The day I taste my first reindeer could hardly be further from Christmas. It's late June, within a week of the longest day of the year. I'm in Lapland, where the days are not just long, but technically endless. The sun doesn't set. It just bounces along the horizon in a teasing kind of way, as if to say, 'you must be shattered ... fancy a kip?' Then just when you're nodding off, it soars upwards again with an 'oh, no you don't ...'
We are on a large floating wooden raft, edged with wooden rails, with its own bolted-down wooden tables and benches, a wooden roof and even a little wooden sauna hut. On the middle of the wooden floor is a huge, free-standing cast-iron, pot-bellied barbecue, stoked with blazing logs. Were it not for the ready supply of water all around us, the designer of this craft would seem like a serious contender for a Darwin Award. But the Lapps, I am to discover, know wood and fire intimately, and handle both with innate understanding and great skill.
The river down which we are gently chugging is clear and fairly shallow, about 200 metres wide, edged with reedy dunes, leading back to pine-forested gentle slopes. On cue, as the skewers of marinaded meat are laid on a grill above the fire, a pair of shabby reindeer (they moult in June) amble from the edge of the pines 100 yards ahead of us. They make their way down to the river, walk into the water up to their shoulders, swim across the deeper channel in the middle, their antlers waggling above the ripples, and calmly walk out again on the other side.
We've touched down at Kittila airport scarcely an hour before. We've seen real live reindeer, and now I'm about to eat a real dead one. I bite on the cube of lightly charred meat and chew. It's soft and tender, and less dry than most other deer species, even after the fierce heat of the barbecue. It tastes pleasantly of juniper - the principal flavouring of much of Lappish cooking, both meat and fish.
I'm sitting beside my hostess, a delightful Lappish lady called Paivikki Palosaari, who runs the lodge where I am staying, and does most of the cooking too. I can see she wants a pretty quick verdict, so before I have a chance to swallow, I'm nodding enthusiastically and making appreciative noises, 'mmm ... mmm derriffous'.
The meat's unique qualities, Paivikki tells me, are a product of the reindeer's diet and lifestyle. A supremely adapted selective grazer, it eats over 100 different types of wild plant according to the season. It's also a meticulous conserver of energy, rarely breaking into a run except in flight from predators. So the slow-growing muscle has a chance to develop the subtle grains of fat - the 'marbling' so prized in the best beef - that most of its cervine relatives are lacking.
She goes on to explain what a resource the reindeer is for the Lapps; how they eat everything but the skin and antlers, which of course have other uses. It's smoked, stewed, salted and made into pâté. Reindeer sausages are a perennial favourite and reindeer salami is stuffed in a natural casing made from its own intestines. Its liver is as rich and mild as calves'. Its tongue slow-cooks to a melting tenderness. Its blood makes a kind of black-pudding called 'blood bread' and its milk is so thick, creamy and sweet it's eaten on its own for tea.
As we're chatting and eating, a long canoe approaches our raft, with a sumptuously bearded fellow at the back, steering with a little outboard motor. As he pulls alongside, I see he is wearing felt and reindeer from head to toe. His reindeer-skin boots look particularly cosy. The canoe turns out to be a traditional Lappish dug-out, generously lined with loose reindeer skins.
He's called Tapsa, and looks like Father Christmas on his summer holidays, which, it turns out, is not so far off the mark. He is a sort of 'professional Lapp', and an associate of Paivikki, whose job it is to ensure that her guests have as authentic a Lappish experience as possible. But he's not faking it. In the winter he drives sleigh safaris with both reindeer and huskies, in the spring and summer he traps fish on the river, and in the autumn he gathers wild mushrooms for Paivikki's kitchen.
Tapsa lashes his canoe alongside the raft, and we zig-zag across the river, stopping at rocks and weedbeds where he has laid his fish traps. In all of them are dozens of wriggling, tiger-striped, hump-backed perch, a few grayling, with their sail-shaped fins, and the odd small but muscular croc-jawed pike. All are killed, regardless of size, because they all are to be eaten.
It's nearly midnight as the raft heads back upstream to the jetty, though the sun suggests late afternoon. Paivikki and Father Christmas set about gutting and scraping the catch, dipping them occasionally in a bucket of river water. When the bucket is emptied into the river, a swirl of shimmering scales dance in the wake of the outboard.
The next day I spend the morning fly-fishing on the river. I catch a few half-kilo grayling, which I kill and keep as I know they'll be put to good use. But the wild Lappish salmon eludes me. Luckily my incompetence has been anticipated, and when I break for lunch and return to the rantamokki (a log-built fishing lodge overlooking the river) I find my fishing host, Kopi, another friend of Paivikki, brandishing a beautiful salmon he caught the day before.
