At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Iceland

Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir

Nanna has thousands of cookbooks on her shelves and has cooked all kinds of meals from them for her family, sometimes wonderful, sometimes weird, and frequently both. But when they are all coming for dinner and she wants to make absolutely sure to make everybody happy, she cooks for them an old favorite, kjöt í karríi. And when she announces that this is what is for dinner, there is always applause.

Kjöt í karríi, which translates as “meat in curry,” is not a remarkable dish in any way; it is chunks of lamb on the bone, simmered until tender. A mild curry sauce is made from the stock, flavored with curry powder and thickened with flour. This is served with boiled white rice and traditionally potatoes and sometimes carrots, although the potatoes, a remainder of the times when Icelanders refused to recognize anything that wasn’t served with potatoes as a proper meal, are often left out now. The dish has been popular in Iceland since the mid-19th century and was probably the spiciest thing many people ever had.

Albala

The whole family gathers around the table for one of their favorite old-fashioned dishes. Chunks of lamb and mounds of rice are eagerly heaped on every dish and curry sauce is ladled liberally over the servings, but most of the vegetables remain on the serving platter. (Courtesy of Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir)

Nanna’s family loves it. Today they are coming to dinner—all except her daughter-in-law, who is abroad working on her doctoral thesis and prefers her mother’s kjöt í karríi anyway, so she won’t miss it—and Nanna needs to go out to buy some lamb. Usually she would go to a nearby grocery store, but today a market has been set up in the foyer of the gleaming new Harpa concert hall—not where one would usually expect to find a farmers’ market, but this is Iceland, where sometimes things are done differently—and someone there will probably have some nice lamb.

Nanna goes there and browses the stalls, tastes several things, and buys some goat meat, a couple of hanger steaks (hard to find elsewhere), some smoked mackerel, and smoked cod’s roe. And then she comes across the farmers from Hrólfsstaðahellir, a farm in southern Iceland. They have some succulent-looking horse steaks, which she doesn’t need now; a horse sausage that she tastes but finds a bit too dry; and a cooler full of different cuts of lamb. She browses through the vacuum-packed offerings and finds several promising-looking chunks of sirloin, so she buys roughly four and a half pounds. Icelandic lamb is slaughtered fairly young after having grazed on herbs and hardy mountain grasses in the wilderness for a few months, and Nanna knows that it will be both tender and tasty; these farmers know how to raise meat.

When Nanna comes home it is already time to start the cooking, so she goes into the kitchen, gets one of the larger pans out of the cupboard, and places the meat in it. There is not much external fat so she sees no need for trimming it, as she might have done with regular soup meat from a supermarket. Nanna was brought up in a farm culture where fat, a much-needed source of energy in a cold climate, was highly appreciated, and her mother would never have trimmed it from the meat. The young urbanites she is cooking for on this occasion think differently and generally dislike fat.

Nanna adds cold water to just cover the meat, around two quarts, and turns on the burner. When the meat has boiled fairly briskly for a few minutes, she uses a slotted spoon to skim the broth. She adds powdered lamb stock, a bay leaf, salt, and some carrots. Then she lowers the heat and simmers the lamb for just over an hour.

Supermarket Layout and Shelving

In supermarkets the fresh and refrigerated foods range around the periphery of the store, ostensibly for access to electricity. Actually, the higher-priced packaged goods are intentionally placed in the center aisles for greater access, because they are significantly marked up and last longer on the shelf, yielding higher profits for the owner. The end of each aisle is also key, where one finds snacks and foods bought on impulse. Even the arrangement on the shelves is carefully considered. Eye-level shelves are the most important, and manufacturers sometimes pay to have their products placed there, though foods marketed to children are always at their own eye level.

There is not much to do in the kitchen during this time, so Nanna goes into the dining room to tidy up—there are tablecloths, runners, napkins, plates, and cutlery everywhere because she has been quite busy recently taking photographs for a book she is working on and was using the dining room as the studio, so she needs to get all the styling paraphernalia out of the way.

When that is done, Nanna pulls out one of the dining table extension leaves, as there will be seven people for dinner. The table is old and full of character, and when there are fewer people and she doesn’t need the extensions, she rarely uses a tablecloth. But the extension leaves are of a different color than the tabletop, so she fetches back one of the tablecloths she just put away. The weather has been rather inclement recently, but today is the first sunny day for many weeks, so Nanna decides to use a cheerful green tablecloth that she also thinks fits the food nicely, though she can’t be bothered to iron it for this crowd. She does have matching cloth napkins but she’s not using them this time, on a weekday.

