Where can I learn more about the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto?
For a detailed discussion of the history, principles, and benefits of the New Nordic Cuisine Movement, please visit Claus Meyer’s website at: www.clausmeyer.dk.
“New Nordic Cuisine,” a concept developed and promoted by Scandinavia’s leading chefs, dietitians, and food journalists, is worthy of exploration not only by people who live where it snows, but by anyone interested in learning how to enrich their diet with the freshest of locally procured or foraged foods. While it celebrates the goodness of cold-climate foods native to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland, this exciting food movement is just as much about how one acquires and prepares seasonal, local ingredients. Here’s how to embrace not only a cuisine but a healthy lifestyle worthy of emulation.
“New” Nordic cuisine took shape as a movement in 2004, when Claus Meyer and René Redzepi, founders of Copenhagen’s now-famous restaurant, Noma, organized a symposium between twelve of Scandinavia’s foremost chefs. Their intention? To define nothing less than a comprehensive, uniquely Scandinavian nutritional credo.
Subsequently adopted by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2005, the results of this historic symposium, “A New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto,” is defined by ten key objectives (here paraphrased in brief from Claus Meyer’s original statement):
To prepare fresh, pure, and seasonal food
To eat foods in season
To base cooking on local Nordic ingredients to create food that’s not only delicious, but healthy
To promote Nordic products, producers, and culture on a global level
To ensure that fishing, hunting, and farming processes are safe, organic, and humane
To reinvent or modernize traditional Nordic recipes
To welcome the “fusion” of Nordic culinary traditions with inspiration from abroad
To promote a regional distribution of some food products while still endorsing local self-sufficiency
To build mutually beneficial, pan-Scandinavian partnerships across the food industry and with consumers, scientists, educators, politicians, and authorities
Where can I learn more about the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto?
For a detailed discussion of the history, principles, and benefits of the New Nordic Cuisine Movement, please visit Claus Meyer’s website at: www.clausmeyer.dk.
Setting folks on fire faster than Vikings on a spree, Redzepi and Meyer’s vision has been embraced across Scandinavia and Great Britain by chefs and home cooks eager to return to the foodways of our grandparents’ generation: utilizing the freshest of seasonal, locally procured ingredients to create delicious, nutritionally balanced meals meant to be savored as they are best prepared—slowly and mindfully.
The success and positive outcomes of the movement are tangible: In 2010 and 2011, Noma captured Restaurant Magazine’s title of “Best Restaurant in the World.” Scandinavian chefs swept the 2011 Bocuse d’Or competition (the Olympics of the international culinary world). And both the beautifully produced public television series New Scandinavian Cooking, hosted by Meyer, Andreas Viestad, Tina Nordström, and Sara La Fountain, and two equally beautiful cookbooks by Trina Hahnemann, The Scandinavian Cookbook (Andrews McMeel Publishing: 2009) and The Nordic Diet (Quadrille Publishing: 2010/Skyhorse Publishing: 2011) have sparked widespread interest in Nordic cooking in the United States.
The desire to promote “Nordic” cuisine wasn’t original to Redzepi and Meyer, who stand on the shoulders of a culinary giant. Sweden’s most famous restaurateur, Tore Wretman (1916–2003), although trained in French professional kitchens, was passionate about promoting Husmanskost, traditional Swedish home cooking. (This is a bit ironic, since Wretman was also responsible for introducing imported avocados and green bell peppers to Scandinavian cuisine.) He revived the tradition of the smörgåsbord at his Stockholm restaurants, Riche and the Operakällaren (“Opera Cellar”). He also cofounded Sweden’s Gastronomic Academy.
One of the primary principles of the New Nordic Cuisine Movement is an emphasis on what the French call terroir: the climatic conditions and cultivation practices responsible for those foods that flourish in specific environments. Food that is gathered, farmed, fished, or hunted in Scandinavia has characteristics distinctive to its environmental landscape—what Claus Meyer calls “the ‘soul’ of the location.” The terroir of Scandinavia, although it varies from country to country, is generally a harsh one; yet, the plants and animals that have naturally adapted to its alternating seasons of light and darkness, its polar winters, its short summers, and—often—its mountainous soils are just as conducive to good health as those native to warmer climes closer to the equator. The glory of the New Nordic Cuisine Movement is that it showcases the health benefits of basing your diet primarily upon local, organic foods, unaltered by genetic engineering or forced farming, that have been allowed to ripen at their own pace in minimally cultivated ecosystems. Foraging and/or acquiring foods straight from their source—when they are in season—is a primary first step in recovering what many of us have lost in this age of packaged and prepared food transported across vast distances. It’s a reminder of our symbiotic connection to our environment and the joy of anticipating foods you can (or at least, should) only experience at specific times of the year.
