30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE768 pages and around 700 recipes from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Magnus Nilsson spent several years travelling throughout the region to collect them.
For a British reader, some of it will be familiar and much of the rest will be a discovery. Swedish meatballs, gravlax and cinnamon buns have become part of Britain's idea of Nordic food, while the Finnish, Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic material remains largely unfamiliar. Nilsson includes the difficult stuff without turning it into a spectacle. Hákarl, skerpikjøt, surströmming and lutefisk sit alongside pancakes and meatballs.
The recipes are short and matter-of-fact, more a record than an instruction manual. The book also contains an extensive section on Nordic food culture, seasonality and history, and that is the part you actually read.
If it is the baking you want, The Nordic Baking Book from 2018 is the companion volume.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 768
Language: English
First published: 2015
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Through the 2000s, Nordic food has been marketed as foraging, fermentation and restaurant aesthetics. That is a real movement, but it is not what people in the Nordics actually eat. Magnus Nilsson travelled the entire region and wrote down the other thing: the boiled, the pickled, the unglamorous and the regional, all the way out to the Faroes and Greenland.
That it was he who did it matters. He was one of the movement's central figures and could have blurred the line between tradition and marketing without anyone objecting. He did the opposite.
