The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  A Nordic cuisine, for Redzepi, begins with harvesting the vast resources of a particular north—running west from Finland through Scandinavia and across the North Atlantic to the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland—and using them to evoke and, in the end, reimagine and refine a common culture of rye grains, fish, fermentation, salt, and smoke, inherited from farmers and fishermen with hardscrabble lives and a dour Protestant certainty that those lives wouldn’t be getting easier. Redzepi’s mother, who worked as a cleaner in Copenhagen and loves to eat at Noma, comes from that Protestant Danish stock. But the cook in the family was his father, a mosque-going Muslim from Macedonia who drove a taxi. “When I was growing up, we’d leave the city for long periods in the summer and stay in the village where my father was born,” Redzepi told me. “It was a two-car village, and cooking for him was kill the chicken, milk the cow. When he eats at Noma, he says, ‘Well, it’s not exactly up my alley.’ His alley is homey stews, homey peasant flavors, and lots of beans.” When I told Redzepi about a blog I’d read, calling him a Nordic supremacist, he laughed and said, “Look at my family. My father’s a Muslim immigrant. My wife, Nadine, is Jewish. She was born in Portugal and has family in France and England. She studied languages. If the supremacists took over, we’d be out of here.”

  Redzepi remembers foraging for berries as a boy in Macedonia. He loves berries. Gooseberries, blueberries, blackberries, lingonberries—any berries in season, at hand, and edible. He carries a bowl of berries around Noma’s kitchens, popping them into his mouth while he checks a prep station or talks to a chef or even stands at the front stove, finishing a sauce. He also loves mushrooms. There are some two hundred edible varieties in Denmark’s woods, and he is working his way through them all. But at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage—from the big pale cabbages that he slices and steams at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam. One of the first things he told me, the day we met, was that for him the great surprise of foraging in Nordic Europe was to see cabbages sprouting from rotting seaweed on the beach, and to realize how much food value the sea, the sand, and the nutrients released in the rotting process could produce.

  It’s an experience that he wants the people on his staff to share before they so much as plate a salad or get near a stove. Seventy people work at Noma. They come from as many as sixteen countries—English is their lingua franca—and it’s safe to say that every one of them has made a foraging trip to the sea or the woods (or both) with Redzepi. “There’s a new guy from the Bronx working here,” he told me when he was introducing the kitchen staff. “I want to take him to the forest. I want to see the first time he gets down on his knees and tastes something. The transformation begins there.”

  The beach near Dragør was bleak, but it was bursting with plants I had never dreamed of eating, and I was ready for transformation. “Foraging is treasure hunting,” Redzepi said; you’ll find the treasure if you believe it’s there. It’s also homework. When he began foraging in Denmark, he stayed up nights reading. He bought botany books and field guides—the most useful being an old Swedish army survival book that had taught soldiers how to live for a year in the wilderness on the food they found. At first he foraged with the army manual in his pocket. Then he began consulting other foragers. Now he forages with his iPhone. “I know a great professional forager in Sweden,” he told me. “If I see something I can’t identify, I call her up, point my iPhone, send her a picture of what I’m seeing, and ask her what it is. At the beginning, I had a little problem with beach thistles—my throat started to close from those weird flowers—but that was the worst time. I got connected to the sea and soil, and now they’re an integral part of me. I experience the world through food.”

