Ask an anthropologist what a society values and you will often be pointed towards its kitchen. What people eat, how they prepare it and who sits at the table says a great deal about climate, work, belief and memory. Iceland makes the case very clearly.
This article looks at Icelandic food as a way of studying culture. It is not a recipe. It treats dishes as evidence, and the same approach works for artists and researchers in any place they choose to work.
What foodways means
Foodways is the study of how a community grows, gets, prepares, shares and remembers its food. It covers the ingredient, but also the tools, the calendar, the unwritten rules about who cooks and who eats first, and the stories told over the meal. A dish is less a product than a document that people have been writing for generations.
This is useful for anyone whose work starts from practice. Cooking is knowledge held in the hands. Nobody learns to cut a leaf bread pattern from a manual; they learn it standing next to someone who already can. That kind of knowledge is hard to capture in text, which is exactly why it rewards close attention.
Scarcity written into the menu
Iceland is a volcanic island in the North Atlantic with a short growing season. For most of its history there was little grain and almost no trees for fuel. Food had to last through the winter, so preservation shaped the cuisine: fish was hung in the wind, lamb was smoked, dairy was soured and stored in whey.
Take harðfiskur. Cod or haddock is dried in cold, dry coastal air until it keeps for months, then torn into strips and eaten with butter. Today it is a snack. Once it was insurance against a bad winter. The method is a record of the place, because it only works with the wind and the cold of the Icelandic coast.
Fermented shark is stranger still. Hákarl is made from Greenland shark, whose fresh flesh is poisonous. It has to be buried and then hung to dry for months before anyone can safely eat it. Whatever you think of the taste, it shows a community solving a problem with what the sea handed them. Over time the solution became a marker of identity. Offer it to a visitor and watch what happens: the dish is now also a story Icelanders tell about themselves.
Food as a calendar
The Icelandic year is marked out with meals. Midwinter brings the þorrablót feast, with plates of sour, smoked and cured meats. Christmas Eve brings smoked lamb. In each case older foods are brought back on purpose, long after modern shops made them unnecessary.
That is worth noticing. People keep cooking certain things after the need has gone because the meal carries something else: continuity, humour, a shared test of nerve, a way to say that this is how we do it here.
Laufabrauð is the clearest example. Paper-thin discs of dough are cut with a small knife into lace-like patterns, folded and fried. Families gather in December to make them, and the patterns are personal and handed down. The bread is edible, but the real product is an afternoon spent together and a design vocabulary passed from one generation to the next. Any artist will recognise that as a craft tradition.
How to read a dish as research material
You do not need special equipment to study food this way. You need a few steady questions, asked patiently, of a dish and of the people who make it:
- Where does the ingredient come from, and who controls access to it?
- What work does the method demand, and who usually does it?
- When is it eaten, and what happens if it is left off the table?
- Who is expected to enjoy it, and who is teased for refusing it?
- What has changed since a grandparent's time, and who decided it should?
The answers will rarely agree. Do not smooth that over. The pattern of disagreement, such as which family adds sugar and which calls that a betrayal, is often the most revealing part of the study.
Keep field notes of the ordinary kind. Photograph the hands as well as the plate. Record the sound of the kitchen. Write down the words people use, because names like svið and slátur carry meaning that translation tends to drop. A word for a cut of meat can tell you how a household thinks about waste, thrift and respect for the animal.
Why this suits artistic research
Artistic research works through making, and food is a natural partner for it. It is material, sensory, shared and temporary. A meal disappears as it is eaten, so the way you document it becomes part of the work. A photograph, a recorded conversation, a handwritten recipe card and a video of hands at work each preserve something different, and none preserves everything.
Food also resists the distance that academic writing often creates. You cannot study a fermented shark from across the room. You have to smell it, taste it, and sit with the people who grew up eating it. That closeness brings ethical questions worth taking seriously: whose tradition is this, who gave permission for it to be studied, and how will the people involved see the result?
Read more about art based research at Artistic-Research.no.
A small study to try
Choose one dish from a place you know well, or one you want to understand. Cook it with someone who already makes it, and let them correct you. Take notes on what they say and what they do without saying. Then ask the five questions above and write down the answers without judging them.
Next, cook the same dish with a second person and compare. The differences between the two versions are your findings. Two afternoons and a notebook are enough to show how much a single plate can hold, and Iceland, with its dried fish, buried shark and carved bread, is a good place to practise looking.
About Icelandic MAT Kitchen
Traditional Icelandic recipes tested in home kitchens — from lamb soup to kleinur.