Fäviken

This is a fantastic book. It's not a cook book, you're not going to follow the recipes in this book, they are ridiculously involved and time consuming (several take literally years!). This is not a criticism. The writing is sublime, the pictures are beautiful. It's a book to savour, in the same way as you would savour Magnus Nilsson's food if you were lucky enough to visit his restaurant - which I really, really want to do. Curl up with this book on a dark evening and imagine the tastes of the aged, pickled, smoky, fantastically fresh food that is served up to you.

First thing first; don’t expect to make any (or many) of the recipes in this book. Most recipes are out of reach of the amateur cook to recreate as many ingredients can’t be easily procured unless you live in a similar part of the world as Magnus. So, why give a cookbook a 5* review if it doesn’t provide any useful recipes? Well, the main reason is because it will most likely provide inspiration and cause you to think about what you cook in an entirely different light. The book has made me think more about the ingredients I use and has even inspired me to start growing my own vegetables. I now cook with much more care than I ever did before and appreciate good quality local food so much more. Although most ingredients in this book are out of reach of most people in the world, it has also caused me to look at the landscape around me and create dishes inspired by the region I live in. Excellent buy.

Bought as a gift for a friend who loves to travel and try new things. It's definitely more of a really nice coffee table book apposed to a cookbook (in the UK anyway) but it's really beautiful and they seemed really happy with it.

Living in northern Sweden, I am lucky to share the nature that is found in the book. When it comes to ingredients, it obviously features some things more easily found in the northern forest or nordic countries. Sweden is where he is from and where his restaurant is. More important than location and ingredients however, is the philosophy behind the chef. Magnus Nilsson cooks with his heart and soul. It will be his attitude to food and cooking that will inspire you, not the availability of some of the ingredients. Being only a few hours drive away, I'm dreaming of a trip to this restaurant with my wife in the future. I'd better start saving the pennies...

This book is so good that when I gave it to my husband for christmas, we both fought over it. It reads beautifully, and is so much more than a cooking book. It can be a book about using local produce, foraging and cultivating your own food. It can also be seen as an insiration for business entrepreneurs and how you can build a successul business anywhere if you only have the passion, but also the integral structure of a brilliant team whom you nurture. I was very inspired by it.

