There She Blows! (Whale of a Tale Part 2 )

So guess what I did? I experienced my first (and most likely last) Faroese meal. I was sitting in the dining room during dinner and Debbie came over to say that they were going to be eating in their cabin in a few and it would be a traditional meal. So I raced up to their cabin to watch the preparation.

Let me start by explaining where the Faroe Islands are for my less adventurous readers. The Faroe Islands are an island group consisting of eighteen islands off the coast of Northern Europe, between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between Iceland and Norway; the closest neighbors being the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland. Because of their location and agrarian culture most Faroese meals consist of fish, mutton (sheep), whale and potatoes, with very little vegetables. So for dinner the Joensens were having dried whale meat, whale fat or blubber, potatoes and dried fish. Jonhard explained to me that the only whale eaten is the pilot whale and that it is not hunted Moby Dick style. Since the villages are so small an entire whale is shared among the community. When a whale beaches itself trained people are called to kill the whale. They use a long wooden spike and drive it into the whale’s head. This is something that requires training and precision since they want to kill the whale quickly but also have as much whale to eat as possible. Then the whale is divided: a section goes to the village like a tax and the rest is shared among the people.

I will try to explain what everything looked like. If you are of Faroese decent and reading this please do not take offence by my outsiders opinion. Let’s start with the smell since it was the first thing I noticed. It smelled like fish. This made sense since whales swim in the ocean, but was odd because whales are mammals. The dried whale meat was very dark in colour and reminded me of venison. Jonhard was cutting the fat/ blubber into bit sized cubes. It was a light shade of pink and I think I expected it to look more like chicken fat – yellow and lumpy. But it was a solid block of light pink blubber and was at least 4 inches thick. Jonhard showed me how to prepare the blubber. Both ends are cut off first: the skin which was a dingy gray and the meat. Then the cube of fat is sliced and cut into little squares. The dried fish was laid out on a plate along with the already prepared potatoes.

Since I could only stay for this part, and had already told Debbie I wouldn’t be able to stomach the blubber, Stefan, their son, offered me a piece of dried whale meat. The taste was interesting, a combination of chewy, fishy and salty. And it was extremely nauseating. I could not believe the weird combo happening in my mouth and was petrified that I might throw up in their cabin. Luckily Debbie offered me a piece of potato, which I highly recommend if you ever decide to try dried whale meat. It has such a strong taste and is very salted that I could barely handle chewing it. The potato helped eliminate the desire to be sick but it did not remove the overwhelming fish taste (a piece of chocolate helped with that once I was in my cabin). All in all, it was an experience and a fun cultural adventure. I was able to eat half of a Faroese specialty called Grind og spik which is pilot whale meat and blubber. Yummy!