Ammoniated Shark & other Euro delights

The Offal Truth

I follow a few Twitter accounts that publish interesting maps. They seem fixated on Europe. Perhaps because it’s relatively small, contains many geopolitical entities that roughly map to various cultural and ethnic identities, and flatters our ability to recognize certain countries. We can all find France on a map. Uruguay or Kazakhstan, well, give me a minute.

The latest map I saw:

Let’s start with the Scandahoovian realm.

The Finns love KAALIKÄÄRYLEET, which sounds like someone stepped on a parrot. It’s a cabbage roll. You can understand the Norwegian fave: FISKESUPPE. Fish soup. I don’t know how soup could be the national dish. The national bowl, maybe.

KÖTTBULLAR is Sweden’s favorite. It is not, as you might think, Cat’s Testicles. (That would be Kattballar, served during the feast of St. Tabitha.) It’s Swedish Meatballs, although of course they don’t call them that, because they’re in Sweden. They are mild and comforting. They are impossible not to like because there’s nothing about their flavor to which anyone could object. It’s barely there. If you imagined seismograph of flavor with a trembling needle measuring the strength of the taste-temblor, it registers as “someone in the next room, seated, jiggling his leg.”