Recipe: seal blubber in a pasta sauce

I’ve never had a problem laughing at the silly stuff I’ve done. Sure, I’d rather no one saw me doing it, but when it comes to telling stories – like the time I fell in the freezer in Sainsbury’s on Christmas Eve – the best ones are the silly ones. This story – and I’ll keep it short, helped my integration into the small Greenlandic community no end. Basically, I understood that Greenlanders ate seal blubber, I happened to have bought a slab of seal meat with blubber, and… hey… I was good to go! I’m pretty sure Jane had a night shift when I experimented with pasta with blubber in tomato sauce, which can only be a good thing.

So, without further ado, let’s just jump into the recipe. I must warn you to follow each step exactly for the best results.

1. Buy a chunk of seal meat from hunters down at the market or straight out of a hunter’s dinghy.
2. Save the meat for “some other time” and cut the blubber into squares.
3. Add oil to a pan and throw in the chunks.
4. Be amazed when it spits and barely browns, and whisper once in a while “that’s a lot of fat”, while cooking the pasta in another pan.
5. Try, desperately, to remove some of the oil with a paper towel.
6. Whisper once more, “that’s a lot of oil,” followed by, “I’m not sure about this.”
7. Open a jar of tomato sauce, dump the blubber chunks into the sauce. Give it a stir, and be amazed at the oil slick puddles of fat rising to the surface.
8. Plonk the blubber and sauce onto the pasta.
9. Take your first bite.
10. A whole chunk.
11. Be amazed, and say something like “that’s a lot of fat,” as said fat dribbles out of the corners of your mouth.
12. Spit the blubber chunk into the sink.
13. Take each chunk, suck the tomato sauce off it, and spit the chunk in the sink.
14. Eat the pasta and fatty tomato sauce.
15. Feed the blubber to a sledge dog.
16. Tell your colleagues and become a ‘legend’ in several languages, dialects, settlements, and, yeah, you’ve got it!
17. Enjoy!

Between us, the only way to eat seal blubber is when a rib of seal is cooked over a fire beneath a flat stone on a beach or in the mountains. The meat cooks in the fat and I have to say, despite growing up vegetarian, regularly eating vegan meals, seal meat on a flat stone fire tastes… legendary!

Chris