How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (3 page)

The folk high schools moved towards a more arts-based curriculum during the 60s, but their presence is testament to the enduring legacy of Grundtvig. Today, 75 students are enrolled at West Jutland – the school’s biggest cohort ever. Else puts this down to the fact that the financial crisis has turned people from consumerism towards more wholesome activities. “People are starting to think in a more old-fashioned way,” she explains. “They realise there are other ways of living, that it’s not all about making money.” But the crisis has also had a more negative effect. The government has cut some of its funding for the folk high schools, which means that students receive a slightly smaller subsidy. In turn, this makes it harder for poorer Danes to attend – it still costs around £120 a week – and so reduces the school’s role as a social leveller.

Another problem is that folk high schools attract very few immigrants. The relationship between so-called
indigenous Danes and those whose families arrived only in the last three decades is often vexed. It reached its nadir during the Muhammed cartoons crisis of 2006, when a Danish newspaper published pictures that portrayed the Muslim prophet as a terrorist – sparking protests across the Arab world. How to foster integration is a constant source of debate in Denmark – and for her part, Else thinks it could be partly achieved if more so-called New Danes studied at schools like hers.

“Unfortunately, there are almost no immigrants here,” she says. “It’s a shame. It’s a pity. I have been trying to get some to come. I think immigrants are brought up in this tradition that if you go to a school, you should end up with a paper so you can become a lawyer or a doctor. Here you end up with nothing! But I would love them to come here because they would know much more about Danish culture. If they came here, where you live together and eat together, they would so quickly learn how Danish people think.”

But how
do
Danes think? They’re a people deeply committed to cooperation and equality – and yet their third largest political party is from the far right. Their national hero preached tolerance – and yet it is the country that spawned the Muhammed cartoons. They’re sometimes called the Latinos of Scandinavia – but drunk pedestrians will still wait patiently for a green man at four in the morning. Danes certainly aren’t the warlike Viking progeny some Britons vaguely imagine them to be. But their values – and their character – are more complex than they first appear.

“I felt that there was a relation between the lack of love or care, and the terrible food in Denmark. And in France I saw the opposite – an abundance of love and generosity, and taste and smell and great meals…” – Claus Meyer

Lars Williams stands at the stove and fries a chunk of mould. Every so often, the kitchen heaves to one side. We’re on a houseboat in the Copenhagen harbour, and the occasional waves make cooking difficult. When winter comes, the days will be dark and short – but at least the kitchen won’t roll in the frozen sea. After some minutes, Lars takes the fried mould from the frying pan and places it on a plate. From a box, he plucks a large, dead insect, and pops it on top – fried barley mould, served with grasshopper. “Breakfast,” he says, and hands it to me.

It’s no ordinary breakfast, but then this is no ordinary
kitchen. This is the Nordic Food Lab, an independent, non-profit laboratory where Lars and his team conduct obscure culinary experiments in the name of New Nordic cuisine – a much-chronicled movement founded in Denmark in 2004 to promote the use within Scandinavian cooking of local and seasonal produce. Eight years on, the lab is just one small part of a now fizzing Danish restaurant scene that is widely considered the most innovative in the world. The lab is an informal testing ground for restaurants like Relæ, Geist and Geranium in Copenhagen; Malling and Schmidt in Aarhus; and Ti Trin Ned in Fredericia – all founded since 2004, and now flagbearers for the New Nordic school. Many of them now have Michelin stars.

But first and foremost, there’s Noma, a restaurant that stands barely 20 metres from the moorings of the Nordic Food Lab. Named the world’s best restaurant for the past three years in a row, Noma is the flagship for the New Nordic movement, eschewing foreign goods like olive oil in favour of locally foraged flavours and herbs. Their aim is to recreate the geography and history of Scandinavia in food form. Ramsons, beach dandelions, sea buckthorn and sea lettuce – they’re all plucked daily from the fields and shores surrounding Copenhagen by the chef Rene Redzepi and his team, or by an ever-larger troupe of professional foragers. Noma’s meats and fish come from nearby farms and fishermen, some of the wine from a little island called Lilleø in southern Denmark. Their sea urchins are snagged by a mad Scot who plunges into the Norwegian sea barely hours
before his catch arrives on your plate. Redzepi himself serves some of the food, which is often characterised by a playful theatricality: eggs that the diner fries in a pan on her placemat; vegetables served in a trough of earth.