  We started out in a thicket of rose-hip bushes at the edge of the beach, where wild grass was just beginning to give way to sand and seaweed. The berries looked like tiny cherry tomatoes, and there were so many of them that after a few minutes we left Redzepi’s “scavenger sous-chef,” who had driven us out that morning—Redzepi hates driving—with the job of locating a couple of large garbage bags and filling them. (I ate some of the berries that night at dinner, in a warm salad of lovage, zucchini, wild herbs, and an egg fried at the table in a hot skillet.) Redzepi pickles his rose-hip flowers in apple vinegar and preserves the berries as a thick purée, for winter dishes. The picking season is short in Denmark, and he has to start gathering in mid-spring in order to dry, smoke, pickle, or otherwise preserve—and in the process, concentrate the flavor of—a lot of the vegetables and fruits that his customers will be eating in December. He told me about beach dandelions with nippy little bouquets of flowers and tiny roots that taste “like a mix of fresh hazelnuts and roasted almonds,” and about the vanilla taste of wild parsnip flowers, and about pink beach-pea flowers that taste like mushrooms. By the time we got to the water, we were sampling most of what we found. We ate a handful of short beach grass that tasted like oysters, and a cluster of spicy lilac beach-mustard flowers that made the mustard in jars seem tame. We snacked on enormous leaves of sea lettuce that came floating by. They tasted to me like mild, salty cabbage that had just been scooped out of a pot-au-feu. Redzepi serves a lot of sea lettuce at Noma. He breaks it down in a saporoso of white-wine vinegar (to make it “easier to eat,” he says, and also to bring out its “ocean flavor”) and wraps it around cod roe or oysters, or folds it into a poached-egg-and-radish stew.

  The weather in Denmark begins to turn in August. It was too late in the summer for sea goosefoot, or for the bladder wrack that bobs near the shore like bloated peas and, according to Redzepi, is just as sweet. The scurvy grass we discovered was too old to eat. But the beach horseradish that day was perfect. It had the “big hint of wasabi taste” that Redzepi likes so much that he serves the leaves folded over sea urchin. By late morning, with the wind cutting through our sweaters, we were still roaming the beach and tasting. “It’s amazing, all these foods in the sand,” Redzepi said. “One of my most important moments foraging—important in the history of Noma—was on a windblown beach like this one. I saw this blade of grass, this chive-looking thing, growing out of some rotting seaweed. I put it in my mouth. It had a nice snap, with the saltiness of samphire. And a familiar taste. A taste from somewhere else. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, it’s cilantro!’ This isn’t Mexico, it’s Denmark, and I’ve found cilantro in the sand.” That night, his customers ate beach cilantro, which turned out to be sea arrow grass. “We put it in everything that was savory.” There are never fewer than five or six foraged foods on Noma’s menu, and usually many more. By now Redzepi depends on professional foragers to supply most of them, but he and his staff still provide the rest. Earlier this year they gathered 220 pounds of wild roses for pickling, and 150 pounds of wild ramps. By November, there were 3,300 pounds of foraged fruits and vegetables stored at Noma, ready for winter. Redzepi told me that 90 percent of everything he serves is farmed, fished, raised, or foraged within sixty miles of the restaurant, and while most chefs with serious reputations to maintain will occasionally cheat on “local,” even the Jacobins of the sustainable-food world acknowledge that Redzepi never does. Early this fall, a food critic from The Guardian noted that the millionaires flying their private jets to eat at restaurants like Noma leave a carbon footprint far more damaging than the one Redzepi is trying to erase at home. Redzepi thinks about that, too, but not much. He says that the point of Noma isn’t to feed the rich—that in his best possible world, Noma would be free, because “there is nothing worse than charging people for conviviality.” The point is to demonstrate how good cooking with regional food anywhere in the world can be. His
mission is to spread the word.

  On an average Saturday night, Noma’s waiting list runs to a thousand people. The restaurant seats forty-four, and Redzepi has no real desire to expand. His partners keep asking, “When will the money begin to flow?” He ignores them. For now, at least, whatever profit Noma makes (last year, 3 percent) goes right back into the business of sourcing and preparing the kinds of food that people who do get reservations come to the restaurant to eat. Most of the cultivated crops he uses (including his favorite carrots, which are left in the ground for a year after they mature, and develop a dense texture and an almost meaty taste) are grown for him on a polycultural farm, an hour away in northwest Zealand, that he helped transform. His butter and milk (including the buttermilk with which he turns a warm seaweed-oil vegetable salad dressing into an instantly addictive sauce) come from a nearby Zealand biodynamic farm. Everything else he serves is “Nordic” by anyone’s definition. His sea urchin comes from a transplanted Scot who dives for it off the Norwegian coast. The buckwheat in Noma’s bread comes from a small island off the coast of Sweden; I downed a loaf of it, watching Redzepi cook lunch. The red seaweed I ate that night at dinner—in a mysteriously satisfying dish involving dried scallops, toasted grains, watercress purée, beechnuts, mussel juice, and squid ink—came from a forager in Iceland. The langoustine that was served on a black rock (next to three tiny but eminently edible “rocks” made from an emulsion of oysters and kelp, dusted with crisped rye and seaweed crumbs) came from a fisherman in the Faroe Islands. Even Redzepi’s wine list, which used to be largely French, now includes wines from a vineyard that Noma owns on Lilleø, a small island off Denmark’s North Sea coast. I tried an unfiltered moss-colored white from the vineyard. It looked murky in the glass, but I wish I had ordered more.