When I finally got my grubby little mitts on Fäviken, the new cookbook by acclaimed Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson, I looked forward with pleasure to the rigors of what I had heard was an ambitious, challenging cookbook. Before glancing at any of the recipes, I read the long introduction by Bill Buford, author of one of my favorite culinary memoirs, Heat. He dedicates numerous paragraphs to describing the stark remoteness of Nilsson's restaurant (also named Fäviken). According to Buford, a visit there requires employing the services of the region's single cab driver. He tells the restaurant's origin story, explaining how difficult it was for Nilsson to hire anyone to work at his new restaurant due to its isolated location in the northern part of snowy Sweden. Though Nilsson's ambitious daily hunting and foraging is reverently described, I was no less confident I could cook from this book. After that long haul comes a foreword food writer Mattias Kroon. In it, he describes an Alice-Waters-like dedication to the local and the seasonal. To my Anglo-Irish sensibilities, this is hardly a novel approach to cooking. I've become so inured to this manifesto, in fact, that I can scarcely suppress an eye roll when I hear it in restaurants--mostly because, in reality, few places actually cook according to this code. One look at a restaurant kitchen's spice rack or the olive oil likely to be served with bread will reveal sins against the gospel of "local or Slow food movement" But according to Kroon, and as was evident when I moved onto the recipes, Nilsson has conscribed the scope of his culinary creativity to only those foods he can coax from the miserly arctic landscape that surrounds him. His cooking must be like a haiku, where limitations and restrictions force a lean poetry into existence that couldn't have been conjured any other way. With mere weeks as a growing season and a severely limited range of things that will grow in the first place, Nilsson must rely on a range of preservation techniques and genius twists to keep his food interesting through the long, dark winter where he lives and cooks. That said, Nilsson's restaurant is situated on a large piece of unspoiled wilderness where he forages and hunts regularly. He is near enough to the water that he gets daily deliveries of just-plucked-from-the-sea-bed scallops and other fish. For an example the Scallop cooked over burning juniper branches. Moi on the other hand, live on a metropolis of concrete in the middle Eastern District of Abu Dhabi. I have a window box & mines-cure garden at my disposal. In the foreword, Kroon comes out and says that the type of food made at Fäviken simply doesn't travel. I wondered if that were the case, why anyone would go to the trouble to write a cookbook about it. Page 25 had a somewhat reassuring headline: How To Use The Recipes. (By now, I was having considerable doubts I could even comment on a book it seemed impossible to cook from.) In this section, we learn that: 1) The recipes are vague and confusing--but it's OK, they're meant to be that way. 2) The instructions shouldn't be taken literally because they are just suggestions to help the reader understand where good cooking really comes from--intuition and passion. 3) We should not even try to replicate the recipes because we are not from northern Sweden. Northern Sweden is the unlisted yet most crucial ingredient in every recipe in the book. 4) We should be inspired by the approach the recipes exemplify and actually create our own recipes from our own local ingredients. 5) "If it tastes good, it is right." This is obviously my favorite line in the book. Unhelpfully, this section concludes with two famous last words: "Good luck!" Still, I was determined to find a recipe from this book I could, in spite of being warned to the contrary, actually recreate. Some dishes looked like candidates at first glance: Beef marrow and heart with grated turnip and turnip leaves, for example. Upon closer examination of the ingredients list, what I needed was not merely a turnip, or even a local turnip, but a turnip "that has been stored in the cellar with its little yellow leaves that have started sprouting towards the end of winter." Even if I possessed such a turnip, I don't think that my non existent basement even if i did have it would be complete with a bugs graveyard and fine toxic coating of dryer lint, would be an appropriate place to store it. And even if it were, I've still got months to go before the start of winter (sorry I forgot what winter? I was drawn to the rackfish and sour cream recipe and could reasonably access the necessary ingredients, but I don't have the pH testing kit I'd need to "control the pH level so that it drops quickly to below 4.46." Even if I did, there are no instructions given regarding how to manipulate a pH level. How fast, in minutes or hours, is "quickly"? Regardless, I didn't have the six months minimum I'd need for this preparation to "mature." Other impossible-to-procure ingredients include: The burnt-out trunk of a spruce tree "good, clean" moss 2 handfuls old autumn leaves from last year 1 lavender petal from last summer After combing Fäviken cover to cover multiple times, I had to face facts. There was almost nothing in this cookbook that I could really cook. I zeroed in on a recipe for "Douglas' Shortbread Biscuits," which does call for homemade jam. Unfortunately, though I followed the instructions to the letter, the recipe just didn't work. Crumbly and dry, the dough was impossible to roll into the spheres depicted. I mounded them up in little craggy hills only to watch it collapse into a mound of gravel-like crumbs when I tried, as instructed, to make an indentation with my finger for the jam. Ultimately I pressed all the loose crumbs into a small baking sheet in a single, jam-dotted layer and hoped for the best. What I decided to do next was follow Nilsson's instructions for using his book. I could take inspiration from his dedication to making a truly local cuisine from a pretty stingy environment. Given the cold and the dark and the abbreviated growing season, he is more or less wringing blood from a stone. It makes what Alice Waters does, from her agricultural Eden of a home base in California, look easy. If Nilsson can forge a local cuisine from so little, surely I can consciously lay off the olive oil, lemons, and avocados that often shape my home cooking-at least for this one meal. I would like to tell you I foraged for mushrooms in the hills of Jimena De La Frontera, the mushroom capital of the Andalucia, or that I donned my hunting gear and shot a deer for cauldron of venison stew. A more rugged soul might take just that inspiration from Fäviken and its chef, frequently seen in photographs swaddled in a furry pelt of something he probably recently shot and ate. This is the last Book I will Purchase involving Foraging and 1 year aging, its just not practical. But that said it has to rank amoung the most "out there" Origional books published by a cookery publishing House.

Magnus Nillson, is a great chef, like a professor, doctor or super geek. Creates only the best food possible within his reach, and it should be amazing! So is the reading. For me a professional chef its even have new info, that only Magnus has found. Within his deep passion for biodiversty, local ingredients and the way of living life only a few could do. The book is a couple of years old. Now their is more then 6 month waiting for a night at Faviken. I will save my hard earned money for a trip to jemtland.

A brilliant antithesis to "haute cuisine", this is about how simple ingredients from local sources, coupled with meticulous processes can create food that acheives its maximum potential through soul, rather than complexity. Don't expect a recipe book - chances are you won't be able to find the ingedients (or even substitutes) for many of the recipes that DO feature. This is more about the human process of eating from cultivation/nurturing, through preparation and to, finally, enjoyment. A brilliant and fascinating read.