How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Read online

  Bi Skaarup was there. “I was very inspired by it,” she says. “But inside I was thinking: ‘Yes, Claus, this is a very beautiful dream. But let’s see if it succeeds.’ And it has. Not in my wildest dreams would I have dared think it would do so well.” One of Skaarup’s fears was that Meyer and Redzepi were trying to stand up for too large an area. “In the speech he gave, Claus said: ‘We’re now going to create a new Nordic kitchen.’ And that’s completely crazy because you can’t make one kitchen. It’s farther from Copenhagen to the north of Norway than it is from Copenhagen to the Sahara.” But in the end, her fear has proved unfounded because the New Nordic kitchen is less about creating one recipe book for the entire region and more about spreading a shared set of values. It’s about people, wherever they are, cooking whatever food is local and seasonal to them.

  Rene Redzepi & Claus Meyer: pioneers of the New Nordic kitchen

  It’s also about spreading ideas and know-how. The tenth and last point in the manifesto speaks of a desire “to join forces… for the benefit and advantage of everyone in the Nordic countries”. This includes not just chefs joining forces with farmers and retailers, but chefs joining forces with each other. Traditionally, the recipe for a restaurant’s signature dish has been a closely guarded secret known only by the head chef and a few trusted assistants. But the New Nordic chefs try to share recipes and ideas in the hope that they’ll all eventually benefit – and nowhere is that concept clearer than on Lars Williams’ Nordic Food Lab, gently bobbing in the waves outside Noma.

  “Hey, Chef!” says Williams to a dark-haired man breezing through the houseboat on his way to the restaurant. It’s Redzepi himself, too busy for an interview, but relaxed enough to sing along to the jazz playing on the stereo. “Ba-ba-bala-lala,” he sings, and waltzes out the door – the first and last I’ll see of him. Williams sees him rather more, and since my visit has moved to a more formal role at Noma itself. But he stresses that the lab – founded by Redzepi and Meyer in 2008 – is not merely an extension of the restaurant next door. “Our research is for Scandinavia in general,” he explains, in a voice so quiet that it’s later hard to hear what he says on my dictaphone. “We want to be an inspiration to all chefs and restaurants.” It’s early days, and he admits that disseminating his ideas is hard. But some of his concoctions have already been adopted by the chefs at Relæ; he’s preparing a Copenhagen-themed garum (or fish sauce) for local fishermen to make from their catches in the city’s harbour; he regularly holds workshops for chefs, and writes about his progress and recipes on the lab’s website. His two colleagues – one a culinary anthropologist, the other a scientist – also feed their research at the lab back into university debate.

  Williams didn’t start out in the kitchen. At university, he studied English literature – the first 15 lines of Paradise Lost are tattooed on his arm – and after leaving, he art-directed music videos for Madonna. But at home, he was nevertheless “completely mental about food. I had pork legs hanging in my living room. I was always baking my own bread and playing around with home fermentation. And then I was just like: I need to do this for real.” Work in New York kitchens soon followed, and a few years later he was heading up Heston Blumenthal’s food laboratory at the Fat Duck in Bray. It sounds a similar job to the one he now holds, but again Williams stresses the difference. There, he was working for one man, and one restaurant. Now he’s working for everyone.

  Aside from developing local produce, this work currently has two themes. The first centres on finding an alternative to meat, since cattle-farming is a major contributor to global warming. The second involves experimenting with micro-organisms like yeast. “We want to create an arsenal of micro-organisms that chefs can use in the same way that they use an oven or a knife or a mixer,” Williams explains. “People think, ‘Oh, yeast. I can only make bread and beer with it.’ But that’s not entirely true.”