  Redzepi was fifteen and finishing the ninth grade when his homeroom teacher pronounced him “ineligible” for secondary school and said that he would be streamed out of the academic system and into trade school and an apprenticeship. He chose a culinary school only because a classmate named Michael Skotbo was going there. Their first assignment was to find a recipe, cook it, and make it look appetizing on a plate. “You were supposed to dig into your memories of food, of taste, and my most vivid was from Macedonia,” Redzepi told me. “It was my father’s barnyard chicken—the drippings over the rice, the spices, the cashew sauce. I think that my first adult moment was cooking that spicy chicken. My second was when we found a wonderful cup and put the rice in it—with the chicken, sliced, next to it on the plate. I had an idea. I said to Michael, ‘No, don’t put the sauce on the meat. Put the sauce between the chicken and the rice. We came in second in flavor and first in presentation.” I asked him who won first in flavor. “A butcher,” he said. “He made ham salad. It was terrific.”

  The boy who couldn’t get into high school now speaks four or five languages, publishes in The Guardian and The New York Times, speaks at Yale, and last year disarmed an audience of literati at the New York Public Library with a philosophical riff on the beauty of aged-in-the-ground carrots, not to mention a biochemical acumen that many scientists and most other chefs would envy. To call Redzepi an autodidact is beside the point. His friends say he was born bored. “Wherever I go, I read, I look, I taste, I discover, I learn,” he told me. “I’m cooking with mosses now. They were a whole new discovery for me. I tasted them for the first time foraging in Iceland. Some mosses are hideous, but those were so lush and green I had to try them. I took some back to Reykjavík, where a guy I’d met ground it for me and put it into cookies. Then I went to Greenland. For years, in Greenland, it looked like the reindeer were eating snow. Now we know they were eating moss. We call it reindeer moss. The moss on trees and bushes has a mushroomy taste—we deep-fry it, like potato chips—but the ones growing from the ground, up near caves, they have the taste and texture of noodles.”

  I ate reindeer moss at Noma, deep-fried, spiced with cèpes, and deliciously crisp. It was the third of twenty-three appetizers and tasting dishes I ate that night, the first being a hay parfait—a long infusion of cream and toasted hay, into which yarrow, nasturtium, chamomile jelly, egg, and sorrel and chamomile juice were then blended. The second arrived in a flowerpot, filled with malted, roasted rye crumbs and holding shoots of raw wild vegetables, a tiny poached mousse of snail nestling in a flower, and a flatbread “branch” that was spiced with powdered oak shoots, birch, and juniper. I wish I could describe the taste of those eloquent, complex combinations, but the truth is that, like most of the dishes I tried at Noma, they tasted like everything in them and, at the same time, like nothing I had ever eaten. Four hours later, I had filled a notebook with the names of wild foods. Redzepi collected me at my table, and we sat for a while outside, on a bench near the houseboat, looking at the water and talking. I didn’t tell him that I’d passed on the little live shrimp, wriggling alone on a bed of crushed ice in a Mason jar, that had been presented to me between the rose-hip berries and the caramelized sweetbreads, plated with chanterelles and a grilled salad purée composed of spinach, wild herbs (pre-wilted in butter and herb tea), Swiss chard, celery, ground elder, Spanish chervil, chickweed, and goosefoot, and served with a morel-and-juniper-wood broth. I told him that it was the best meal I had ever eaten, and it was.

