Ritual beauty
Believe it or not, the task of dinner can actually be a joy, says Nadine Levy Redzepi. A world away from her husband’s famous restaurant, her own cooking, collated in a new cookbook, is reinventing the everyday.
Nadine Levy Redzepi’s cooking has been given some of the highest praise possible – chef René Redzepi says the five-course dinner she once surprised him with was the “greatest meal I’ve ever eaten”. And this is from the innovator who started Noma in Copenhagen, which held the title of best restaurant in the world for four years.
René also happens to be Nadine’s husband and he writes about that memorable meal in the foreword to his wife’s cookbook, Downtime – how the warmth and comfort of her home cooking is “a kind of electrical current that runs through the family and keeps it going and together”.
He, writes, too about how much chefs are lauded and given so much credit when these days he’s more impressed by the caregivers who tirelessly, “stroll up and down the supermarket aisles several times a week, trying to come up with something the children won’t reject after they put it in their mouths”. And he credits Nadine as the best he knows.
That’s what Downtime is about – making meal times magic again. And Nadine goes about that in a very personal way. She shares details of her fascinating upbringing– food being an ever-present thread – right through to her first time working front of house at Noma, meeting René and starting a family.
The recipes within have largely been collected from their life together.
“When I was pregnant with our first daughter, Arwen, I was thinking about my own childhood, what type of mother I wanted to be,” says Nadine. “I had always loved the idea of a family cookbook being passed down to the next generation, so I started writing down my favourite recipes in a notebook with the intention of passing it on to our children. René would say with a smile on his face ‘who knows maybe one day you’ll write a cookbook’.”
Of her reasoning to include some of the more personal information, it was very important to her the book not be viewed as just that of a “famous chef’s wife – ‘bet that’s a load of crap’”. Because, she says, “if I am completely honest, I would be the first person to roll my eyes and think exactly that. I was hesitant to add some of the darker parts to the book, but I decided it was a part of my story and I wanted to tell it the way it happened.”
Nadine’s fascination and love of cooking started a long time before she ever met
René – she was born in Portugal to musician parents – her mother Danish, father English – and says all her favourite memories of her earliest years there are connected to food. After moving to Denmark, with her newly separated mother and her brother, she began to experiment with cooking, sometimes out of necessity as her mother worked long hours. A stint of glandular fever at home meant a new obsession with cooking shows – she still counts Ainsley Harriott, of Ready, Steady, Cook, as a food hero. That show “made my jaw drop completely – [it] for me was brilliant in the way it showed you could cook three dishes in 20 minutes”. The late Antonio Carluccio was also a significant influence with his “very warm approach to food”.
But having an “incredibly brilliant” chef as a husband inevitably has been what has also shaped Nadine’s attitude to food. “René likes to look at humble-looking produce and force his mind to look at it in a different way and pretend that a seemingly humble head of cauliflower is as ‘precious’ as the most expensive meat. For me, this is very inspiring and something I use all the time when cooking. Limitation somehow forces creative ideas to flow.”
Nadine’s own stance on making everyday cooking something other than a chore is what is so inspiring to us, as the reader – creating the right atmosphere, what the
Danes call “hygge”, at meal times is key. Her older daughters, Arwen and Genta, are often involved in meal prep, while her mother changes the music continuously and her young daughter, Ro, plays on the floor. All parts of these daily routines can be made enjoyable with a new perspective, she asserts.
“People look at grocery shopping and cooking as a chore or some horrible task they just need to get done. I think trying to look at it in a different way can help a lot.
“I like to turn grocery shopping in to ‘me’ time. I make it something nice – I get a coffee to go while I do [it], get my head out of work and get ready to pick up the kids and have family time. [It’s] shopping and cooking that lead to my favourite part of the day – when we sit down at the table and spend time together while we eat,” she says.
These messages and how to realistically implement them permeate Downtime. The majority of its recipes are “simple, flavourful comfort food”. Luckily for us, too, working at Noma and being married to one of its chefs means she’s been able to learn and hone techniques and adapt them to cooking at home. So not only is her cookbook filled with delicious René Redzepi-approved fare, it’s also simple and practical and of it she is, rightly, “incredibly proud”.
“[It’s] shopping and cooking that lead to my favourite part of the day – when we sit down at the table and spend time together while we eat.”