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Test 1 / 25

The Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands are beautiful in a very Scandinavian way – they’re not comforting or luxurious, but have this wild, untamed natural beauty. There are no trees, just wind and ocean, and I love how the cuisine reflects the place – it’s a great example of how we are good at creating a lot with little.

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The most notable food is a type of fermented mutton called rast. The meat is hung outside to dry for a few months.

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You can eat it with a spoon – it’s perfect when you don’t need to use a knife to cut it. Most foreigners find it too much.

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Fishing is very much part of life, as is hunting, and people are pretty self-sufficient – lots of people have a little butchery in their basement for killing their own sheep.

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Because the climate is so rough and it never really gets warm (though the winters are mild) only a few vegetables grow – potatoes, turnips, rhubarb and wild herbs – and it’s interesting to see how creative people are with few ingredients.

Torshavn, the capital, is so pretty. It’s like a picture in a children’s book, with cobbled streets and hills and small red houses with white-painted windows. And the ocean is everywhere. You can go and stand on a cliff and feel the waves’ power or just walk out into incredible nature so close to town.

People go to the Faroes especially to eat at Koks restaurant. It has recently moved to Kirkjubour, 10 km outside town.

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There’s delicious sourdough bread and fermented meat, and all of it comes from the landscape you can see through the window.

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It has lamb cooked two ways. One is braised a lot longer, served with boiled potatoes and sauce, and desserts such as rhubarb and porridge with cream – what we would call grandma food. Barbara is a more modern fish and shellfish restaurant. Go there to eat mussels and razor clams, or for its famous fish soup, while Etika has great sushi.

Helicopters are quite a common form of transport. They are a good way to visit the more remote islands and surprisingly inexpensive. I used one to visit Stora Dimun, an island where just one family lives – grandparents, parents and children. They raise sheep and make the most wonderful sheepskin.

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Foroyar is a lovely hotel located a little bit outside of Torshavn. Overlooking Nolsoy Fjord, it has a grass roof and blends into the landscape.

The current movement in Nordic cuisine reflects what was happening 30 years ago in California – when chefs and farmers came together to create a better food scene. Ingredients are so important now, we’re looking to use what is grown on our doorstep.

The water is very cold, too, which is perfect for mussels to get really big. They have horse mussels, which are related to the more common blue mussels, but are enormous, up to 20 cm long.My favourite hotel is Hafnia because of its location in the centre of Torshavn close to most of the restaurants and shopping. Gudrun and Gudrun has a shop where you can buy the sweaters from The Killing, and there are a lot of knits, furs and ceramics to shop for too in the little pedestrian streets.Back in the capital, another great restaurant is Aastova. It serves traditional dishes – what you would eat in a Faroese home. The place is so tiny that if you’re tall you can’t even stand up.We do that at Stedsans, my eatery on a rooftop farm in Copenhagen, but more and more places have kitchen restaurants and work with farmers and people eat together at long tables, too.You’re never more than 5 km from the sea here. Everyone has a fishing boat or knows someone who has, so fish, shellfish and sea urchins are menu staples.It’s eaten sliced as it is, or it can be cooked in soups. There’s an even deeper fermentation process when it becomes skerpikjott which is very strong tasting, a bit like rotten meat.With a population of only 50,000, there are more sheep than people. They’re everywhere – even grazing on top of houses, as rooftops are often covered in grass. If you hit one with your car you must report it to the police.It’s the perfect example of creating magic with very little and serves amazing, simple food such as lobster grilled so hot that it caramelises naturally.
Test 2 / 25

Malgudi Days

Just at that turning between Market Road and the lane leading to the chemist’s shop he had his ‘establishment. At eight in the evening you would not see him, and again at ten you would see nothing, but between those times he arrived, sold his goods and departed. Those who saw him remarked thus, ‘Lucky fellow! He has hardly an hour’s work a day and he pockets ten rupees – even graduates are unable to earn that! Three hundred rupees a month! He felt irritated when he heard such glib remarks and said, What these folk do not see is that I sit before the oven practically all day frying all this…

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At about 8:15 in the evening he arrived with a load of stuff. He looked as if he had four arms, so many things he carried about him. His equipment was the big tray balanced on his head, with its assortment of edibles, a stool stuck in the crook of his arm, a lamp in another hand and a couple of portable legs for mounting his tray. He lit the lamp, a lantern which consumed six pies worth of kerosene every day, and kept it near at hand, since he had to guard a lot of loose cash and a variety of miscellaneous articles.

