This month…
… I’ve had a flashback to the time I tasted rakfisk. This Norwegian dish of fermented trout had the aroma of damp football kit left in a school locker over the holidays. As a Marmite addict I appreciate I have no place to criticise another nation’s pungent delicacy, yet I wanted to reassure you that rakfisk plays no part in this issue’s season-by-season tour of fresh, disarmingly simple Nordic cuisine (p88).A happier personal recollection followed on reading features editor Orla Thomas’s atmospheric search for traces of Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli and Shere Kahn in modern India (p60). In 2007, while working in The Times of India’s offices in Mumbai, I happened upon the exquisitely crumbling remains of the house where Kipling was born (right). In the canopy of a tree alongside, a mass of fruit bats jostled one another with leathery wings for sleeping space: a taste of the real Jungle Book, in the heart of the mega-city.