  SEPTEMBER

  I came home to New York, checked my mail, and discovered that I had missed the Vassar Club’s “foraging tour” of Central Park. It was quite a relief. I ordered a steak from Citarella (by phone, for delivery), walked to the Friday greenmarket on Ninety-Seventh Street for corn and tomatoes, and was home in fifteen minutes. I spun some salad from my corner store, unpacked my suitcase, plugged in my laptop, uncorked the wine, and cooked dinner. It seemed too easy. Surveying my kitchen, I wondered where I would put a Thermomix or a foam siphon with backup cartridges or a Pacojet or a vacuum-pack machine or even a No. 40 ice-cream scoop—all of which I would need just to produce the carrot sorbet and buttermilk-foam dessert that I’d been eyeing in Redzepi’s cookbook. Where would Redzepi put them in his own kitchen? Then I remembered the sliced cabbage, steamed with a knob of butter in a half inch of leftover tea.

  Noma isn’t about home cooking or even foraging. The restaurant is a showcase, a virtuoso reminder that only a small fraction of the planet’s bounty gets to anyone’s dinner table, and that most of it is just as good as what does get there—even better, if it’s cooked with patience, imagination, and a little hot-cold chemistry. It seems to me now that if you take John Paterson’s enthusiasm for little wild things that work together and Elisabeth Luard’s conviction that those things express the timeless “taste-good” ingenuity of peasant cooking, the message is not so different from Redzepi’s. Most of us eat only what we know. It’s time to put on our boots (or our sneakers) and look around.

  John Paterson is now the head chef/patron of a new restaurant in Todi, the Cantina del Mercataccio, where he commands a state-of-the-art kitchen and serves a clientele that arrives from all over Europe to eat his food.

  Paul Levy is reviewing music, art, and theater in England while working on two new food books, including a long-awaited riposte to culinary political correctness called Why We Don’t Eat Worms.

  René Redzepi has since published a three-volume “work in progress”—one volume of Noma recipes, one of his journals, and one of the snapshots he has taken over the Noma years. Early this year (2017), he closed Noma, and by fall will be reopening what he calls “an urban farm,” complete with biosphere, research lab, and seasonally staggered restaurant in the middle of Copenhagen.

  A FORK OF ONE’S OWN

  MARCH 2013

  Your kitchen may not be the mirror of your soul, but it can produce a pretty accurate image of where you’ve landed on the timeline of domesticity. Take a tour through it. You’ll find not only the food you eat (and don’t), and the objects with which you preserve, prepare, cook, and serve it, but very likely, tucked away in the back of the highest cupboard, the abandoned paraphernalia
of your mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen life. And if you think seriously about this, you will eventually start asking questions about what went on in other people’s kitchens during the twenty thousand years since one smart Homo sapiens picked up a rock and ground a handful of wild barley into something he could eat—the most obvious being which came first, the food that sits in your fridge today or the technology, from the rock to the thermal immersion circulator, that got it there and puts it on the table.

  I have two kitchens. For most of the year, I cook in an Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. It was designed in the 1890s and is probably best described as a landlord’s misguided attempt to lure tenants with horizontal evocations of the upstairs-downstairs life. The “public” rooms, meant to be seen and admired, were large and well proportioned. The “private” rooms, out of sight off a long back hall, were for the most part awkward and cramped, and perhaps the lowliest room on this totem pole of domestic status was the kitchen, where your cook, emerging each morning through the door of a tiny bedroom—in my apartment, it opened between the icebox and the sink—was expected to spend her waking hours. At the time, no one except presumably the cook cared that the kitchen was hot and smelly, or that she had to climb onto a chair or a stepladder to fetch the plates, or crouch on the floor to reach into the cabinets where she kept her pots and pans. Nobody else went in. There was room for only one chair, perhaps to discourage the cook from sitting down with the cook next door for a conversation, and no room at all for a table where she could have a meal.