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.”
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.
“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.