The Swedish kitchen is known for its rich variety of local flavors and traditional dishes, most often served with vegetables. According to Swedish chef superstar Magnus Nilsson, Nordic cooking, in general, is much more than meatballs.
Known for his endless exploration of the Nordic flavors, Nilsson cookbooks include the Nordic Cookbook and the Nordic Baking Book, where he showed how the different Nordic countries are similar, but also very different, sharing recipes of 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,” observed Nilsson in an interview with Suitcase Magazine. “What you eat in Finland and what you eat in Greenland are incredibly different.”
“People don’t really have a grasp of the full food culture, simply because it’s very inaccessible,” he added. “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.”
The award winning chef was featured in PBS series The Mind of a Chef and the Netflix docuseries Chef’s Table. But you can also follow him on Instagram, or purchase his most recent book, Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, here.