  The fried barley mould is a good example of how Williams is trying to achieve both ends. As silly as it sounds, this slab of mould – comparable in size and texture to a flapjack – could replace a steak as a main course. At the same time, it’s also an example of how to use micro-organisms as a kitchen appliance. Taking a sack of barley grains, he soaks and steams them for 24 hours before coating them with a fungal yeast and leaving them in a highly humid container. After a day and half, the yeast has worked its magic, so Williams removes the grains once more and before my eyes he fries them – now packed closely together like a slice of cake – in rapeseed oil.

  Lars Williams at the Nordic Food Lab

  We try some. We like it. It has a texture that I think is somewhere between a lamb chop and a cereal bar – but what do I know? “Mmm,” says Williams. “There is some sweetness, but also an umami fatness. It’s almost like a honey-cured ham – but actually they’re just grains that have been changed by a micro-organism.”

  Williams is less impressed with the mouldy sunflower seeds he has subjected to the same process. They’re too oily, too fatty. “It doesn’t taste amazing – and that’s our criteria,” says Williams. “It has to taste amazing.” And if it doesn’t, he says he abandons the experiment immediately. “That’s the difference between this and a university laboratory. We don’t have to work through everything to the nth degree.”

  On the bottom deck of the houseboat, we find jar after jar of equally bizarre experiments, into which Williams period-ically plunges a pipette so that I can have a taste. There are pots of buckwheat and yellow peas that have been fermenting for a year. A kombucha floating in carrot juice. Oil made from local pine trees. Grasshopper garum. Quince vinegar. A very large rock. What does that do? I ask. “Oh, that’s just a rock,” smiles Williams. “We’re not fermenting the rock. Not yet.” But he could be on the verge of something similarly unexpected: a Danish curry.

  “Denmark isn’t really known for spice,” says Williams, “so we wondered if there were ways of making our own.” It was a process of trial and error – but eventually he discovered that if you dried slices of Danish cucumber at 60 degrees, then ground down the desiccated slivers, you ended up with a reddish powder that tastes first sweet, then salty, then peppery – and finally like a spice.

  It’s pretty high-end stuff – and 20 years ago the suggestion that anything as highfalutin as this would be happening here in the harbour of Copenhagen would have seemed laughable. When Bent Christensen wrote to the Michelin guide in the late 70s to ask if they might cover a few Danish restaurants, Michelin replied saying they doubted there were any restaurants of note in Denmark.

  “Danish food culture was really down the pan,” remembers Bi Skaarup, at home on her farm in Falster, southern Denmark, where she hosts courses about the history of Danish food. “If mother had an evening off, you had pizza, Coca Cola, and chips.”

  Copenhagen’s top restaurants looked to Paris for their inspiration, while Danish bread – once proudly varied – became limited to a few different kinds of loaves. “We once had more bakers than you did in Britain,” says Skaarup. “Even in the smallest villages, there would be a baker. But during the 70s and 80s, they started getting a lot of competition from the supermarkets, who were creating things that were much, much cheaper. At the same time, this fashion of eating white bread became more and more common.”

  Rye bread became comparatively less fashionable – particularly sad for a country where rye has been a strong part of the food culture. Behind Skaarup, the flat Danish fields scud towards the sea, punctured only by the occasional windmill. “The northern border for growing wheat goes straight through here. South of here you could grow wheat. North of here, you couldn’t. I usually say it’s right through our farm.”

  It wasn’t always like this. Towards the end of the 19th century, rye bread consumption was at its height, thanks to the very Danish invention of smørrebrød – otherwise known as open sandwiches. A nascent bourgeoisie had emerged in Copenhagen. For the first time, large numbers of people had disposable income – and so they started eatin
g out more. High-end restaurants opened, and in order to compete with the new businesses, the traditional wine and beer cellars realised they had to up their game. So they took the bland food they had always sold – rye bread and butter – and began to layer it with more exotic delicacies.

  “First, they would have lobster, Russian caviar,” says Skaarup. “But it was actually the smørrebrød that used the old Danish recipes – frikadeller [meatballs], salted beef, ‘exploded ox’, pickled herring, the usual peasant food – that became most popular. And it saved the rye bread. At that point, wheat had suddenly become very cheap – but because it was fashionable to eat smørrebrød, the bourgeoisie continued to eat rye.”

