Iceland´s Ugly Food Festival (Þorrablót) started Jan 23rd 2015

In the latest Iceland Times there is an interesting article about the „Ugly Food Festival” in Iceland; in Icelandic called Þorrablót.  Þorri being the old Icelandic word for winter – að the noun blót meaning festival so actually instead of the insulting „Ugly Food Festival” – Þorrablót should be referred to as the Winter Food Festival in Iceland.

The food served on a Þorrablót isn´t perhaps very appetizing to foreigners – but it reminds us Icelanders what we had to eat while under the control of another nation, when we weren´t free … and that is an ugly situation to be in.   What is being servered at the Winter Food Festival in Iceland is what used to be the poor peoples meals in the old days.  And most Icelanders were poor and oppressed; under the thumb of the Danish rulers.

What the poor people ate were all parts of the animals that no one wanted to buy (f.x. The head of the sheep, it´s testicles a.s.o.).  Also the food reflects lack of means to conserve food – it was sometimes simply left to rot, f.x. the shark, but to hungry, poor people even the stinking shark was a feast.

It is perhaps more glorified to imagine us Icelanders to be eating the same food at the Winter Food Festival as our victorious Viking ancestors but the truth is that this is the food our ancestors ate after Iceland lost its independence in 1262 and until we got it back in 1944; it has the ugly taste of oppresion and total lack of freedom. Today we just eat Þorramatur or „Winterfood” to remind us of older times.

Ein með öllu

The Icelanders favorite snack is the American hot dog which we´ve turned into our own and call „Ein með öllu” (lit. One with all).  This is a wiener on a bun with 5 ingreedients (that is if it´s supposed to be a „one with all”): Ketchup, Mustard, fried onions, raw onions and remoulade (a mayo type condiment).  This is the taste of freedom the US and in fact Allies brought with them in 1944 for us Icelanders …. and we love.

Here goes the Iceland Times article about the „Ugly Food Festival”:

The month of Þorri begins on the 23rd of January which is Bóndadagur, (Husband’s Day) and ends on Konudagur (Women’s Day) marking that special time of year known as Þorrablót, where Icelanders feast on ugly food in every pocket of the country. Blót = a festival held in honour of a Norse god, in this case, Þor.

The food that is served is called Þorramatur (mat=food) and includes boiled sheep head, pickled ram’s testicles, blood pudding, liver pudding, hangikjöt (smoked lamb) and the most offensive of them all, rotten shark. (heads up- it’s the little pale cubes in the photo above served in their own plastic container). If you are invited to a Þorrablót celebration, there will often be other, more, um… normal foods offered for the squeamish (that’s me!) such as smoked salmon, rugbrauð (rye bread), and flatkökur, also known as flatbrauð or flat bread, the Icelandic version of unleavened bread which dates back to Icelandic Settlement in 874AD.

The first Þorrablót was held by the association of Icelandic students in Copenhagen in 1873, but did not become widely celebrated until the 1960s when a Reykjavik restaurant offered traditional food that was more commonly eaten in the countryside. Neatly coinciding with the rise in tide of nationalistic sentiment in the mid 20th century, the Þorrablót tradition gained traction and is now a popular mid-winter event.

Of course, if you have grown up with this kind of thing, the nostalgia for it will be with you forever. But for the rest of us….

Try it at your own risk!

The abovementioned article was published in Icelandic Times and you can access the original article by CLICKING HERE: