What in the name of Cod!

So there I was, with a big pile of fresh and extremely fatty cod liver in front of me. Pretty nasty stuff, and somehow I needed to turn this into food for human consumption. We were about to have a northern Norwegian mølje party, with mostly foreigners at the table. Mølje is the traditional dish made from skrei, the fatty winter cod which comes into the fjords to spawn. It consists of boiled slices of cod, cod roe cooked in the sack and boiled cod liver. Very good if you were born above the arctic circle, but for rest of us, it's rather nasty in a niceish way. You know, the fish is fantastic and succulent, the roe is grainy and not too unpleasant, and then the liver; Grayish brown, collapsed and leaking fish oil. You taste it and go: "Well, that wasn't quite as bad as it looks.". But you will not ever go for seconds. Ever.
More as a sick joke than anything else, I decided that the liver needed to presented in a more palatable, or at least in a not so unappetizing looking manner. So, I google for cod liver pate. Zero hits! I could not believe it. If it's not in google, it's nowhere. It has not been done before! Since I knew the liver was going to end up in the compost bin anyway, I decided to fearlessly do some experimentation. This resulted in two different recipes for cod liver paté, which will be published in a moment. My biggest technical fear was that the livers would leak out most of the fat, and I would end up with a split liver mess floating around in fish liver oil. Like a failed Sauce Hollandaise from hell. But, to my great surprise both patés came out of the oven nicely browned on the top and had a pleasantly solid consistency. The even greater surprise was that they tasted good! Really good actually! Almost delicious! In fact, what happened at the party was that they were finished. Gone! They ate it all. And that's when I decided that google needed to be augmented with information about cod liver paté. Not that it's likely ANYONE will ever stumble upon this blog, but at least the information will be there for future generations.

In Cod we trust.