Although certainly not identical to the Nordic terroir, the climates of the northern states and provinces of North America are similar enough to Scandinavia’s to enable us to emulate the principals of the Nordic food movement. It isn’t a coincidence that more Scandinavian immigrants settled in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, Iowa, and the Pacific Northwest than in Florida or New Mexico. They wanted to be in places that reminded them of home, and that allowed them to continue to enjoy the cold-climate berries, root vegetables, fish, and wild game of their homelands.
Look at any recent top ten list of the healthiest foods you can eat, and you will find that most of the foods mentioned are native to Nordic climes. There is the vast abundance of summer’s berries: lingonberries, cloudberries (called “bakeapples” where they grow wild in Alaska and Canada), gooseberries, elderberries, blueberries, and strawberries—all rich in antioxidants vital to nervous system and brain health. The hardy, unrefined, high-fiber grains of Scandinavia—rye, barley, oats, and spelt (now returned to cultivation after a hiatus of a century or two)—are proven to reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and contain amounts of cancer-fighting phytochemicals equal to or greater than fruits and vegetables. These whole grains have the added benefit of being useful for reducing the discomfort of perimenopause and of significantly lowering the risk of colon and breast cancer. And colorful cold-climate root and cruciferous vegetables—beets, rutabagas, onions, kohlrabi, cabbage—are all indispensible superfoods. Even often-vilified potatoes are extremely nutritious when prepared properly (baked, not deep-fried): they are a great source of nervous system–soothing B6.
In water-locked Scandinavia, fish and seafood from the ocean and pristine lakes were traditionally key both to subsistence and to the economy (Norway is still a leading exporter of salt cod). Two to three servings a week of heart-healthy cold-water fish like salmon, cod, herring, and halibut, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, can lower triglycerides and “bad” LDL cholesterol, preventing the metabolic syndrome that leads to heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.
Please note that before following any of the dietary suggestions in this book, you should first secure the approval of your physician, especially if you have a pre-existing condition like kidney disease, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or pregnancy that requires a special diet. People with kidney disease, for example, shouldn’t eat venison, which is high in purines and can contribute to kidney stones or gout; neither should they ingest juniper berries (often a flavoring used for wild game). Women who are pregnant or nursing and also young children should limit their consumption of cold-water fish, which may contain mercury. Safety first: check with your doctor.
In Scandinavia, where a strong hunting culture still predominates, one can find wild game in the supermarket—a distribution practice that Americans should lobby for. Game meat—venison, boar, moose, elk (in America), rabbit, wild fowl—is so lean and succulent when cooked properly that it deserves a much larger place in American cuisine than it now enjoys. If you don’t hunt yourself or have hunter friends willing to share their bounty with you, you can order farm-raised game online from several suppliers. It’s often fairly expensive, requiring refrigerated shipment from far away, but is worth the cost if that’s the only way you can get it. Enjoyed in moderation—as most red meat and pork should be—wild game is the perfect antidote to restore palates and waistlines destroyed by too many fast-food burgers.
In 1755, Swedish cookbook author Kasja Warg championed a cooking method that became proverbial for generations: Man tager hvaÐ man hafver. Loosely translated, this means “Use what you have on hand,” a piece of wisdom that ought to be embroidered and hung in kitchens everywhere, with perhaps the addition of the word “locally” added for clarification. Cooking seasonal foods from scratch isn’t difficult—often it calls for little more than a pot of water, some spices, ingenuity in using what you can find in your cupboard … and the one thing that’s harder than fresh venison for many to find: time. It takes more time to source and select fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, and seafood than it does to order a pizza. It takes more time to cook food from scratch than it does to zap a frozen dinner in the microwave. It takes more time to sit together at a dinner table with your loved ones, enjoying good food and uninterrupted conversation, than it does to gobble a fast-food burger in the car, at your desk, or in front of the television set. Yet the health and emotional benefits of slowing down—even just a little bit—are incalculable.
