and I point at the otter. After a few seconds it swims away, moving in the same dolphinlike manner. Hugo and I stand there, laughing. He’s never seen an otter swim that way, and it seems a little strange for the animal to move like that in the open bay of Skrova, and in broad daylight. Hugo often sees otters when he goes out fishing around Skrova, and they always seem to be having a lot of fun, especially in the winter. They slide down into the sea from steep, ice-covered rocks. Then they climb back up and slide down again. Their behavior serves no obvious purpose; they obviously do it for one reason only: to play. Otters are known to be smart. Sometimes they float on their backs in the water, holding a stone in their paws. They use the stone to smash shellfish against their chests.
The otter is native to Skrova. The mink, however, was brought here from America close to a century ago, to be raised for its fur. Of course a lot of the mink managed to escape, and they more or less adapted to living in the wild. Mink get into everything and don’t have much restraint, wreaking havoc whenever an opportunity presents itself. They also kill huge numbers of seabirds.
—
In the afternoon we go out in our boat, but not very far. It’s good weather, so in a couple of hours we get a day’s catch of cod. The fourteen-footer is of no use when it comes to hunting for Greenland sharks on the seaward side. That’s not something even worth discussing. Of course, it’s unfortunate because in my small traveling library, I have a book that gives me good reason to believe that right now the deep is teeming with Greenland sharks.
Johan Hjort (1869–1948) was one of Norway’s truly great ocean scientists. In 1900, he set out on a yearlong trip along the coasts of northern Norway on board the “fishery researchers’ ” new steamship, named for the eminent Michael Sars. Hjort was not only a scientist, but at that time he was also the director of Norway’s fisheries. In the north he wanted to record independent observations regarding all the fisheries. In 1902, he published Fiskeri og Hvalfangst i det nordlige Norge (Fishery and Whaling in Northern Norway), which I’ve brought with me to Skrova.
In the introduction, Hjort writes that he wants to shed light on “the big questions that have preoccupied the people of northern Norway, and which have become generally known because of the old conflict between fishing and whaling.” Back then coastal fishermen in Finnmark believed that whales normally chased great numbers of capelin toward the coast, but when whaling ships went out to hunt, the whole natural balance was disrupted. Simply put, capelin no longer came to the coastal areas, and for this the fishermen blamed the whalers. Over the course of one season, they might kill up to a hundred blue whales and several dozen fin whales in Varangerfjorden alone. The coastal fishermen also thought that the waste materials from the whaling furnaces and factories polluted the seafloor.
Since Hjort had set out to investigate both the economic and marine-biology factors for all the fisheries, he couldn’t ignore the Greenland shark. He admitted that scientific knowledge about the species was far from complete, but he concluded that huge numbers of Greenland sharks existed in the Arctic Ocean. At that time there was a significant focus on fishing for Greenland sharks in the north. In the winter, according to Hjort, the sharks might even venture all the way south into Bunnefjorden, near Christiania (present-day Oslo).
In late winter, large numbers of Greenland sharks were found in the coastal banks off Nordland just as the skrei were arriving to spawn. Hjort writes that in order for the skrei fishing to get going, the Greenland sharks first had to be chased away, but he doesn’t say how this seemingly impossible task was executed. In Finnmark alone—especially from Hammerfest to Vardø—the shark was hunted from six ships and twenty-one (motorized) vessels during the years Hjort visited. His description of how the shark was caught shows that Hugo and I aren’t entirely off the mark. I go to find Hugo, who is putting in a floor inside the Red House. There I read him a quote from Hjort’s book. “A big, strong iron hook is used, fastened to a slender iron chain, and with a big iron weight attached to the line. Seal blubber is used as bait, and the fish is hauled up with a small, hand-held winch. Using this method, sixty Greenland sharks can be caught in a day.”
“Sixty in one day! As if that’s anything to brag about,” Hugo says with a laugh.