  Yet by then the wider decline in Danish food had already started – and, like many things in contemporary Denmark, it can be traced to the rise of the farming cooperatives in the late 1800s. Until that point, dairy farmers tended do everything on an individual, low-tech basis. Each farmer would milk their own cows, put the raw milk in a container and wait a couple of days until the fat had surfaced – at which point they’d skim the milk. At this stage, they were in a position to make their own individual brand of butter. On the plus side, this meant that there was a great deal of variety in Danish dairy products, and a great deal of expertise and interest in food production. However, it also meant that the food being produced was of a variable quality, and consequently unsuitable for export.

  Following a disastrous harvest in the early 1890s, and with the simultaneous rise of the collective ideals explored in other chapters, Danish farmers realised they needed to do more to work together. So small groups of them formed co-operatives and clubbed together to buy the latest dairy technology. These machines could quickly generate large quantities of skimmed milk and cream that were all of a high standard – and which enabled the farmers to create cheeses and butters that were at last suitable for the export market. Over the course of the 20th century, these cooperatives grew larger and larger through mergers – and by the 1950s and 60s, there were only a few large companies left. Similar transitions occurred in the slaughterhouses of the bacon industry.

  The process was great for the Danish economy, but it also caused three problems. It eradicated much of the diversity in Danish food; it made rural communities much less engaged with their products; and because the best stuff was being sent overseas, it made the consumer less conscious of what was good cheese and what wasn’t.

  “We were taught in schools that we produced some of the best agricultural products in the world – but it wasn’t true,” says Skaarup. “I realised I could get much better butter in Ireland, for instance, or in France. We were just very good at producing it in large amounts. And in the battle to get things sold to England, the Danish consumer lost the knowledge of what was good. At the same time, the people at the farms lost knowledge of the product. They didn’t know how a great cabbage should look because they didn’t grow it themselves. And at some point, they stopped slaughtering their own animals.”

  Simultaneously, amateur cooks were losing their sense of adventure – a change Skaarup attributes to the Danes’ collective loss of confidence following the defeat to Germany in 1864. “Our pride was really broken there. We started listening to the authorities much more, instead of creating our own opinions about things – and this was also mirrored in the kitchen. Housewife associations travelled the country teaching women how to make ‘correct’ food. They were discouraged from being creative and fun in the kitchen.”

  She shows me some Danish cookbooks from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. “Look at her face!” says Skaarup, pointing at a miserable-looking woman in one photograph. “She’s not having fun. These women stand in a special way. They hold the meat in a special way. It looks like it’s been dipped in chlorine. There’s no fun, there’s no creativity any more.” By the 60s, with more and more women in work, home-cooking was a thing of the past – and so was an interest in Danish cuisine.

  How things have changed – although people can’t agree exactly why that change happened, or when. The conventional answer is 2004, with the creation of the New Nordic manifesto, but really the seeds were sown long before then. Bi Skaarup charts it to November 1995, when three government ministers held a conference at Humlebaek’s Louisiana Gallery to discuss the problem with dozens of chefs and food critics. But Bent Christensen has another suggestion: the late 70s, when a Danish chef called Erwin Lauterbach moved to Sweden. At the time, the Swedish government gave pensioners meal tickets to use at participating restaurants. The pensioners provided a lot of business, and so competition between these restaurants was fierce. Each chef had to be particularly inventive in order to win the pensioners’ support.

  “To make money, Lauterbach had to be very creative. He learned to make celery in 15 ways. He used special fish, special parts of the cow, special parts of the pig – like the nose, or ear or tail. Fish of no reputation. Vegetables of no reputation. And he had to focus on local produce, because it had to be cheap. So he invented simple Nordic cooking, because he started to be creative with local foods that people did not think were normally eatable. He was the one starting the tradition.”

