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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Hi, Thankyou very much for your recipe - I stumbled upon it from Google, and hope I can obtain some cod liver in Australia..
ReplyDeleteDo you know if/how regularly this is eaten in Norway?
I don't think it's eaten very regularly in Norway. When I created the recipe, I had never heard of it, and googling for it only gave a link to an Icelandic cat food producer. I have since heard older folk from the country side talk about old recipes somewhat similar to mine. I also mentioned my recipe to a chef friend in Finland, and he told me he had created a similar recipe using burbot (lota lota) liver. If you can't find fresh cod liver, just use liver from some other fish. Just make sure that it's not poisonous (some tropical fish have poisonous livers!), and that it has a pleasant taste by itself. Good luck!
ReplyDelete... And here it is 2019 and I've got three giant burbot livers from a recent ice-fishing trip here in Canada. All I can find online is that they're a "delicacy" but very little on how to actually prepare them! Of the couple recipes/techniques I've found for pates, yours for the cod livers seem like they might result in the best end-product for my burbot. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI can add now that I think it worked well! I used the Cod Liver Pate, recipe 1 -- the one with the bread crumbs and onion, mashed thru a strainer, etc. Thanks again.
DeleteSuper nice to hear! I have not made the recipe for years now, but the fatty cod season is just around the corner. It think it's about time to pull out the old experiments and try them with new eyes!
Delete