Cooking to the calendar of eight seasons

Sápmi is not a Norwegian county and not a period in history. It is the homeland of the Sámi — an Indigenous people whose territory crosses northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and reaches into the Kola Peninsula — and the cooking that comes out of it belongs to a culture with living languages, its own institutions and its own working livelihoods. Reindeer herding is one of them, carried on here now rather than remembered. Gáhkku, the soft hearth bread, is baked on an ordinary weekday. Suovas is sold hot at winter markets. None of it is a re-enactment; it is simply the north, cooking.

Herding sets the calendar. Reindeer move between inland winter pasture, where lichen is dug from beneath dry snow, and the coastal and mountain grazing of summer — a migration measured in tens or hundreds of kilometres depending on the district. The work is organised through the siida, the herding group that shares pasture and labour, and the year is commonly counted in eight seasons rather than four, because calving, marking, separation and slaughter are each held to be a time of their own. Most meat enters the household after the autumn slaughter. Much of what follows in this collection is, at bottom, a way of making autumn last until spring.

An Arctic larder is narrow and deep. Reindeer carries most of it: bone-in cuts for bidos, the stew ladled out at weddings and midwinter gatherings; meat frozen and shaved thin for finnbiff; salted and smoked reindeer for suovas; trimmings bound with fat for reinsdyrpølse; and bones for the stock that stands behind much of the rest. Cold water supplies the fish — Arctic char and mountain trout from lakes that never really warm. The gathered layer is the third: cloudberries from the bogs, lingonberries and juniper from the heath, angelica — kvann in Norwegian — whose peeled stems were traditionally eaten green, and birch, which gives sap in spring, bark for vessels and smoke for the fire.

Before refrigeration, four techniques did the preserving, and they were usually combined. Cold, dry inland air dries meat and fish without heat, which is why drying racks stand where the wind does. Salt, once trade made it affordable this far north, made that drying quicker and surer. Smoke over birch and alder both flavoured and dried; on the pages that follow it survives as flavour, in suovas and in cold-smoked røye. The winter itself served as an outdoor freezer for months at a stretch — the reason shaved frozen reindeer became a technique rather than a compromise. Berries were kept another way again: cloudberries were traditionally stored in water rather than in sugar. None of this is set down here as a method to copy — the recipes in this collection that touch cured or smoked food are written around professionally produced meat and fish, not around a home cure.

It is worth saying what this collection is not. Sámi cooking is not a regional accent of a generic "Nordic" style, and the dishes that carry Sámi names keep them here: bidos — often written biđus in North Sámi — along with gáhkku and suovas. Nor is every recipe filed here Sámi. Kaffeost, cubes of baked cheese dropped into hot coffee, is shared with Kven and northern Finnish tradition; blodklubb is a northern Norwegian farm dish; fenalår is cured across Norway's mountain districts rather than in Sápmi in particular; and hjortestek is red deer, far more an animal of the western fjord country than of the Arctic. They are filed together, and reading them side by side is useful. Collapsing them into a single tradition is not.