If you’re not a foodie, the mania that surrounds the restaurant may surprise you. Saturdays at Noma often have a 1000-strong waiting list. You can only book a table on the first day of the month, and even then only for a date three months in the future. Needless to say, I couldn’t get a table – but I spoke to people who have. “It’s like experiencing a play in which you take an active part from the moment you step in the door,” explains Bi Skaarup, president of the Danish Gastronomic Association. “Some of those three-star Michelin restaurants make you sit on the edge of your chair. You’re afraid. But Noma is very relaxed. They peel the nervousness out of you. Rene is there himself. Although when we wanted to thank him at the end of the meal, he had already left because his wife was having a caesarean. He was there right up until the point he really needed to go to the hospital.”

Bent Christensen has been writing guidebooks about Danish restaurants since the 70s, but his voice still quavers when he describes Noma. “Are you interested in football?” he asks when we meet. “Do you know how Barcelona play football? Do you see their passes? That’s Noma. That’s the service of Noma. Normally a restaurant’s service is one of its weak points. Especially in the Nordic countries.” His voice stretches to a higher pitch. “But at Noma they can DO
it!” There is a pause while Bent fetches a wine delivery from the car park, but on his return he seems more emotional. “The food gives joy! It gives surprises. It gives a little bit of fear. You don’t really know what to say when you see three little shrimps, still alive. But you are not there to be full in your stomach. You are not there to survive. You are there to have a very special experience.”

In the press, Redzepi is treated like a god. A food blogger has called this the era of the “I Foraged with Rene Redzepi Piece”, and the chef was recently seen on the cover of
Time
, having been named by the magazine as one of the world’s most influential people. The adulation is not undeserved, but at the same time it obscures a much bigger story. For the narrative of the extraordinary culinary revival in Denmark goes far beyond just one man, or just one restaurant, or even the wider crop of restaurants mentioned earlier. Noma is just a part of how Denmark’s entire food culture – from its bakeries to its farms, from its wholesalers to its consumers – has been transformed in the space of barely two decades from a bland backwater to the envy of the culinary world. Once they ate cheap foreign takeaways; now both consumers and wholesalers are increasingly interested in things grown and cooked on Danish soil.

You don’t have to go to Noma to see it happening. You can visit Aamanns, in central Copenhagen, where a young chef has revitalised the dead Danish art of the open sandwich. You can pop into most supermarkets, where you’ll find boxes and boxes of locally sourced ramsons, or wild
garlic. This would have been unthinkable four or five years ago, when most people hadn’t heard of the herb, and those who had might have thought it a weed. But with the rise of New Nordic cuisine, and with several restaurants now serving it, consumer demand for ramsons has quickly risen, and in many supermarkets you can buy 100 grams’ worth for around 17 kroner. In some places, you can even buy stinging nettles. What’s more, people aren’t just buying these herbs; they’re foraging for them too. One of Denmark’s largest food organisations was recently so inundated with queries from the public about where to find both ramsons and seaweed that they have been forced to publish an online foraging guide to both. And sales have spiked for cookbooks like Claus Meyer’s
Almanak
, which has a seasonal recipe for each day of the year and tells readers where to forage for weeds. The book has sold over 60,000 copies – the equivalent of selling 700,000 in Britain.

