A Taste of Salt
by Bob Brooke

Because of its rarity, salt was long an expensive commodity in Scandinavia, a commodity to the rich, but a source of envy to the poor. When the price of salt dropped, those who could suddenly afford the condiment scrambled to buy it and tended to use it with such zeal in preserving their foods that they gave themselves violent thirsts.

The specter of starvation that once drove fishermen and farmers to salt their fish and meats and hoard them against winter no longer motivates Scandinavian housewives, but the desire for salted food lingers and is expressed in multitudinous ways. In Finland, where body salts are likely to be sweated out in the heat of the sauna, there is actually a condition sometimes called "salt hunger." In Sweden the smorgasbord would be a barren thing without its array of salty fish. And in both Sweden and Denmark, many a housewife will still buy meat or poultry with the intention of pickling it-not, as of old, to store, but to eat right off. Cooks in either country will submerge a goose or duck in brine. Sometimes a bit of saltpeter will be added as a preservative and coloring agent. The bird is then left to soak for a couple of days. This helps to break down the muscle tissue and gives the meat its most marked characteristic, a tender smoothness. A goose so treated is called "burst" by both the Danes and Swedes.

In Denmark the cook will boil a goose in clear, fresh water with a little thyme, and serve it in moist, thick slices with sharp mustard, dark sour rye bread and yellow pea soup containing leeks, carrots, parsnips, onions, celery root and potatoes-and it will be washed down with fiery gulps of ice-cold aquavit and foaming beer. In Sweden a "burst" goose will be boiled and served hot with a crisply frozen whipped-cream sauce, in which there is a sting of horse-radish.

The Danes often use duck as a less expensive substitute for goose. After pickling, it can also be cooked with celery root, carrots and the green blades of a leek. The duck is served cut into pieces, with separately boiled leeks and carrots, green peas, spinach, parsley potatoes, melted butter and to add spark, tying all these various flavors together, add frozen horseradish whipped cream sauce.

When salt was in short supply or too expensive to buy, people had to resort to other methods of preserving perishable food, some of them very odd indeed. Often they stored meat and butter in whey; the Vikings did this and the Icelanders still do when preparing one of their national dishes singed sheep's head. On other occasions, in a primitive attempt at refrigeration, they buried fish in the ground or left it hidden in clefts in the rocks.

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