Mat og Drikke — food and drink

Norwegian food is not, by reputation, a cuisine people cross oceans for — and Norwegians themselves will tell you so, cheerfully, before you can. But the reputation misses the point. Norwegian food culture is less about the dishes than about what the dishes are for: coffee that holds a conversation together, a cheese that means home, a meal that is mostly an occasion to sit down with people. This is the cultural side of eating in Norway. The mechanics of restaurants are covered separately in the Practical section; this is the texture.

Coffee is the social glue

Norway drinks more coffee per person than almost any country on earth, and the reason is not the coffee. It is the kaffepause — the coffee pause — the small recurring institution around which Norwegian sociability is organized. Coffee is what you offer a guest the moment they are through the door. Coffee is the reason to sit down, the frame for the conversation, the thing refilled until the conversation is finished. The pot is the invitation. To be offered coffee in a Norwegian home is to be told stay a while, and the staying is the point.

The foods that mean something

A handful of foods carry more cultural weight than their ingredients would suggest:

• Brunost — the brown, faintly sweet, caramelized whey cheese, sliced into thin curls with a cheese plane (an implement a Norwegian invented) onto bread or a waffle. It tastes like nothing else and it tastes, to a Norwegian, like childhood. The brick of brown cheese is the single food a Norwegian abroad is most likely to smuggle home.
• Vafler — heart-shaped waffles, soft rather than crisp, served warm with sour cream and jam, or with brown cheese. They are a coffee-pause food, an all-afternoon food, a church-basement and cabin and grandmother food.
• Fårikål — mutton and cabbage layered in a pot with whole peppercorns and simmered for hours. It is, by a national vote, the country’s official national dish. It is an autumn dish more than a July one, but it is the meal Norwegians name when asked what Norwegian food is.
• Cloudberries — the amber berry of the high bogs, multer, hard to find and briefly in season in the northern summer, eaten with cream. A delicacy in the real sense: scarce, seasonal, and prized.

Late July also lands the family in the good season for the coast’s plainest pleasure — fresh seafood, and especially cold shrimp eaten off newspaper with bread, mayonnaise, and lemon, the unhurried summer meal of the fjord towns.

The skål

Drink in Norway carries one ceremony worth knowing. When glasses are raised, you say skål, and you look the other person in the eye — before drinking and again as you set the glass down. The eye contact is the whole gesture. Norwegians take it seriously, and around a long table you do it with each person in turn. Wine is expensive enough that a bottle is a small celebration; the traditional spirit, akevitt, is a caraway-flavored thing most at home with heavy food and Christmas. If a Norwegian relative offers a small glass of it, the gracious move is to accept.

Where to taste it

For the family, two stops put the food culture in one place. Mathallen in Oslo is a covered food hall — a single roof over dozens of producers and counters, a good and low-pressure way to graze across the whole range. And the Fish Market in Bergen, on the harbor, is the coast’s larder in the open air: the shrimp, the salmon, the fish soup, eaten with the working harbor in front of you. Neither is a museum. Both are simply where Norwegians and visitors eat — which is the right way to meet a food culture that was never trying to impress anyone in the first place.