This Swedish Chef Will Introduce You to the Nordic Kitchen

With most of us stuck at home, traveling is more-or-less restricted to our kitchens—the silver lining being that we’re finally making use of our ovens. Cooking also allows us to experience different cultures without doing the actual legwork.

This week, we want to introduce you to Swedish chef superstar Magnus Nilsson.

With features in the Emmy-Award winning US PBS series The Mind of a Chef and the Netflix docuseries Chef’s Table, and having won the White Guide Global Gastronomy Award in 2015, Nilsson is the ideal guide to Nordic cooking. According to Nilsson, Nordic cooking is much more than herring, gravlax, and meatballs.

“People don’t really have a grasp of the full food culture, simply because it’s very inaccessible,” he remarked once in an interview with Suitcase Magazine. “If you compare Nordic food culture to, for example, Spanish food, you could go into a random restaurant in Madrid, and there is a pretty good chance of you finding a true representation of traditional Spanish cooking. But in Sweden, you won’t find anything. That kind of restaurant doesn’t exist, because in the Nordic region the food culture is carried more within the home, rather than in restaurants. If you don’t have someone in the Nordic region to invite you into their home, the chances are you probably won’t get a taste of the food culture there.”

View this post on Instagram

Dinner.

A post shared by Magnus Nilsson (@magnusfaviken) on

His cookbooks include the Nordic Cookbook and the Nordic Baking Book, where he explores the history of the Nordic culture to some extent and, more importantly, introduces his followers to recipes to dishes that people actually cook at home today.

View this post on Instagram

Today marks the end to a project of which I am very proud. Six years ago I started to research Nordic food culture with the purpose of trying to explain what it actually looks like and why. I wanted to create two documentary books which weren’t colored by what the author thinks is great and not (at least not too much), but which rather tried to represent as many of the people in as many parts of the Nordic region as well as possible. I wanted to write books that explained through recipes how all the different countries in the nordics are similar, but also how they differ. Books which talk about the history of a culture to some extent and more importantly includes all the recipes that people actually cook at home today. The first book to come out of this research process was the Nordic Cookbook which was published three years ago. The second one, and the one to conclude the project comes out today, and is called the Nordic Baking Book. It’s been incredible to travel all across this vast geographical region interviewing people, copying their old recipe books, photographing the landscape and the food, and reading pretty much anything I have been able to find on the subject. It’s simply been amazing to get to know a culture which I assumed I knew a lot about, but which it turned out I knew much less about than I thought. I want to thank all of those who contributed to this project, and especially @phaidonsnaps who agreed to publish it and saw the potential in these two books. I can tell you that books based on these amounts of research are not cheap to produce, and they are becoming increasingly rare. Few publishers are willing to take the risk… Also, many of you send books to @faviken to have them signed. This is very sweet and humbling, but also a bit expensive for you, and hard for us as we don’t have any infrastructure to handle this (small restaurant you know). Instead we have sat up a small web shop with a book distributor (link in bio) and I have signed some books which they can ship directly to those who want. I will also travel a bit this fall doing some events and talks about the new book. The schedule can be found at the same page as the shop. #fun

A post shared by Magnus Nilsson (@magnusfaviken) on

“One of the things I discovered whilst making this book is that it is not a homogenous region,” says Nilsson. “What you eat in Finland and what you eat in Greenland are incredibly different.”

You can preorder Nilsson’s most recent book, Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, here and follow his social media pages on more.