Inside the rantamokki are various fireplaces configured in different ways. On and around them are all sorts of spits, racks, trivets, pans, kettles, cauldrons and hot plates, all fashioned out of black cast iron. The Lapps are truly the masters of every variation of wood-fired cookery, and the way my host deals with the salmon is a case in point.
He cuts a long, fat fillet from the fish and lays it skin-down on a fresh plank of wood - birch, he tells me. He pushes the blade of his hunting knife through the flesh, and gives it a couple of taps with a stone to make a notch in the plank. Then he cuts a few short splints from the edge of another scrap of wood. He pushes these through the slits in the fish, so their sharp points find the notches he made with his knife, securing the fillet to the plank. It's taken over to the central fire, and simply leaned on a trivet, at an angle of about 60 degrees.
Within a minute the surface of the salmon flesh is taking colour, and the fatty juices are starting to run. The fish is seasoned with salt and a few twists of a mill containing peppercorns and allspice berries. In 15 minutes, it's a tawny golden colour, just cooked through. My appetite is at the point of twitching anticipation, I taste the fish - half smoked, half grilled, beautifully seasoned - and it is the best salmon I have ever eaten.
Over the next couple of days, the feasting is interrupted only by the odd fishing trip, sauna, and swim in the river. The last night is billed as a special farewell dinner. Paivikki promises to pull out all the stops. But it's hard to see how she can top what we've had so far.
She explains the plan. We are going to pit-roast a whole haunch of reindeer in the fire that has been blazing outside the lodge almost non-stop since we arrived. Paivikki takes the huge haunch and lays it on a double sheet of greaseproof paper. On and around it go thick slices of streaky bacon, root vegetables, and great sprigs of juniper and bay leaf. I help her wrap the parcel in layer after layer of wet newspaper, it's all bound up with thick garden wire, and we carry it outside. The burning logs are scraped to one side of the fire, and Tapsa digs a metre-wide hole right underneath where the fire was blazing. The parcel goes in, the smouldering logs are raked back over it, and the fire is rekindled with fresh wood.
I have been invited to prepare a course, and I have asked Paivikki to find me some reindeers' tongues. I'm simmering them gently in a liquor of water, wine, vegetables, and juniper, which will be reduced to make an intense sauce. Paivikki asks me how long I'm going to cook them and I tell her, about three hours. She shakes her head and tuts, 'these are much more delicate than cows' tongues. They'll be done in an hour and a half.' I'm sceptical as I imagine the tongues at work on those hundreds of rough and thorny Lappish plants. They must be tough old muscles.
But I keep a eye on them as they simmer gently in their stock, and she's quite right. In just 90 minutes they pass Mrs Beeton's classic test for boiled tongue: 'so tender that a straw would penetrate it'.
The first night's catch of perch, grayling and pike turn up as an aperitif, variously salted, cured and smoked, and served with endless glasses of ice-cold Lappish vodka. The next course is also fish - a soup of salmon with cream and great handfuls of dill. Rich, aromatic and wonderful. Then comes my dish of tongues, skinned, sliced, and glazed with the rich, winey reduction. Better - tenderer, tastier - than calves' tongues, I think. A couple of tongue sceptics at the table claim to have been converted, which feels good.
Three courses in, and we're all pretty daunted at the prospect of the pit-roast reindeer haunch, but we gather round as Paivikki starts to unwrap the charred paper parcel. She gets to the meat, and it looks and smells delicious. But she doesn't look happy. She prods it a couple of times, and says it isn't ready yet. It needs to go back in the fire, for at least a couple more hours.
She's distraught and I think she may burst into tears. We all reassure her that it's just as well, that we've already had a wonderful dinner, and would struggle to manage the haunch anyway. It's true because we really are completely stuffed. Eventually she starts to accept our solace, then says, with a weak smile, 'you're not too full for my little pudding, I hope'. We all laugh, and reassure her...no, not too full for that...
It's roast cheese - a very fresh cow's curd, slightly sweetened, pressed in a mould, and then baked in a wood-fired oven until speckledy brown - served with a compôte of wild cloudberries. The sheer deliciousness of the concoction helps me find space for a second helping.
The next morning the untouched haunch of venison is on the breakfast table, now cooked to Paivikki's satisfaction, but cold. She carves me a slice, and serves it up with a spoon of the bittersweet cloudberry compôte.
I have been utterly seduced by her stunning Lappish hospitality. In just a few days, I have been inducted into a culinary culture that is more holistic, more robust, more in touch with its wild and natural heritage, more resourceful, generous, honest and deeply touching than any I have visited before. So I guess by now I am a little biased. But I really do think this breakfast haunch of reindeer is the best cold meat I have ever tasted. And I ask for another slice.
