Fruits of his labour

Signe Johansen on her grandfather, resistance, and the sweetness of a Norwegian summer

Signe and her grandfather Julius in the early 80s

May in Norway is a time of celebration. As everyone emerges from a long winter, communities arrange a dugnad — Norwegian for a gathering of neighbours and local volunteers who organise and clear debris, arrange necessary maintenance and generally spruce up neighbourhoods and communities in time for the many parties and parades that happen on the 17th of May, Norway’s Constitution Day. It’s also the month we remember Norway’s liberation from occupation under Nazi Germany.

This year, as we mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) day on the 8th 0f May, I’ve been reflecting on the quote from Finland’s beloved cartoonist and writer Tove Jansson: “I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream!” In 1940, Julius, my farfar (paternal grandfather) joined the Norwegian resistance against the Nazis. He was captured, tortured, lost a kidney and spent the war years in a POW camp before being released to see Norway regain her freedom from German occupation in 1945.

Julius went on to raise a family, have a successful career as an insurance executive, and lived a hale and hearty life well into his 80s. In truth, he and I had a slightly awkward relationship: he didn’t understand my love of books, languages and appetite for travel; I found him ornery and was desperate to ask him about the war and his experience in the resistance, but knew better not to. Thankfully we established some common ground: his beloved summer farm. My father and I joked that the man would trade half his family for a supply of the best dung to boost his annual strawberry crop, the crimson jewel in his horticultural crown. And who could blame him? As Charlotte Mendelson rightly claims in her late Onward and Upward in The Garden column for the New Yorker, “Take strawberries: the point of summer.”

The point of the farm, as we all understood it in an age when PTSD wasn’t yet identified and that generation didn’t seek counselling for their trauma, was to help Julius recover and eventually thrive after his wartime incarceration. It was his pride and joy, a pleasure unalloyed.

We Johansens tend to discuss food the way normal people discuss their favourite TV shows. And while we eat vegetables with enthusiasm, we don’t venerate potatoes to quite the extent that Jansson’s Moomintroll do. Growing (and eating) fruit is more our jam. Unreformed heathens we may be, but the closest we get to faith in any meaningful sense is our frenetic and borderline deranged habit of planting, tending, composting, sprucing, watering and pruning, no matter how costly or frustrating the experience proves to be.

After 15 years of living in Oslo, I arrived at university in the UK and would tell my new friends all about the summers spent at my grandparents’ farm in fjord country, where fruit was abundant and cherished. “You grow fruit in Norway?” one pal asked. Where did they think Norway was exactly, next to Siberia? It’s not all permafrost and arctic conditions year-round, at least not south of the actual Arctic Circle where much of the country is located.

The early summer bounty of Julius’ farm

I was reminded of this curious geographical blind spot when revisiting Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book (1982), a cornucopia of delights for any fruit freak. What’s not to love about a book you can dip in and out of depending on the season, the fruit you happen to crave or be growing at that particular moment? Yet what struck me during a recent re-read is how scant Grigson’s references to Scandinavia are. Britain is a northern European country, and while during certain periods of history its lens has tilted north and eastwards (especially as you reach Yorkshire, the Scottish borders and Orkney) France, Spain and Italy still have an understandable hold on the culinary imagination.

Across the North Sea we grow plenty of similar food to what’s produced in Britain. Let’s set aside the potatoes, cauliflower, leeks, beetroot, kale and Jerusalem artichokes for the moment. Vegetables are wonderful, but what really sends a tingle down my spine every May is the anticipation of summer’s sweet-sharp produce grown on bushes, trees, in patches, orchards, woodland and up mountainsides. Every year, usually after the festivities on the 17th of May, Julius and my farmor (paternal grandmother) Oddny would decamp from Bergen and drive three hours to their farm in the Aurland valley, nestled between a range of forbidding mountains, a roaring waterfall and a river teeming with trout and Atlantic salmon. Long popular with fishing enthusiasts — William Gladstone was a regular visitor during the latter half of the 19th century — the fishing and hunting rights associated with this region are still highly valued and strictly regulated. Every August my father meets with his gang of close friends from school and they catch mountain trout, salting and hot-smoking it for the year ahead.