The fishermen that Hjort interviewed were convinced that Greenland sharks wandered far and wide. In April, the boats fished along the coast, but by May they had already moved far from shore. In the summer, the fishermen had to go all the way out to the eastern ice fields of the White Sea off Russia to catch Greenland sharks. And in September many fishing boats headed for the ice floes between Bear Island and Spitsbergen. Seamen who participated in these ventures told Hjort that they often found remnants of nets and hooked lines in the stomachs of Greenland sharks they’d caught in the far north. Back then, that type of equipment wasn’t used in the Arctic Ocean, so the sharks must have swallowed them somewhere along Norway’s coasts. The fishermen thought the sharks followed the cod on their migration to and from the Arctic Ocean because in the sharks’ stomachs they frequently found large quantities of cod that had been swallowed whole.
Toward the end of the section about fishing for Greenland sharks, Hjort makes a general comment that matches exactly what Hugo and I have experienced. “This fishing for Greenland shark is an extraordinarily strenuous business. In these northern waters, storms rage nearly all year round, and then, of course, it’s especially unpleasant for the small boats to have to anchor while listing in the cold and heavy swells, hauling up the heavy sharks.”10
Some of Hjort’s informants had wrestled with Greenland sharks all their lives. One arctic seafarer had spent thirty summers in a row chasing them. He said that he alone had probably brought in eighteen thousand gallons of shark livers, which were the only parts of the fish they saved. Thanking him silently, I close up the book about fishing and whaling in northern Norway, written by the good Johan Hjort, who at the time of the writing had a brilliant career ahead of him as a researcher of the vast ocean deep.11
—
The skrei are teeming right at our doorstep, and the most agile and hungry of Greenland sharks may have followed them all the way from the Arctic Ocean. Even if we’d had a decent boat, we couldn’t have gone out right now, because the big Skrova skrei-fishing championship and festival is fast approaching.
26
We had discussed the plans for the event last year after we woke up one morning to discover a gale had arrived overnight from the southwest, blowing straight into the bay. Hugo was worried that the same old fourteen-footer we’re now using might not have been tied up securely. Back then there was no floating dock at Aasjord Station, and we had moored the boat in front of the Ellingsen station after returning from a fishing trip.
Hugo’s gut feeling turned out to be correct. When we arrived at the other side of the bay, we found the boat filled with water. We bailed for half an hour, turning the boat to face into the storm so it could float securely with the sea at its bow. Since we were already on that side of the bay, we decided to go to the championship skrei-fishing festival, which was being held at the Ankas Gjestebud restaurant.
Around the corner from the premises, two adults were sprawled in a snowdrift, thrashing around. Maybe they were trying to make a snow cave. A blues band with a well-known Norwegian actor on vocals was clamoring in the background. “A sea
gull / you were; to think that you / should end like that! / The others take flight in the storm, / you stand on a skerry and scream.”
—
It was not yet noon. The rugged party tent set up outdoors had room for at least a hundred people, but it was in the process of being evacuated. The wind had just made a respectable attempt to blow the whole thing into the sea, people and all.
Inside, the bar was packed with customers drinking heavily and shouting to one another, as if they were still outside in the storm. The patrons were all adults, and the women were just as aggressive as the men. When I went over to the bar to order some wine, the man next to me began staring. Finally, I felt compelled to return his stare.
“Want to fight?” he asked.
In bewilderment, I asked the man politely if he wouldn’t mind waiting until I got drunk. He was probably just joking, though he gave no hint of a smile or any other indication that his comment was meant in jest. From where he was sitting some distance away, Hugo had taken note of the incident. When I got back to our table, he asked me what the man had said. He wasn’t surprised. He told me the man was well known for breaking people’s arms, so I’d better lie low.
Hugo was then reminded of a story from his childhood. One morning, looking out a window at home, he saw a man come storming out of a tent, barging through an opening he’d cut with his own knife. Two others rushed out of the tent after the first man, who went racing to the shore. Their tent erupted in flames behind them. A fight had broken out and someone knocked over a Primus stove. The man who was being chased reached the sea and began swimming for his life. The two others got out a shotgun and began shooting at the swimmer, who was trying to make it to his boat, which was moored to a float 150 feet out in the waters of Innersundet.
Shark Drunk Page 17