New Nordic in a Bottle
In November 2004, a dozen chefs from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands met in Copenhagen and signed a document. The Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen had ten points, and read together they amounted to a dare: cook with what the north actually grows, in the season it grows, with purity, simplicity and an eye to the welfare of the land, the animals and the people who work them, and see whether that produces a cuisine worth the name. Nobody outside the region took it seriously. Then a restaurant on the Copenhagen waterfront, opened the year before by two of the signatories, René Redzepi and Claus Meyer, spent the next two decades proving the dare could be won, and Copenhagen became the most influential food city in the world.
The interesting thing for a pantry is what happened next. A manifesto about restaurants became a set of products. This is the movement, what it believed, and the bottles and tins on our shelf that carry it.
What it believed
Three ideas from the manifesto did most of the work. The first was terroir applied to the north: that Nordic ingredients, sea buckthorn, pine, wild herbs, root vegetables, birch, seaweed, the fish of cold water, were worth building a cuisine on rather than importing lemons and olive oil. The second was preservation as flavor: with a short growing season, the Nordic kitchen had to pickle, salt, smoke, dry and ferment to eat through the winter, and the movement turned those necessities into techniques of the first rank, running fermentation labs where a restaurant might have kept a pastry section. The third was purity, in the sense of restraint: fewer elements on the plate, each one clear. Those three ideas, applied to products rather than plates, describe most of what follows.
Garum: fermentation leaves the lab
The restaurant's fermentation lab spent years reviving and reinventing garum, the fermented fish sauce of the Romans, and then made it from things other than fish: roasted grains, mushrooms, beef, even insects, using enzymes and time to break proteins into the deep savory taste the Japanese call umami. When the restaurant's founders launched Noma Projects to bottle the lab's work for home kitchens, Mushroom Garum was the first product, and it is the single clearest expression of New Nordic in a bottle: a Nordic ingredient, preserved by fermentation, reduced to one clear savory idea. Our guide to using it and the pot of beans it improves are where to start; the corn yuzu hot sauce is the same lab turned toward heat.
Sparkling tea: the sommelier's problem
A Copenhagen sommelier, Jacob Kocemba, faced the problem every tasting-menu restaurant faces: what to pour for the guest who is not drinking that is as serious as the wine. His answer was to blend fine teas, carbonate them and finish them with a little sugar and acidity, so they behaved like wine at the table, and Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company grew from it. It is New Nordic thinking applied to a glass: purity, restraint, and a refusal to accept that the non-drinker gets the lesser thing. Our producer guide covers the bottles, and our zero-proof guide puts them in the wider category they helped create.
Licorice: a Nordic flavor made beautiful
Licorice is the most Nordic of flavors, and until the 2000s it lived in supermarket bags. Lakrids by Bülow, which began in a Bornholm kitchen in 2007, the same years the manifesto was taking hold, applied the movement's design sensibility to it: real licorice root, tempered chocolate, a single letter on a heavy matte tin. It is not a manifesto product, but it comes from the same Copenhagen that had decided its own ingredients deserved the best possible treatment, and our Lakrids guide and licorice guide tell the story.
Tins: the Jutland fjord
Preservation as flavor reaches its most literal form in Fangst, the Danish conservas house that tins Nordic fish, trout from Limfjord smoked over juniper, Baltic sprats, mussels from the fjords, in the Iberian tradition but with northern ingredients. It is a tin of the manifesto: local fish, preserved by smoke and oil, one clear flavor. Our guide to Fangst and Ramón Peña puts the Danish tin beside the Galician one, and the tinned fish tasting gives it slot seven.
What the movement changed everywhere else
The New Nordic idea traveled because its principles were portable: cook what is near you, preserve it with skill, put less on the plate. It gave American restaurants permission to be regional rather than French, revived fermentation as a home technique, made foraging fashionable and, more quietly, taught a generation of food producers that a bottle of something fermented or a tin of local fish could carry the same seriousness as a tasting menu. The Danish pantry on our shelf is one result. The Denver cooks who now make their own garum are another.
The Nordic table at home
Rye bread, good butter and a tin of smoked trout. A pot of beans or a bowl of mushrooms finished with a spoon of garum. Pickled cucumber, because every Nordic table has it. A sparkling tea in a wine glass. Dark chocolate and a piece of licorice from a black tin to end. It is a table built on restraint and preservation, and it is remarkably easy to set from a shop like ours. The garum, the sparkling tea, the licorice and the Danish tins are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. The pine and the sea buckthorn you will have to imagine, or come in when it snows.