Nanna also thinks about which plates to use. Her granddaughter’s boyfriend is coming, and as he is not quite family yet she is not using the everyday plates—instead Nanna opts for her third-best set of plates. They are white with an embossed floral pattern. She wouldn’t use anything more fancy than that for this type of food. She also uses the everyday steak cutlery and plain water glasses that she buys in bulk from IKEA. There are no wineglasses; wine is rarely served with everyday food here, and although she fleetingly thinks about asking one of her wine-buff friends to suggest a matching just for fun, she would never serve anything but water with this dish. Forty years ago, milk would have been the norm; Nanna’s family used to drink milk with every meal. Even when she was in college, the jugs that were placed on the tables in the canteen contained milk, not water. You had to ask at the counter if you wanted water.

Nanna’s son arrives while she is setting the table, and her daughter and her family—her husband, her two children, and the aforementioned boyfriend—appear while she is cooking a pound of rice to serve with the lamb curry. “Ah, the good rice!” the grandson exclaims when he discovers Nanna is using white rice. His more health-conscious mother always uses brown rice. Out of habit, Nanna also cooks a few potatoes although she knows it is unlikely anyone will want them.

The only thing that is left is making the curry sauce, so Nanna removes the meat and carrots from the pan with a slotted spoon onto a serving platter and keeps it warm. Then she half-fills an old jam jar with cold water, adds several heaped tablespoons of flour and a couple of tablespoons of curry powder (or rather what is left in the box, as she doesn’t actually measure it), shakes the closed jar vigorously, and stirs the yellow sludge briskly into the boiling broth to thicken it. If she was preparing a smaller amount of sauce she would make a curry roux, but this time she takes a shortcut. Nanna uses all the broth for the sauce so there is an awful lot of it, but she knows her family. She tastes it and adds a little pepper; then the curry sauce can be left to simmer unattended, so she joins the family in the living room.

Starters are rarely served with everyday meals in Iceland, and there is little if any tradition for them in many homes—Nanna doesn’t recall her mother serving a single dish during her more than 60 years as a housewife that could be considered a starter—and Nanna would only offer something to nibble on before a meal of this type if she had been trying out a new recipe and wanted to test the results on the family. But she doesn’t have anything now, so the family just chats.

After 10 minutes or so the sauce is ready, and so is everything else. Nanna carries the platter of meat and carrots to the table, along with a big bowl of rice and another of curry sauce, and tells her family to be seated. They almost invariably take the same seats every time, but if someone should decide to switch, that wouldn’t cause any trouble—except if someone appropriates Nanna’s seat at the head of the table, of course.

Nanna is the matriarch of the family, and there is an unwritten rule that no one puts anything on his or her plate until she sits down and says “gjörið svo vel” (please begin). This is how home meals usually start in Iceland, and if someone sneaked something onto his or her plate before the magic words had been uttered, someone else would probably yell at the person or at least frown. Not even the grandson breaks this rule in this family. But the family does not wait for Nanna to serve herself first or expect her to serve them.

Everyone helps himself or herself, and there is no particular order; however, if there are children who need some assistance with their food, someone usually helps them first before starting on his or her own meal. And if there was an outside guest, most of us would wait for that person to begin serving himself or herself, although the always hungry grandson might not have patience for that. The boyfriend is now such a familiar face at the dinner table that he has lost this status, and no one waits for him to begin.

If something needs to be added to the table, Nanna always gets up and fetches it herself, except that one of the others may go and fill the water pitcher from the kitchen tap. On this occasion she needs to go twice into the kitchen to refill the large sauce bowl, because everyone likes to drench the food in curry sauce. But she is prepared for this.

The granddaughter, usually a rather moderate eater who often can’t finish even a normal portion of food, heaps her plate with rice and cut-up meat and pours several ladles of curry sauce over it. “This is how it should be,” she tells the boyfriend, who is quick to imitate her. Then they dig in.

The dinner is very informal, as most of this family’s meals are. The grownups have mostly come straight from their workplace and are wearing their everyday clothes. Nanna’s grandson came directly from track practice, so he is hungry. He always is, but this time he is hungry enough for three large helpings. Most of the others have at least two helpings. The evening meal is always timed to begin at 7:00 unless someone has asked for it to be put forward or backward for some reason. The TV is on in the adjoining living room so they can hear the 7:00 news, but there is rarely anything interesting enough to make anyone leave the table to watch, except maybe sports. But today nothing seems to be happening, so even the grandson makes no effort to leave the table until everyone has finished the main course.

The family talks a lot over dinner and laughs a lot. Anything goes, more or less: politics, which the family fortunately mostly agrees on; work; weather; TV shows, which invariably means that the son needs to use his iPhone to show his sister something he has found on YouTube; dogs, which means that the son-in-law reaches for his iPhone to show some photos of their Labradors; sports; and invariably, food. The granddaughter gets a few text messages that she absolutely has to read and respond to during the meal. The son teases the daughter; the daughter teases the son. The grandson asks for help in cutting the meat off the bone, and although everyone tells him that as he is now a teenager he should be able to do it himself, he still gets the assistance he asked for, along with some teasing. Someone mentions sheep from the Skagafjörður region, and everyone laughs at Nanna’s expense except the boyfriend. He looks a bit confused; he is not quite used to the family yet and doesn’t know about the running jokes in the family.

