I have tasted lutefisk twice. Once on the way down…
Pork is preserved by making it into ham. Why aren't other kinds of meats preserved in that same way?
The ‘hurkey’ went to waste. Most of the family just didn’t like it. My husband loves ham, but it wasn’t hammy enough for him.
I love pork chops, cutlets, steaks, etc. Ham? Eh, for breakfast or in a sandwich? Other than that nah.
I agree that your location and culture have more to do with what you perceive as ‘typical’ than what is really typical in general. That Norwegian fish? No thank you. I’m less picky than years ago, but that stuff sounds borderline toxic. I just don’t think I could do it.
Lutefisk sounds like surstromming, hakarl, etc. in that somebody must have figured out it was edible, and were hungry enough to actually eat it.
What about haggis? Who even thought of that?
Someone who wanted to use all of the sheep except the baa, I guess.
This is what I was going to mention. I love a lot of different preserved meats, but fenalår is my absolute favorite.
And speaking of canned meats, when I lived in Norway canned reindeer meatballs and canned fish balls (a sort of fish meatball) were very commonly eaten.
Haggis is a pretty standard pudding/sausage-type thing, except it uses the stomach rather than the intestines or a cloth bag as casing. But chopping up all sorts of meats in a casing? Not that weird in a culture and period where all those organs are considered suitable fare anyway. I mean, we don’t consider liverwurst weird, do we?
It’s the blood sausages and pudding where I wonder “who thought of that?”.
Same answer, really. Eating blood is pretty sensible if you’re living in a time/place where it’s important to consume every calorie of the animal. But unless you want to drink it straight from the tap, you have to find a way to preserve it.
The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was quite fond of Pfälzer Saumagen, which is similar to haggis (different stuffing though). Many a foreign Head of State had to endure that when visiting Germany, and most were polite when asked how they liked it. But it is a dish to eat after cooking, not a preserve.
To those claiming that the ham taste comes from nitrites, I can only say that serrano ham in Spain and prosciutto in Italy use only normal salt (NaCl), and they taste as ham-y as can be.
https://www.fredmeyer.com/p/libby-s-corned-beef/0003900008104
Also, there are many smoked, preserved, seafoods, some of them in cans.
https://buy.taylorshellfishfarms.com/ekone-canned-products/the-ekone-sampler/
I, indeed, consider liverwurst weird. Bleh
To my tastes, prosciutto does not taste like ham at all. Which is fine, I like both.
But Braunschweiger is great!
Okay, now I’m hungry for a sausage plate and beer.
Pastrami was mentioned but it fits the bill. I always think of it as the the closest thing to bacon from a cow. Corned beef is very similar.
We were serving prosciutto the other day, and a new cook decided to throw a couple of slices on the grill. It was awful, I do not recommend.
As in, it is already cured and ready to eat. Do not cook prosciutto
I was going to comment as well that prosciutto and some other meats are only cured with salt, but then I realized, it doesn’t really have that “hammy” taste to it. It’s different. I’ve made corned beef with salt only and with Prague powder (nitrite/nitrates), and not only does the former just look kind of like a sad gray lump when it’s done, it doesn’t have that full “corned/hammy” flavor to it. It was still edible, but not quite what I thought of as corned beef.
Just in case anyone is unaware of this. Lye isn’t used in the preservation of the fish. It’s used in a step of the rehydration of dried fish. I’ve never tried just soaking such fish in water, but I expect plain water just won’t penetrate as well. The lye breaks down a significant amount of the protein, but allows every part of the fish to return to a “non rock hard state”.
I learned to enjoy it as an adult, but that’s because of the pork fat and bacon bits my family uses as “sauce”. I don’t seek it out outside of the traditional family lutefisk party at Christmas.
Pastrami is smoked corned beef.
I’ve mentioned this before but one of my first jobs out of school aged 16 involved, collecting the fresh blood from the freshly killed pig and making the black pudding.
It was mixed (by my hands,) with herbs, spiced cubed back-fat and grains in large square baking trays (no skins involved) and baked slowly in a bread oven.
The smell was absolutely incredible. It was then left to cool, sliced and sold. It is absolutely delicious.