- Most Nigerians are unaware that stockfish is Norwegian fish
- Stockfish has a unique taste
- Nigeria is Norway's biggest export market for the fish.
Stockfish is popular in various homes, as most Nigerians can’t cook without cooking with the fish.
The chief reason most people use stockfish for cooking is because of the taste the fish creates.
Stockfish has a pungent smell, and because of that, it is hung up to dry for three months.
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The BBC reports that a Lagos-based rising star in the culinary world, Michael Elegbede’s signature dishes revolves around stockfish.
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NAIJ.com gathered that Elegbede spent a lot of time helping his grandmother in the kitchen, and she loved stockfish as a key ingredient in traditional dishes.
He said: "When we got home and we smelled the boiling stockfish we knew grandma is cooking, and now when I smell stockfish that nostalgia of my grandmother immediately kicks into my head"
Erling Falchs whose family's business, Saga Fisk has been in the stockfish trade for six generations, said: "We sell about 200 to 250 containers of stockfish to Nigeria; that's about 4,000 tonnes.
A Norwegian historian, Frank Jensen stated that the process of drying it means that stockfish can last for years, and that it made it perfect to be used as food for the West African people enslaved and sent on long sea voyages to Americas.
Jensen pointed out that it was the Biafran civil war that brought stockfish into Nigerian cuisine.
He said more than a million died mostly from hunger, after which churches and relief agencies from all over the world joined together to fly in emergency supplies, and that Norway’s contribution was stockfish.
NAIJ.com had previously reported on 5 surprising Nigerian foods that kill pot belly & help with weight loss
Can bitter leaf cure high blood pressure? - on NAIJ.com TV
Source: Naija.ng
ROSY CREST
Wednesday, 29 November 2017