A key time-saving tip to think about when contemplating baking the Nordic way is that most Scandinavian cookies, cakes, and baked goods freeze magnificently. So do soups, stews, and savory pies. The trick is to make them when you have the leisure and inclination, then freeze them for later use on days when you’re too tired to cook or when unexpected company drops by.
One of the greatest things about cooking many of the Nordic recipes in this book is that, while they are often (although not always) slow foods that need time to simmer over low and slow heat or to rest in the refrigerator for a few hours or even days, most of them don’t take a lot of effort or advanced cooking skills to make. The only thing they require is some planning ahead. The hallmark of Nordic cooking, past and present, has always been simplicity. If you have your ingredients on hand, the primary time required is for tossing them together before allowing them to cook in the oven, to smoke outdoors (or indoors in a SAVU Smoker Bag), or to cold-cure in the refrigerator.
So what are some of the staples you should keep on hand to facilitate cooking like a modern Viking? Here’s a checklist:
Whole Grains and Legumes: rye flour, rye flakes, cracked rye, spelt flour, spelt berries, barley flour, pearl barley, oat flour, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, semolina, Swedish brown beans, dried yellow peas, potato starch flour (Swan brand), all-purpose flour
Canned Seafood: pickled herring, smoked herring, cod or lumpfish roe (caviar), Kalles roe spread, dried salt cod, Swedish spiced sprats (Swedish “anchovies”)
Dairy and Cheeses: Icelandic skyr (Siggi’s brand), buttermilk, Snøfrisk, Danish blue cheese (like Danablu brand), gjetost (Ski Queen brand), Våsterbotten, Nøkkelost, Havarti, Hushållsost (farmer’s cheese)
Vegetable Bin: onions, garlic, leeks, beets, rutabagas, cabbage, carrots, celery, celery roots, kohlrabi, potatoes, turnips, broccoli, cauliflower, horseradish
Herbs and Spices: cardamom pods or seed, dill (fresh and dried), dill seeds, star anise, anise seed, fennel seed, caraway seed, allspice berries, cloves, peppercorns, ground ginger, dried bitter orange peel, curry powder, coriander seed, mustard seed, saffron, bay leaves, juniper berries, rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, kosher salt, sea salt, cinnamon sticks, ground cinnamon, white pepper
Dried Fruit: prunes, cranberries, currants, raisins, rosehips, apples, apricots
Jams and Sweeteners: lingonberry jam, red currant jam, cloudberry jam, vanilla sugar, Swedish dark syrup (mörk sirap), Swedish light syrup (ljus sirap), honey, sugar, meringue powder, cocoa powder
Nuts: walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds
Miscellaneous: cold-pressed rapeseed oil (a.k.a. canola oil), hornsalt (baker’s ammonia), dried mushrooms (morels, chanterelles, porcini), aquavit or potato vodka, vanilla beans, vanilla extract, cardamom extract, almond extract, lingonberry vinegar, rennet liquid or tablets, gravy browning (Kitchen Bouquet brand), unflavored gelatin powder, sheet gelatin, sago or pearl tapioca, active dry yeast, frozen puff pastry, capers, gherkins
You don’t necessarily need fancy cooking equipment to prepare flavorful Nordic recipes. However, if you love to bake, it’s really nice to have these items: a lefse griddle, a lefse stick, a grooved rolling pin, a hob-knobbed rolling pin, a plattar (or plett) pan for Swedish pancakes, a Danish æbleskiver (or ebleskiver) pan, an almond cake pan, a 3-liter Danish rye bread pan (or a pullman pan), sandbakkel tins, a rosette iron, kransekake rings, a krumkake baker or iron, a waffle iron, and a potato ricer. To ease preparation of cooking in general, it’s also great to own a stand mixer, a slow cooker, an outdoor or stovetop smoker (or Finnish SAVU Smoker Bags for use in the oven or on the grill), an immersion blender, a digital thermometer, and an oven thermometer.
