would you try it?

Eating Narwhal

Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker recently visited Niaqornat, Greenland as part of her reporting on tracking the elusive Narwhal. We asked her to share her unique culinary experiences while up in the Arctic cold.Knud Rasmussen, the grizzled adventurer who explored Greenland by dog sled in the...



Knud Rasmussen, the grizzled adventurer who explored Greenland by dog sled in the early 20th century and survived all kinds of wildlife and weather, met his end at dinnertime. The deadly dish was kiviak: whole auks (small black-and-white seabirds) stuffed into a disemboweled seal carcass and buried under a stone for half a year or so, until the birds ferment practically to the point of liquefaction. Kiviak is an Inuit delicacy, rumored to smack of tangy old Stilton, but Rasmussen – though he was born in Greenland to an Inuit mother – didn’t have the stomach for it. He contracted food poisoning and died soon afterwards.

Rasmussen’s fate flitted into my mind last fall when I visited my first Greenlandic grocery store, set beside a tiny airport where I’d stopped on the way to visit narwhal scientists working in a remote Inuit village. The freezer case was full of curious meats: a snowy hunk of a fin whale’s throat, a slab of musk ox. My companion, Danish whale scientist Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen, browsed thoughtfully in the reindeer jerky section before selecting a few pieces for the road.

I’m a meat-eater, which in Greenland was (for once) a virtue; I had been warned that vegetarians did not prosper there. Leafy things, and even grains, are scarce, and sea creatures like seals, whales and even walruses are common main courses. The scientists liked to laugh about a vegetarian visitor who had stayed at their camp, scrupulously avoiding whatever was boiling in the dinner pot. When the man could not seem to stay warm while the scientists worked outside all day, Heide-Jorgensen blamed his diet of granola and other vegetarian fare. “Out on the ice is not where spaghetti belongs,” he told me in his stern Danish accent. “It doesn’t matter how many nuts you eat.”


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/eating-narwhal-57237540/#ksA9OxcXSmfFWqeo.99
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Hákarl or kæstur hákarl is a national dish of Iceland consisting of a Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) or other sleeper shark which has been cured with a particular fermentation process and hung to dry for four to five months. Hákarl is an acquired taste; it has a very particular ammonia-rich smell and fishy taste.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl

Described once to me as tasting like pencil erasers soaked in amonia.

Shrubbery!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027023669