Essays
p. 034
A kitchen that cooks with the sea
On the Faroe Islands, one chef has stopped buying salt altogether. Hana Sørlie on brine, patience and the taste of a cold ocean.
There is no salt cellar in the kitchen at Brimhús. There are, instead, six steel buckets of seawater, drawn each morning from the same rocky inlet below the restaurant and labelled by hour: 06:00, 09:00, 12:00. The chef, Jónas Petersen, says they taste different. After a week of cooking with him, I think he is right.
Cooking with seawater is older than cooking with salt. Fishermen on these islands boiled potatoes and cod in it for centuries, and the habit only died out when packaged salt became cheap enough to forget about.
Salt, slowed down
Petersen reduces the water slowly over a peat fire until it becomes a grey, mineral brine he uses for everything: to cure lamb, to season bread, to dress the first rhubarb of the year. Nothing on the menu is seasoned with anything that did not come out of the sea within sight of the kitchen.
It is a romantic idea and also a practical one. On an island where everything else has to arrive by ferry, the sea is the one ingredient that never runs out.
“Salt is just the sea, slowed down.”
About the writer
Hana Sørlie
Hana is a former line cook who now writes long essays about preservation, salt and the Nordic pantry. Her first book, Brine, is out next spring.
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