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He always arrived in time to catch the cinema crowd coming out after the evening show. A pretender to the throne, a young scraggy fellow, sat on his spot until he arrived and did business, but he did not let that bother him unduly. In fact, he felt generous enough to say, ‘Let the poor rat do his business when I am not there. This sentiment was amply respected, and the pretender moved off a minute before the arrival of the prince among caterers.

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Though so much probing was going on, he knew exactly who was taking what. He knew by an extraordinary sense which of the jukta drivers was picking up chappatis at a given moment – he could even mention the licence number. He knew that the stained hand nervously coming up was that of a youngster who polished the shoes of passers-by. And he knew exactly at what hour he would see the wrestler’s arm searching for the perfect duck’s egg. His custom was drawn from the population swarming the pavement: the boot polish boys, for instance, who wandered to and fro with brush and polish in a bag, endlessly soliciting ‘Polish, sir, polish” Rama had a soft spot for them.

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It rent his heart to see their hungry, hollow eyes. It pained him to see the rags they wore. And it made him very unhappy to see the tremendous eagerness with which they came to him. But what could he do? He could not run a charity show, that was impossible. He measured out their half-glass of coffee correct to the fraction of an inch, but they could cling to the glass as long as they liked.

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He lived in the second lane behind the market. His wife opened the door, throwing into the night air the scent of burnt oil which perpetually hung about their home. She snatched from his hand all the encumbrances and counted the cash immediately.

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After dinner, he tucked a betel leaf and tobacco in his cheek and slept. He had dreams of traffic constables bullying him to move on and health inspectors saying he was spreading all kinds of disease and depopulating the city. But fortunately in actual life no one bothered him very seriously. The health officer no doubt came and said, ‘You must put all this under a glass lid, otherwise I shall destroy it some day… Take care!

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Rama no doubt violated all the well-accepted canons of cleanliness and sanitation, but still his customers not only survived his fare but seemed actually to flourish on it, having consumed it for years without showing signs of being any the worse for it.

Rama prepared a limited quantity of snacks for sale, but even then he had to carry back remnants. He consumed some of it himself, and the rest he warmed up and brought out for sale again the next day.All the coppers that men and women of this part of the universe earned through their miscellaneous jobs ultimately came to him at the end of the day. He put all this money into a little cloth bag dangling from his neck under his shirt, and carried it home, soon after the night show had started at the theatre.No one could walk past his display without throwing a look at it. A heap of bondas, which seemed puffed and big but melted in one’s mouth; dosais white, round, and limp, looking like layers of muslin; chappatis so thin that you could lift fifty of them on a little finger; duck’s eggs, hard-boiled, resembling a heap of ivory balls; and perpetually boiling coffee on a stove. He had a separate aluminium pot in which he kept chutney, which went gratis with almost every item.His customers liked him. They said in admiration, ‘Is there another place where you can get six pies and four chappatis for one anna?’ They sat around his tray, taking what they wanted. A dozen hands hovered about it every minute, because his customers were entitled to pick up, examine, and accept their stuff after proper scrutiny.They gloated over it. ‘Five rupees invested in the morning has produced another five…’ They ruminated on the exquisite mystery of this multiplication. Then it was put back for further investment on the morrow and the gains carefully separated and put away in a little wooden box.But he was a kindly man in private. ‘How the customers survive the food, I can’t understand. I suppose people build up a sort of immunity to such poisons, with all that dust blowing on it and the gutter behind…’He got up when the cock in the next house crowed. Sometimes it had a habit of waking up at three in the morning and letting out a shriek. ‘Why has the cock lost its normal sleep?’ Rama wondered as he awoke, but it was a signal he could not miss. Whether it was three o’clock or four, it was all the same to him. He had to get up and start his day.When he saw some customer haggling, he felt like shouting, ‘Give the poor fellow a little more. Don’t begrudge it. If you pay an anna more he can have a dosai and a chappati.’