Missing My Brown Cheese

No matter where you go in this world, you will find culture and food special to that place. One thing I really enjoy and admire about America is that it’s a big mixing pot of everything. If you want Vietnamese food, you can have Vietnamese food. If you want German food, you can have German food. If you want deep fried Oreos, you can have deep fried Oreos. Foods from all across the globe have found their way into the American eating culture, making the American food market extraordinarily diverse.
Growing up in a small town in Norway did not give me this luxury of choice. My town has pizza, Chinese food, and a tiny selection of other foods. And to everyone’s surprise we recently got a Burger King, which by the way tastes way better than here.
I’m not saying Norway does not have a variety of food, because we do, yet it is not comparable to here in America. We do, however, have quite a lot of traditional food. Most of it involves fish or potatoes. (I recommend searching up “smalahove.”) Or the fish dishes we built our country on, “lutefisk” and “tørrfisk.” These meals are not the most common in everyday life though, and are rather mostly eaten around Christmas, by the brave or by the traditional.
For actual everyday food, the most eaten meals are not traditionally Norwegian. I should probably be ashamed of our extreme consumption of frozen pizza, but with how good they are I cannot bear shame. Another interesting fact about Norwegian eating habits is that we, according to numerous sources, have the second highest taco consumption per capita in the world. They are made to order to individuals’ tastes, and definitely not the same as you would get from a Mexican abuela, but they are tacos nonetheless. Statistics say almost 15% of the population eat tacos every Friday.
Other than the stolen pizza and tacos we eat a lot of potatoes and meat, in many different ways and variations. A traditional, and personal favorite is “raspeball,” potato and flour mixed into a ball and eaten together with bacon, sausage or salted lamb. Nobody can make it like my grandma’s does for family dinner.
Two other things I’m accustomed to eating often are rice porridge and bread. I can eat rice porridge for any meal, often as a substitute for bread. Bread in Norway is like the air we breathe. Bread is used for breakfast, bread is used for lunch, and bread is used for what we call kveldsmat, directly translated to “eveningfood” and eaten between dinner and bed. It is often just a slice of bread, topped with cheese, jam, liverpaste, ham, or my personal favorite brown cheese.
Brown cheese is another Norwegian specialty, and is as you can imagine, a cheese that is brown. It is made of milk, often milk from goats, whey and cream, and is said to taste more like caramel than cheese.
Though I miss some Norwegian food, I am committed to spending the rest of my time here fully embracing the rich American food culture. At least, apart from my small collection of food from home, stored in the top shelf of the refrigerator.