The morning wholesale fish market opens at 4 a.m., on the docks below Akershus Castle just a minute’s walk away from the Oslo City Hall. Here, owners of local fish markets buy what they hope they can sell in a day. By 8 o’clock, the dealing is over and fish that are promised to local restaurants and supermarkets are crated and trucked away. By 9 the market is empty and so are the docks but customers are just beginning to enter the local fish markets and are buying the freshest of the catch.
An American tourist will recognize most of the seafood he sees displayed on crushed ice in a fish market: cod, mussels, crabs, shrimp, haddock and lobsters. In Norway there are two types of lobster. One type resembles an American lobster and is called a hummer. Hummers that are sold at the dock often have only one claw. Indeed, the whole arm of the lobster down to the body can be missing, the result of “doing battle on the ocean floor,” said one merchant, struggling with his English. Mutilated lobsters are rarely sold in America, probably because eating the two claws is often the highlight of a lobster feast and, to be honest, a one-clawed lobster is a disturbing sight and less marketable.
Then there is the Norwegian lobster, called a krep. It does not resemble any particular crustacean on the Maine coast though it seems to be a mixture of a lobster, a shrimp and a crab, in the same way that a platypus borrows its features from a beaver and a duck.
A krep’s claws are like a crab’s, and when mature a krep is only half the size of a mature hummer. Fully grown, a krep resembles a giant shrimp with crab’s claws attached. Hummer season is between October and February and it is a special treat to eat hummer at Christmastime. The krep is more plentiful and can be trapped throughout most of the year. The tail meat of a krep is sweeter and less rubbery than the meat of an American lobster. It would take two or three kreps to satisfy an American appetite.
About mid-afternoon a small dragger noses its bow against the public sidewalk that’s built into the face of the stone seawall in front of the City Hall. The captain displays his catch to passersby and does a brisk business selling cooked and fresh shrimp and cod. He has an advantage over his competitors in that his boat is so small that he can sell his catch as easily as if he were a merchant in a shop and the novelty of his activity attracts customers from around the plaza. Oslo is a proud and modern city, yet his presence there recalls the ancient custom of selling the catch right on the waterfront.