Plokkfiskur: the fish-and-potato mash Iceland actually eats

Overview

Plokkfiskur is boiled white fish and boiled potato, broken up together with onion and a white sauce, and served hot in a shallow bowl. The name means, near enough, “plucked fish” — the fish is pulled apart by hand or with a fork rather than cut, and the texture that results is the dish: not a purée, not a chunky stew, but a soft mass with flakes still identifiable in it.

The fish is haddock or cod, boiled plain. The potatoes are boiled and roughly crushed. Onion is softened in butter, flour and milk make a béchamel, and everything is folded together with white pepper and a great deal of butter. Some households add curry powder, which sounds like a foreign intrusion and is a genuine, old, local habit. Some add cheese on top and brown it.

It is a leftovers dish by origin, and that is the honest frame: this is what a fishing country did on the second day with the boiled fish and boiled potatoes from the first. Nothing in it was ever bought specially, and it was never a restaurant dish until relatively recently, when the city’s kitchens began putting the domestic repertoire on menus. That transition is why you now find it in places that also serve lamb fillet and langoustine, and why the version in an old harbour café tastes closer to what the dish is for.

It is native in the strongest available sense: not exclusive to the capital, but genuinely Icelandic, made in ordinary homes across the country, and one of the few things on a visitor-facing menu here that people actually eat at home on a Tuesday. In a food culture that gets written about mostly for its extremes — the fermented shark, the sheep’s head — this is the correction. What the Nordic north actually eats is fish, potato, butter and bread.

What it should taste of is butter, white pepper and the mild sweetness of good cod. If it tastes of nothing, it was made with too much potato and not enough of either.

What to order

The word is enough: plokkfiskur, on the menu at harbour cafés, canteens, some bakeries and a number of restaurants. What comes with it is not negotiable and is half the dish:

Rúgbrauð — dark rye bread, dense, almost black, sweet in the way steamed rye is, and traditionally baked slowly at low heat. It is served in thin slices with cold butter, and the correct method is to butter it thickly and eat it alongside rather than to put the fish on it. The contrast — hot soft savoury against cold sweet dense — is the whole architecture of the plate, and a plokkfiskur served without rye bread is missing its other half.

Beyond that, the variations you will meet:

• With cheese, browned on top. Common, modern, and it makes the dish richer and heavier.
• With curry powder stirred through. A local habit rather than a fusion — worth trying if offered.
• In a bakery, as a filling for a bun or on an open sandwich, which is the cheap lunchtime version.

Portion sizes are generous and the dish is filling out of proportion to how it looks. One bowl is a full lunch.

Drink: coffee, which is what most people here have with lunch, or a light beer. A glass of milk is the domestic answer and nobody would look at you oddly.

What to avoid

The commonest disappointment is the version that has been held too long in a bain-marie, and it is identifiable in the bowl: the surface goes matt and slightly skinned, the sauce separates into a watery edge, and the fish disappears entirely into the potato. Fresh plokkfiskur is glossy and loose enough to move when the bowl is tilted.

Second, the potato ratio. Fish is the expensive ingredient and potato is not, and a bowl that is essentially mashed potato with a fishy background is a cheap one. You should be able to see and feel flakes.

Third, and specific to the centre of this city: the main street through the old town is one of the most concentrated tourist corridors in the country, and the restaurants along it price a bowl of plokkfiskur like a main course in a European capital because they can. This is a home dish made from the cheapest fish available. The canteen-style places by the harbour and the bakeries a few streets away serve it at a fraction of the price, and often better, because they sell a great many of them to people who work nearby.

One thing that is not worth avoiding: the buffet-style lunch counter. In a country where eating out is genuinely expensive, the workplace-canteen model — help yourself, one price, bread and butter included — is where the honest version of this dish lives.

Practicalities

Reckon on roughly 2,500 to 3,500 krónur for a bowl at a harbour café or lunch counter with bread and coffee included, and 4,500 and upwards at a restaurant on the main tourist street. A bakery sandwich version is cheaper again. This is an expensive country and none of those numbers is low, but the spread between them is almost entirely about the address.

It is lunch. Kitchens make a batch in the morning and it is at its best within the first hour or two of service, which in practice means arriving between about half past eleven and one. By the middle of the afternoon what is left has been sitting, and this is a dish that does not improve with holding.

The season to think about is the one that makes it obvious: the winter here is dark, long and wet, the wind comes off the water, and a hot bowl of fish, potato and butter at midday is exactly calibrated to it. In the long light of June it is still good and it is a great deal of food.

Cards work for everything, everywhere, including a coffee — cash is genuinely close to unnecessary in this country and many places prefer not to handle it. Tipping is not expected, and prices on the menu are what you pay.