Aurlandsfjorden, a relatively puny 29km offshoot (or a ‘fjordlet’ if you will) that juts south of Norway’s mightiest fjord, Sognefjorden, was where we would swim in summer. As an anxious child with an overactive imagination, I loved the cool water, but fretted about crayfish snapping at my toes, or any unexploded Second World War ordnances that may have been lurking in the deep water. We went on a lot of hikes. As Norwegians say, “Ut på tur, aldri sur”, which roughly translates as “out on a hike, never crabby.” Looking back, I now appreciate how vital that was to our collective mental health. Whatever was going on could be talked through during a day-long walk through the mountains.

Summers on the farm were not for lollygagging. When we weren’t hiking or swimming, us grandchildren were commandeered by Julius to assist in picking, sorting and selling excess fruit to tourists driving past the farm to their campsite or hytte (cabin). No hygge without hustle in this family. While strawberries were the harbinger of summer and we gorged ourselves on them for a few heady weeks in late June, what we didn’t sell roadside we made into kilos of frysetøy (freezer jam) to remind us of midsummer on those bleak midwinter mornings to come. As July and August arrived we welcomed successive waves of red and green stikkelsbær (gooseberries, although the word directly translates as prickly, or stinging berries); raspberries; wild blueberries grown on the mountainside; blackberries, black, white and sour cherries; black, white and redcurrants; Keisarinne (empress) pears; the pinnacle of plums: Reine Claude (greengages) along with your more humdrum Opal, Victoria and other plums designated for baking and preserving. The much-anticipated arrival of mylter (cloudberries), a nutritious, orange caneberry with a musky, almost savoury taste, signaled summer’s wind-down, and a mad dash to known spots where they grew in abundance. My father, like the crafty forager he is, never reveals to anyone outside his inner circle of friends where those patches are, and I’ve been sworn to secrecy too.

Conditions for growing cultivated fruit on the farm in the valley and for wild berries to grow up in the mountains were near-optimal: mostly dry, warm and only occasionally drizzly. Much like the berries grown in Scotland, the longer periods of daylight, especially around midsummer, add to the intensity of flavour. I think a lot about the quality of the fruit we ate every summer on the farm, and what a sensory education we received in smelling and tasting produce when it’s at its peak. Cox, a variety familiar to Britons, was a popular eating apple grown in the valley. Yet it was the September arrival of Gravensteins, an apple variety described by Harold McGee in his comprehensive McGee on Food and Cooking (a book along with Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book every feinschmecker should own) as “simple, refreshing” that marked the end of a season of wild, delicious abundance.

Julius never looked more serene than when he was riding his tractor around the farm, carting bales of hay or fresh deliveries of that precious dung. Sometimes he just rode the tractor around for the fun of it, a look of pure contentment on his face. He knew how lucky he’d been to survive a brutal, frightening period in Norwegian history, channeling that same fierce patriotism which had driven him to do what many contemporaries thought was irrational and insane, into a healthy, productive relationship with a few precious acres of soil. He lived in peace and planted his favourite fruit. Lord knows what he dreamt of, but every day on that tractor must have felt like a small and meaningful victory, a legacy worth fighting for.

Signe Johansen is the author of seven books, including Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One, Smörgåsbord, Spirited, How to Hygge and Scandilicious: The Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking. She is co-author/recipe tester/ghostwriter of a dozen more books on food and culture.

Right now, she is enjoying Jenny Linford’s new book Repast: The Story of Food (Thames & Hudson and The British Museum), Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection Show Don't Tell (Doubleday) and Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime classic The Heat of the Day (Vintage)