The drive from Oslo to Eggedal had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience is always a warning sign. Three hours of pine forests and fjord glimpses, my partner navigating while I smugly declared myself "quite good at Norwegian roads now, actually." Then, in the final mile, I confidently turned left at a fork where I should have turned right, and spent twenty minutes reversing down a gravel track barely wider than a supermarket trolley while a local in a Volvo watched with the patient amusement of someone who'd seen this many times before.

The cottage itself appeared like something from a particularly persuasive travel brochure. Red wooden walls, white trim, a small deck overlooking nothing but trees and a distant glimpse of lake. I stumbled out of the car, still flushed from my reversing ordeal, and immediately noticed the smell. Woodsmoke from somewhere nearby, yes, but underneath it something else. Something promising. The air in Buskerud carries a kind of appetite with it, I've decided. Mountain appetite, my grandmother would have called it. The hunger that comes from proper air rather than the recycled stuff back in Manchester.

We'd planned to eat out that first evening. There was a supposedly decent place in the village, perhaps ten minutes away. But the cottage kitchen proved too seductive. A proper wooden table, windows open to the pine-scented evening, and a fridge we'd stocked at a supermarket near Drammen that had felt like preparing for some Arctic expedition. Reindeer sausages, I remember. A lump of brown cheese that the checkout woman had approved of with a nod. Potatoes that actually smelled of earth.

I attempted a kind of Norwegian fry-up, if such a thing can exist without causing diplomatic incident. The reindeer sausages split obligingly in the pan, releasing something dark and rich that made my partner raise an eyebrow in what I chose to interpret as admiration. I burned the first lot of potatoes through overconfidence, distracted by the view and a glass of aquavit I'd found in a cupboard. The second lot I watched like a hawk, which meant they were merely heavily browned rather than actually carbonised.

We ate at ten o'clock, which felt scandalously late and completely natural. The light was still doing that Norwegian refusal to properly end the day, and something about the combination of slightly charred potato, gamey sausage, and the particular melancholy of a holiday kitchen made me unexpectedly emotional. I told my partner this. They reminded me I'd had three glasses of aquavit and was notoriously sentimental after long drives.

The morning brought proper exploration of local food possibilities. We'd discovered a small market in Eggedal village, operating from what looked like someone's garage with the doors open. Brown cheese featured heavily, in various degrees of intensity that the seller explained with the seriousness of a wine merchant. I bought the strongest, because I am incapable of moderation in unfamiliar culinary situations, and spent the rest of the morning wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake. It sat in the car like a small, orange challenge.

Lunch was assembled rather than cooked. Dense bread from the market, the brown cheese sliced thin in self-preservation, some kind of pickled fish in a jar I'd selected primarily for its attractive label. We ate on the cottage deck, watched by what I can only describe as an excessively confident squirrel. The cheese was... intense. Caramelised and faintly sweet and somehow savoury all at once, like someone had described cheese to a person who'd never tasted it and they'd done their best from the description. I found myself returning to it, puzzled and pleased in equal measure.

That evening I attempted fish properly, having purchased something local and silver from a man who'd gestured at the lake when I asked where it came from. I pan-fried it with butter and dill from a pot on the cottage windowsill, feeling briefly like a person who knew what they were doing. The fish fell apart slightly, because I'd been too enthusiastic with the turning. We ate it anyway, with more of those earthy potatoes and a white wine we'd chilled in the lake in a moment of holiday improvisation.

The thing about self-catering in a place like Eggedal is that your failures become part of the place's character. The slightly burned, the slightly fallen-apart, the cheese that challenged rather than comforted. Each meal carried the weight of where we'd found the ingredients, the conversations attempted in broken English and enthusiastic gesture, the particular light through the kitchen window at different hours.

By our final morning I'd developed a routine. Coffee first, made in a pot that required some coaxing, eaten with the last of the brown cheese which I'd grown to genuinely crave. Then a walk to work up appetite for whatever I'd attempt next. The squirrel had become almost companionable, or possibly just demanding. I left Norway with recipes scrawled on the back of a ferry timetable, a jar of something lingonberry-related, and the certain knowledge that I'd never quite recreate that particular combination of slight culinary chaos and absolute contentment.