Pålegg — what Norwegians put on their bread
The vast category of bread-toppings that fills the Norwegian fridge — pickled herring, brown cheese, liver pâté, caviar from a tube, mackerel in tomato sauce. Lunch is open-faced sandwiches, and the toppings are the cuisine.
Pålegg is one of those Norwegian words that does a great deal of quiet work. It means, literally, that which is laid upon — and in practice it names anything a Norwegian might place on a slice of bread. The category is enormous: brown cheese and white cheese, liver pâté, pickled herring, mackerel in tomato sauce, salami, smoked salmon, sliced cucumber, jam, honey, cod roe squeezed from a tube. Open a Norwegian fridge and most of what is in it is pålegg of some kind, lined up in tubes and tubs and waxed-paper packets like a small library of choices. There is no English word for this category because no English-speaking country has organized its lunch around it. Norway has.
Lunch is a sandwich, and the sandwich is open
The Norwegian lunch — lunsj, eaten around eleven — is in almost every case the same shape: slices of dense brown bread, each one open-faced, each one wearing a single pålegg. Not stacked. Not closed. The bread is the surface; the topping is the picture. A Norwegian eats four or five of these in a sitting, switching toppings as they go: a slice of brunost, then a slice of leverpostei, then a slice of mackerel, then a slice of cheese with cucumber. The variety is the meal.
This is why the fridge looks the way it does. A Norwegian household keeps an assortment because the open-face sandwich asks for one — a single topping per slice means the household needs at least four or five on hand at any moment. The tube of Kalles or Mills cod-roe spread, the brown-cheese brick, the leverpostei terrine, the jar of pickled herring, the cucumber, the jam — these are not stockpile. They are the working palette.
The matpakke
The institution that carries the lunch from the home into the world is the matpakke — the food-pack. Four or five open-face sandwiches, each separated by a small square of mellomleggspapir (the thin, slightly waxed paper sold five hundred sheets to a box at any grocery store), stacked into a flat container, slipped into a bag. A Norwegian child receives a matpakke every school morning from roughly the age of six. A Norwegian adult, in many professions, brings the same thing to work. The bus driver eats a matpakke. The deputy minister eats a matpakke. The format does not change with the salary.
The roots of this are specific and recent. In 1932 the Oslo school health authority, under the physician Carl Schiøtz (1877–1938), rolled out the Oslofrokost — the Oslo Breakfast — as a universal free meal for every primary-school child in the city. Bread, milk, cheese, half an apple, a piece of raw vegetable, a spoon of cod-liver oil from September through April. The aim was nutritional: Oslo in the 1920s was a poor city and many children came to school undernourished. Schiøtz’s studies showed the breakfast worked. Within a decade the model had spread. Within two it had migrated home — parents took over the morning preparation and packed the same kind of plain, cold, nutritionally serious meal into a box. The Oslo Breakfast became the matpakke, and the matpakke became universal.
The fridge as a national institution
What the matpakke required, the fridge supplied. A Norwegian fridge is recognizably itself the moment the door opens — a brown brick of brunost, a tube or two squeezed flat in the door, a yellow tub of leverpostei, a half-finished jar of sild, a square of butter, a bottle of milk. It is the closest thing the country has to a national still life. The contents reflect the meal: spreads, slices, single-flavor things that go cleanly onto a piece of bread.
The icon of the assortment is brunost, the brown cheese — the brick a Norwegian abroad smuggles home. Foreign visitors find it bewildering, a brown cheese that tastes like caramel and goat. To a Norwegian it tastes like childhood. The Mat og Drikke article carries Anne Hov’s 1863 invention story.
Lunch as equality
The matpakke is also a class equalizer. Office workers, tradespeople, and government ministers carry the same kind of paper-wrapped sandwich stack to work. The professor of social anthropology Runar Døving, who has spent a career on this and titled one of his essays Den hellige matpakka — The Holy Packed Lunch — argues that the matpakke has done a kind of damage to Norwegian food culture by flattening it, keeping the restaurant lunch trade thin, and freezing the lunch hour at the bread-and-leverpostei standard for a century. The argument is fair. But the same flatness is the equality: a culture that eats Janteloven on a slice of bread does not produce lunches that mark out who can afford what.