OSLO – Gravad lax – or pickled salmon – is one of the most popular Scandinavian dishes. Its preparation process is simple and quick, and its ingredients are seemingly identical everywhere: Salmon fillet, salt, sugar, oil, and herbs.
However, despite this, those in the know and lox connoisseurs have been claiming that the Swedish gravad lax tastes differently than the Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish variety. “The Swedish variety contains some sort of slight sourness, “ says Danish Chef Richard Muller Holstrum. “I was never able to detect its source.”
Horror at the village
Arnolf Lillehammer, a resident of the Norwegian village of Idiben, located near the Swedish border, will never forget the last time he saw his father alive. “It happened just before the last summer,” Arnolf recounted. “The lake was about to freeze, and dad went out to fish in the afternoon. He asked me to help him clean the fish when he returns. After three hours we started to worry. The next day, after we found his boat, we realized something terrible had happened.”
Three weeks later, Arnolf’s fears were replaced by pure horror, after finding his father’s corpse buried in the snow, with both his feet cut off.
This was not the only disappearance in the area. In fact, dozens of cases of fishermen failing to return home at the end of the day were recorded in eastern Norway in recent years. The locals attributed the many disappearances to the harsh winter conditions; fierce snowstorms did not leave any hope for finding the bodies. However, the horrible fate of Arnolf Lillehammer’s father, Videkon, made it clear this was a much more sinister affair than previously thought.
The bizarre death was extensively covered by local media and police officials devoted great efforts to solving the mystery, but answers were not forthcoming. However, the Lillehammer family finally received some unexpected help: One clear summer day, a man by the name of Bjorn B. (the full name is being withheld) appeared at the family’s door and presented himself as a Swedish army defector.
The salmon war
Bjorn told the stunned relatives that in the framework of his role as an intelligence officer, he was exposed to the activity of a top secret unit in the Swedish army. The discovery prompted severe pangs of conscience. The moment he read about the Lillehammer family’s tragedy, he knew he would not be able to live with himself if he doesn’t confess to them.
In the 1950s, Bjorn revealed, Sweden faced a sharp decline in pickled salmon exports, mostly because of the growing competition against Norwegian salmon. Secret experiments and taste tests performed by Swedish scientists finally identified the secret ingredient that would give Swedish salmon the edge: One gram of fungus taken from human feet for every 100 grams of gravad lax.
Residents of east Norway villages, known for not changing socks for long months, were therefore an obvious target. And so, Sweden established the Strumpor Stinkande elite unit, responsible for fresh supply of stinky human feet for the Swedish salmon industry.
Senior Swedish military officials are of course rejecting out of hand reports on the existence of the above unit, yet Bjorn B.’s testimonial was further reinforced last week in the Norwegian village of Durknhart. A boy walking by the river found a piece of metal resembling a pin of a military unit sporting an unequivocal symbol – a sock flanked by two wings.
Now all that is left is to see whether the International Court of Justice at The Hague will take up the challenge and probe what appears to be a brutal crime committed by Sweden against the Norwegian people.
Swedish Foreign Ministry’s response
We are stunned by this baseless anti-Swedish report and expect the Israeli government to harshly condemn it. The absence of any condemnation is reminiscent of the Ben Gurion government’s feeble response to Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte’s assassination in Jerusalem in 1948.
Note: The writer of this piece is a phony investigative reporter; the above investigative report is worthless, just like the Swedish report published last week.