Minimalist lessons in Scandinavian cheese
Editors can be cryptic. They send you single-sentence emails, without subject lines, such as, “Do you know anything about Scandinavian food?”
I could’ve told her that I know what everybody knows, that Scandinavian food had an unflattering reputation, of meatballs and pickled herring, but thanks to a movement spearheaded by Rene Redzepi’s celebrated Noma, Copenhagen is now a global culinary destination. Instead, I was just honest and said no.
But I like to make people happy. So I set out to answer her much more specific follow-up question: Is there a Scandinavian food scene in Toronto and how is it linked esthetically to the minimalism of Scandinavian furniture design?
I spoke with John Baker, owner of Mjolk, a design shop in the Junction. I spoke with Ben Spiegel, a chef who had cooked at Noma. The answer I got was no, outside of Hansen’s, a Danish bakery on the east side, we do not have Scandinavian food in Toronto.
But after visiting Mjolk, lost in the splendid fantasy that I might have a home where a Maruni sideboard wouldn’t be out of place, I found Baker and his wife, Juli Daoust, so charming that I invited them over for dinner.
I’d wanted to make something Scandinavian. But, much like Canadian cuisine, it is ill-defined.
“If you took Scandinavian design,” says Baker, explaining its connection to cooking, “most of the inspiration is nature. And we have the exact same landscape as them.”
There is a handful of core, identifiable recurring elements — fish, potatoes, salted licorice — as there is in Canadian cuisine — maple syrup, salmon, poutine — but mostly the cooking is defined by a devotion to terroir.
In keeping with this, I stick with a one-metre diet, using ingredients found in the terroir of my freezer. Spiegel, who was passing through town on his way back from Denmark (he’s cooking at The Willows Inn on Lummi Island, Wash.) was kind enough to bring me a loaf of rugbrød, a dark rye bread with the density of tungsten, he bought in Copenhagen at the Lagkagehuset bakery.
I slice the rugbrød about one centimetre thick. On top of it, I stack skate, sautéed in butter with lemon and capers, then a slaw of pickled onions, sugar snaps and dill. It’s a version of the Danish lunch staple, smørrebrød, an open-faced sandwich, usually topped with cured meats, fish, pickles or whatnot. The heavy presence of the rugbrød is a good base, making any other flavours or textures stand out. It’s indicative of the region’s design: practical and lean.
Although to hear Baker tell it, having had an overwhelming influence since the 1930s, Scandinavian design isn’t really Scandinavian anymore.
“It seems like the current generation of designers in Scandinavia are actually having trouble,” Daoust adds. “I think they struggle with their past and living up to that past.”
Their well-curated shop does focus on Danish, with a bit of Japanese. And the young couple is confident in the products they’ve chosen.
“We’re in the post-scandinavian design movement,” explains Baker. “And anything can be a Scandinavian design. There are Italian designers that are doing things that are really interesting and I say, ‘Why can’t that be in the store?’”
Economy of scale is still an obstacle to Canadian designers.
“Why is it so expensive? To be honest, it’s because no one’s buying it.” He would like to support more Canadians, but the margins are too slim. “It’s a free market. So if people want it, the price is going to go down.”
Canadian designers, he suggests, also struggle with their identities. “We’re living in a culture that is a result of multiculturalism and I think that’s good. But I think that people lack the courage to do something very simple. I think people feel they have to stand out by almost compromising their design.”
I certainly felt the need to jam one more significant element into this meal.
I had a perfectly good dish, sweetbreads with potatoes and asparagus sauce. I’d gone to all the trouble of poaching the sweetbreads, then battering them in buttermilk and deepfrying them. But, because Spiegel had also given me a wedge of brunost, a caramelized Norwegian cheese, I’d felt compelled to include that in the dish. Secreting a slice at the bottom of everyone’s bowl, I figured that, if they got to the strange brown cheese and enjoyed it, it would make the dish better. And if not, they’d be nearly done eating and it would be too late to change their mind.
Bad as it tastes on its own, it’s even worse after a mouthful of sweetbreads.
If anything, the cooking mistake only proves true that old Dutch saying: “Een kleine zonderling Noorse kaas kan een volkomen goede zwezerikschotel bederven.” (A little weirdo Norwegian cheese can spoil a perfectly good sweetbread dish.) mintz.corey@gmail.com