  But it would not be fair to end this account without devoting more space to Claus Meyer, the man who founded Noma, and who asked Rene Redzepi to work there in the first place. Outside Denmark, Meyer is virtually unknown, and it is Redzepi who gets all the publicity. But while Redzepi deserves the adulation he receives, his success is mostly in making Noma what it is today. Meyer’s role has been far wider: he has had a hand in virtually every area of the Danish food resurgence.

  Early in the chapter, I mentioned that the story of Danish cuisine is about more than one man and, as Skaarup’s and Christensen’s different narratives show, there are many people and influences in play here. But Claus Meyer deserves a special place in the pantheon, because few people have understood as well as him how Danish food could be saved. He realised early on that the problem could not be solved simply through individual restaurants. It was about wholesale social change.

  Some chefs look down on Meyer because he has never run a gourmet kitchen himself. But he has done virtually everything else. He’s published 14 cookbooks and hosted his own show – Meyer’s Kitchen – on Danish television for the past two decades. Aside from Noma, Meyer has founded three other restaurants, each aimed at achieving New Nordic goals at more affordable prices. With Redzepi, he founded the Nordic Food Lab. He owns a bakery chain, he lectures in food science at the University of Copenhagen and runs a cooking school that teaches the values of the New Nordic cuisine. He has a catering business, a vinegar brewery and an organic orchard. He heads a research project aimed at improving children’s food. He set up a series of allotments for public use. Most recently, he filmed a show where he trained convicts to cook, a concept later used by Gordon Ramsay. In his spare moments, Meyer runs a programme that teaches underprivileged Bolivians to cook. Incidentally, as a teenager, he was a regional badminton champion.

  The smorgasbord – a revamped national staple

  “It is a never-ending story,” he says when we meet in his garden in Frederiksberg, a smart part of Copenhagen. “My idea was to make a kind of virus, to create an enormous amount of initiatives and events and projects and partnerships that together in a very smooth, frictionless way would have an effect on both demand and supply. It was a total attack on this food culture of ours. My feeling is that it doesn’t work if the government comes in with some decreey. Opening a restaurant doesn’t work on its own. But if you do a lot of things together, and you try to include a lot of people, and you inspire them and you think about both those who act and those who consume, then you might get a kind of critical mass. It’s like the snowball effect, or a tipping point.”

  In this light, though Noma is the most famous of Meyer’s projects, it is but one of many means to an end. “When we started Noma, there were two objectives. One was to make a fantastic restaurant. The other was to challenge the French resta
urant model, which was the way of the top restaurants in Denmark at that time. So it was just one means in my struggle to open the minds of my fellow Danes to the potential of food culture. Noma was the launch. But I wanted to do something that was much more for ordinary people. I wanted to deal with the everyday meal, the egalitarian meal. And so I had to focus on how to change demand – how to inspire consumers to be part of this thing.”

  Meyer ran his own chocolate business as a teenager, but it wasn’t until 1983, when he was 20, that he had his culinary epiphany. With an alcoholic mother and an absentee father, Meyer felt lonely and directionless. “So I said, what the hell – let me win some time. I’ll go to France. There was no real reason for it – I just went.” First, he went to Paris, where he lived with a dentist and cooked for his mistresses. But then Meyer came down with hepatitis and moved to Gascony to recover. He ended up living with the family of a pastry chef called Guy.

  “That family,” he remembers, with some emotion, “they couldn’t have children, but they’d always wanted a boy. So they treated me like their lost son and spoiled me with fantastic cakes and desserts and love. As soon as I recovered from my disease – and I did it extremely quickly, to the surprise of all the doctors – I started working with Guy, who became my spiritual father, my mentor and my muse. And in contrast to my actual father, he taught me that I was good at something and he taught me that I could do great things and that I should love what I was doing.”