The grandson, having eaten more than anyone else, is allowed to leave the table even though the grown males are still finishing their meat and curry. He borrows Nanna’s laptop and places himself firmly in front of the TV. By the time everyone has finished the main course, there is one small piece of meat and one carrot left and a little sauce, but the rice bowl has been almost licked clean. No one has touched the potatoes, of course; Nanna has planned to use them in another dish tomorrow anyway. The son collects the plates and carries them to the kitchen while Nanna fetches dessert plates, forks, and spoons.

Nanna often serves more than one dessert, as she does a lot of testing and may have several desserts stored in the fridge or freezer. This time there are three—all sugar free and without sugar substitutes, as Nanna has recently discovered that she is prediabetic and decided to quit sugar, as the daughter did two years ago, and try to develop less of a sweet tooth. They do eat fruit and fruit-sweetened desserts and cakes, however. Nanna is also working on a sugar-free cookbook, so there is a coconut rice pudding with pineapple and mango; baked apples with nuts, raisins, and almond butter; and fruit-flavored ice cream. Everyone likes at least some of the desserts except the son, who announces that life was better on the whole before his sister and Nanna quit sugar. He gets little sympathy.

The grandson returns to the table for dessert. He devours three large helpings of ice cream and tries to stuff some huge chunks into his mouth. He is told that this isn’t polite and that if he behaves like that when Nanna takes him to Rome in the spring, the Italian food police will probably arrest him for bad table manners. “But I’m not in Rome now, am I?” he says gleefully and gobbles up another large bite. The next one is smaller, though.

The family remains at the table for quite some time after they have finished the desserts, all except the grandson, who prefers the TV and the computer to their company. As always, Nanna asks the son to make coffee. As a former barista, he does this dutifully and skillfully and brings the coffee to the table in a coffee press. He also gets out the coffee cups, a typical mismatch from the kitchen cupboard. Nanna does have several sets, but they are only used when there are outside guests. The granddaughter and the boyfriend do not want any coffee, but they remain at the table and take part in the conversation.

The walls of the dining room are covered by rows and rows of cookbooks. Usually it is Nanna who reaches for one of them when something comes up in a dinner conversation, but this time the talk somehow turns to nose sizes, and the son starts to search for something he is absolutely sure he saw in one of the cookbooks—he is adamant that there is a photo of a man with the world’s largest nose, somehow connected with caviar. The son goes through all the Russian cookbooks but doesn’t find it.

The grandson is competing in a track meet early tomorrow morning and has to go to bed early, so his parents prepare to take him home, and the others decide to leave as well. They all say “takk fyrir matinn” (thank you for the food) as they rise from their seats, as is always done here, and Nanna’s reply is “verði ykkur að góðu,” which may be translated as “may it benefit you” or something along those lines. It would be considered very impolite to leave the table without thanking the host in this manner.

The son collects the dessert plates and brings them into the kitchen. They all say their goodbyes and go away, and as there are almost no leftovers, all that is left for Nanna to do is to rinse the plates and fill the dishwasher. Then she sits back and relaxes. And somehow her thoughts bring back visions of the farm kitchen of her childhood and her mother cooking kjöt í karríi for everyone.

Lamb Curry

Serves 4

1½ to 2 pounds lamb, on the bone

Salt

2 teaspoons lamb stock powder, or to taste

1 bay leaf

3 to 4 medium carrots

1½ tablespoon butter, softened

2 tablespoons flour

2 teaspoons curry powder, or to taste

Freshly ground pepper

1.The meat should be cut into fairly large chunks. Cut away excess fat, rinse the meat in cold running water, and put it into a pan.

2.Add enough water to just cover and bring to a boil.

3.Skim and add 1 teaspoon of salt and the bay leaf and carrots. Simmer for around an hour, or until the meat is tender. Remove it, with the carrots, to a plate and keep hot.

4.Strain the broth into a pitcher.

5.Wash and dry the pan and put it back on the cooker at medium heat. Melt the butter, then add flour and curry powder and stir until smooth.

6.Gradually stir in the hot broth until the thickness of the sauce is to your liking—it should be fairly thin. Alternately, just shake flour and curry powder with some cold water and stir into the hot broth.

7.Bring to a boil and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Season to taste.

Serve the sauce with the meat and vegetables, along with boiled long-grain rice and maybe some potatoes.