Most of the principals espoused by current fads like the “whole food,” “local food,” and “slow food” movements apply to Nordic cooking as well—all reasons why this cuisine has attracted so much interest. If you close your eyes and think back to how your grandparents or great-grandparents procured, cooked, and consumed their meals, you’ll find that you already know the basics:
Whenever possible, buy vegetables, meats, and fish from local farmers, fishermen, and butchers—you should be able to shake the hand that picked your cabbage or caught your fish. Patronize farmers markets or become part of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) food box program. Many CSAs allow you to request specific box contents, but it’s even more fun—like Christmas every other week—to let yourself be surprised and creatively inspired by whatever they’ve placed in the box for you.
Unless it’s cheese, whole grains, or local meat or seafood, try to resist the urge to buy any food product packaged in plastic, Styrofoam, or cardboard. You can’t smell foods for freshness if they’re wrapped in plastic, and you can’t control the ingredients of processed mixes or ready-made meals.
If a food doesn’t grow in your area or it’s out of season, think twice, and then twice more, before eating it. Yes, there are exceptions to this tip—healthy staples like olive oil, seasonal treats like Christmas oranges, or the imported Scandinavian specialties like lingonberry jam and matjes herring you can find at any IKEA marketplace. But let your buying be ruled primarily by what’s local and what’s in season.
Instead of going to a smelly gym to work off the results of a sedentary lifestyle, get outside and celebrate the changing seasons by foraging for nettles or elderflowers, picking summer berries, or fishing for lake trout. Plant a container or a hydroponic garden. There’s something deeply rewarding about eating natural foods you’ve foraged or harvested for yourself.
Avoid big-box stores (except for IKEA, of course, which features Scandinavian products). If you can, leave your car at home and patronize markets or grocery stores that are within walking or biking distance. Never buy more food at one time than you can carry home in two shopping bags. One of the reasons that Europeans are generally more fit than Americans is that many still walk to do their shopping.
Enjoy sugar and alcohol—but only in the presence of others, where three or more are gathered together. Seriously. The Swedes love their fika (coffee breaks often accompanied with a sweet yeasted bread or pastry), often two or three times a day, but they generally walk to the coffee shops to meet their friends—they don’t sit alone in their work cubicle drinking a double-sized caramel latte. You’ll find an abundance of recipes for sweet breads, desserts, and alcoholic beverages in this book, but these are meant to be shared with others, in modest proportions, at special social occasions—not as comfort food pick-me-ups to wolf down in solitude.
Neither this book nor the New Nordic Cuisine Movement in general are about weight loss. Rather, they’re about lifestyle—the choices you make about what you choose to eat, where it comes from, how you get it home, how you prepare it, and how you eat it (hopefully, in the spirit of Danish hygge, relaxing with good friends at a cozy and calming dinner table).
Yet the evidence is mounting that following the principles endorsed by the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto can indeed help to combat obesity and lead to improved health. In 2011, the American Society for Nutrition’s Journal of Nutrition revealed how scientists from Denmark’s Institute of Cancer Epidemiology and Aarhus University investigated the health benefits of a diet based on native Nordic foods, concluding that the consumption of things like root vegetables, healthy seafood, and—especially—whole-grain rye could be directly related to lower mortality among middle-aged Danes, especially men.
To read these early research findings favoring the Nordic diet, have a look at the abstract of the article “Healthy Aspects of the Nordic Diet Are Related to Lower Total Mortality” by Anja Olsen et al., of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society, published in the Journal of Nutrition (2011, 141:4), and Claus Meyer’s article “The Health Benefits of the Nordic Diet,” at www.clausmeyer.dk/en/the_new_nordic_cuisine.
Additionally, in collaboration with Claus Meyer, an obesity research team at the University of Copenhagen has been conducting a $20 million, two-year research study investigating the weight-loss potential of a Nordic diet. Preliminary findings of one twenty-six-week study revealed that participants who adhered to a strict diet of native Scandinavian foods had, by week twelve, achieved a weight loss of 3.1 kilos (6.8 pounds) as opposed to the 1.6 kilo loss by participants who ate typical meals of meat, potatoes, and refined grain products.
Now that you know about the health benefits of a Nordic foods diet and lifestyle—let’s get started!