Unusual Recipes

by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I talk to school groups about my Georgian books, I occasionally recount tales of Georgian food. It's guaranteed to liven up any group. There's something about food from different cultures and times that is an endless source of fascination for most of us.

So I talk about how gelatine for jelly was made by boiling pigs' trotters in a pan and red food colouring obtained from beetles (both still true, of course, we just don't do it ourselves in the home kitchen any more) and how pulled chicken was made - though bizarrely pulled meat has started coming back into fashion, so it's no longer as interesting.

But one of the most weird and unappealing dishes I've found to date is still the one I came across researching my first book Between Two Seas. The novel is set in Skagen, which is the isolated tip of Jutland, Denmark, and where in the 1880s they had rich seas and poor land. As a result, the Skagen dwellers' diet consisted almost entirely of fish, with some rye bread to bulk it up. And yes, they suffered from all kinds of digestive disorders as a result.
One way of ringing the changes was to eat the occasional fried seagull.

That's right. Fried Seagull.

The recipe is as follows (just in case anyone's hungry):
Pluck the bird, wash it and soak it in cold water with some herbs overnight. Then soak it in milk. Tear the skin off, wash it again and boil it in water and herbs until it's half done. Finally, drain it and fry it.

The bird was served stuffed with slices of raw potato. To quote the locals of the 19th century 'Det smagte dejligt' - it tasted delicious.

I've always rather doubted this, suspecting it's probably an extremely acquired taste. So I googled whether anyone else around the world eats seagull, and apparently the Maori people of Southern New Zealand do - fried muttonbird. According to the American food blogger who tried it, it's incredibly greasy and tastes like a tidepool. I thought as much. You can read the account here: http://cookrookery.com/?p=2449
I think the fact that fried seagull was eaten at all is probably a mark of how desperate the Skagen community sometimes was for food, especially in the winter when the sea froze over. It makes me very grateful for my local Sainsbury's.

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Revisiting Skagen

by Marie-Louise Jensen
My writing at present is steeped in the Georgian era, as I embark on my third tale set in the early 1700s. But right now, I'm in Denmark, and being here brings back so many memories of writing my first book, Between Two Seas.
I was very touched to receive an email in late July from a reader in Scotland. Finding herself in Denmark on holiday, she made the trek north to Skagen to visit the scenes of the novel. This made me think about what she would have seen and what I found there when I was researching the late 1800s.
Being far more recent, there is so much more still in existence than from the early Georgian era. Houses, hotel and paintings are all still there. True the old wooden houses only survive in an open-air museum (Skagens by og egnsmuseum), but nonetheless, you can visit them and see just what cramped homes the poorer fishing families lived in. A kitchen floor of sand, one room for sleeping, eating and living; narrow beds where many people slept. They seem quaint and charming now, but I bet they weren't when nine or ten people were living there through the dark, cold winter.

Poor fisherman's house

The old lighthouse still stands preserved out on 'grenen' the tip of Jutland, just north of Skagen, though more modern ones have replaced it. The splendid old hotel Brøndums, is still open for business and on quiet days, perhaps out-of-season, you can enjoy a coffee or a hot chocolate and imagine yourself back over a hundred years in time without any difficulty.

Brøndums Hotel

Best of all, the expressionist paintings that helped make Skagen famous are on display in the art museum (Skagensmuseum). A rich cultural heritage that captures the essence of life of the town in the 1800s. Currently there is a special exhibition featuring paintingsthat are normally in other collections:

Summer Evening on the Beach at Skagen. Artist and His Wife (Sommeraften ved Skagens strand. Kunstneren og hans hustru) Painting by Peder Severin Krøyer. 1899. The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen.

Walking out the northernmost tip of the country and standing with one foot in the Baltic Sea and one in the North Sea is as popular now as it ever was. In fact this summer, I took my cousin from Brazil up to play tourist in the same way visitors have been doing for a couple of hundred years. It was a bit approximate this year as the spit of sand where Jutland vanishes into the sea was less clearly defined than it sometimes is, but we could still see the waves crashing into each other from opposite directions further out, and a baby seal swam right in to investigate us, which was completely charming.






Grenen