High-end bakeries – once almost extinct in Denmark – have re-emerged in the shape of chains like Emerys and Meyers, a response to the wave of homebaking that has swept the country in the last decade. Meanwhile, on a little island amusingly named Lolland, thousands are also flocking to an organic farm called Knuthenlund, whose recent transition mirrors that of Danish food culture in general. Once just like any other bland dairy farm, in 2007 Knuthenlund underwent the largest conversion to organic farming in Danish history, and now makes some of the most delicate cheeses in Europe. In 2011, 35,000 foodies made the
slog to the remote farm to see what the fuss was about – 5000 more than would typically visit the Museum of Copenhagen each year in the noughties. The big dairies are getting in on the act too. Arla, who make much of the milk and butter we consume every day at breakfast, have long been criticised for their bland products and disregard for diversity and innovation. But the New Nordic movement has got Arla thinking.

“Ten years ago, some of the top chefs claimed that we didn’t produce quality,” admits John Gynther, the Arla executive who develops their new range of bespoke cheeses. “They said we only produced for the big consumers, discount chains and supermarkets. So ten years ago, we invited the chefs to meet us. We were of the opinion that our Lurpak butter was one of the most excellent butters in the world. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘but can you produce butter that reflects the change in seasons? That expresses the climate and landscapes here in the Nordic countries?’ And they were right, we hadn’t been working with innovation in this way. So we began to try it.”

Initially, the project hit the buffers because Arla’s massive factories simply weren’t set up to make these kinds of bespoke products. But little by little, Gynther found ways of making smallscale production work. He trialled some niche Arla cheeses in some of the New Nordic restaurants – something that would previously have seemed unimaginable – and, ten years on, he is now on the verge of releasing, for high-end supermarkets, small ranges of bespoke cheeses –
some of them unpasteurised – that are distinctly Danish in their ingredients, and which come from specific farms or regions. “Do you know the New Nordic manifesto?” asks Gynther – an extraordinary question from a man whose company was once associated with the most uncreative aspects of Danish food. “That’s my bible.”

He’s not just referring to the general ideas of the New Nordic kitchen. He means a very specific document that was drawn up in 2004 by Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer, the author of
Almanak
, the owner of Meyers bakery and the man who founded Noma in the first place. Recognising that Scandinavia had long lacked a regional culinary identity, the pair decided they were going to create one.

“We weren’t obsessed with being the best restaurant in the world at that point,” remembers Meyer. “Rene and I at that moment wanted to make a great food culture in this region where the culinary legacy is so sad.”

He was inspired not just by the chefs in San Sebastian who did a similar thing for Spanish cuisine in the 70s, but also Danish film-makers like Lars von Trier, who in the mid-90s had invented Dogme, a pared-down, purist school of Danish cinema.

“I was very inspired by the Dogme brothers,” says Meyer. “I thought if they could do it, then we could also do it.”

With a background in business, Meyer then came up with a long-term plan to revitalise Danish food that addressed different aspects of the food business: farmers, wholesalers
like Arla, consumers and also politicians. But first he realised he needed to win over other Danish chefs (many of whom were continentally minded, and had mocked his and Redzepi’s regional ambitions at Noma) because it was they who could most easily influence the public’s food habits.

“Society needed chefs to act as role-models,” says Meyer. “We didn’t need chefs to be like Gordon Ramsay. We needed chefs to be responsible people who would inspire the whole population to redefine their eating habits and their relationship to Mother Earth.”

Meyer felt that government-led initiatives that used pamphlets and adverts to change how people ate were counter-productive. Instead, he wondered: “What would happen if the top chefs in our region stood up and said they were going to change things?” Trying to answer that question, he invited leading chefs and critics from all over Scandinavia to a two-day symposium in Copenhagen. Eighteen hours later, the assembled group had hammered out a ten-point plan that set out the aims and goals of the movement. It begins: “The aims of New Nordic Cuisine are: 1. To express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate with our region. 2. To reflect the changing of the seasons in the meals we make. 3. To base our cooking on ingredients and produce whose characteristics are particularly excellent in our climates, landscapes and waters.” A movement was born.