Store

Faroese Foodways

Føroysk matgerð

National

The food of eighteen North Atlantic islands with no trees, no arable to speak of, constant wind and a climate that never freezes hard and never gets warm — which turns out to be precisely the climate for RÆSTING, a controlled open-air fermentation that is the defining Faroese technique. Sheep, in numbers greater than people; fish, above all cod; seabirds where tradition and law allow; pilot whale; potatoes; and a kitchen built on the hjallur, the slatted drying shed, rather than on salt or fire.

Atlas — where and when

Where in the world

Communities and languages

  • Faroese community documented

Languages: Faroese

Related foodways

This foodway relates to

  • part of North Atlantic Foodways documented
  • related to British Foodways documented

    The wartime British occupation and the fishing trade with Britain.

  • related to Danish Foodways documented

    Part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with a trade monopoly until 1856 — a political and commercial relationship, not a culinary parentage.

  • related to Icelandic Foodways documented
  • related to Norwegian Foodways documented

    Settled from Norway and under Norwegian rule from 1035.

Recorded as relating to this foodway

  • influenced Historical Norse Foodways documented
  • related to Greenlandic Foodways documented

    Two self-governing North Atlantic countries of the Danish Realm with comparable sheep, fish and drying traditions and quite different ones otherwise.

  • related to Icelandic Foodways documented

    Two North Atlantic sheep-and-fish societies with closely related languages and comparable preservation problems.

  • related to Norwegian Foodways documented

    The Faroes were settled from Norway and under Norwegian rule from 1035; the sheep, dried fish and language relationships all run this way.

  • related to Scottish Island Foodways documented

    Reestit mutton and the Faroese wind-drying traditions belong to one North Atlantic preservation world.

  • related to The Kingdom of Denmark — Foodways Relationship documented

    Political and historical, and a real trade and migration relationship — NOT a parent-child culinary relationship.

Regional cuisines

Recipes

No recipes are filed under this cuisine yet.