Swedish Chef Magnus Nilsson and his Unconventional Recipes for Fäviken

Magnus Nilsson has been named one of the top 10 chefs in the world. His restaurant Faviken in rural Sweden made the list of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2011.

He has a new cookbook called, simply, “Faviken.” The meals are unconventional. As he writes, “the recipes in this book are not like those in many other cookbooks.”

As long as we’re talking about lists, that may top the list of Understatements of The Year. The book includes recipes for “black grouse in hay” and “marrow and heart with grated turnip and turnip leaves that have never seen the light of day, grilled bread and lovage salt.”

And contrary to most cookbooks, there are no measurements. Nilsson urges cooks to “read the recipes with an open mind” and follow the principles. He says you’ll never make the dish like he does, and that’s okay.

The World’s Aaron Schachter visits a local Whole Foods in search of ingredients to make a meal from Faviken. It’s not easy to do.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Aaron Schachter: Now, OK. Here’s how it works when we do celebrity chef interviews at The World. The publisher sends a cookbook to our newsroom and one of us takes the book home and attempts to make at least one of the recipes. Makes sense, right? That’s what I wanted to do before speaking with Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson. He shot straight into foodie stardom after his restaurant in rural Sweden – and we mean rural – Faviken, was proclaimed the most daring in the world by Bon Appetit magazine. Now, he has a new cookbook out also “Faviken” and I wanted to see what I could make from it. First step: a trip to a local Whole Foods to find the ingredients. Marketing team leader David Remillard tried to help me out, but it wasn’t easy.

[Clip plays]
Schachter: We need marrow and heart with grated turnip and turnip leaves that have never seen the light of day – very important – grilled bread, and something called lovage salt. We need a very fresh cow’s heart to start with and then a very fresh cow’s femur.

David Remillard: The marrow or the femur we definitely can order for you. We can talk to our meat guy, our butcher, about the heart because I think we can also get that in for you. And what was the other things that you also needed?

Schachter: We need one turnip, that’s easy enough.

Remillard: But that hasn’t seen the light of day?

Schachter: “That is stored in the cellar with its little yellow leaves that have started sprouting towards the end of winter.”

Remillard: I have turnips, I have local turnips. I can’t promise you though that they haven’t seen the light of day.

Schachter: Shall we try and find our cow’s heart and femur?

Remillard: Let’s go. I’ll take you over to the butcher.

Robert Mitchell: Hey, how you doing? Mitch.

Schachter: Aaron. Nice to meet you.

Mitchell: Nice to meet you too.

Schachter: So we’ve come to you to find ingredients, are you ready for this?

Mitchell: Yeah.

Schachter: Marrow and heart.

Mitchell: Femur bones? We have ‘em. We can get ‘em in anytime you ask and we’ll look to see if we can get some beef hearts in. I’ll let you know if I can do that.

Schachter: What was the other one we had a little trouble with? Oh, you know, we needed a retired dairy cow.

Mitchell: A retired dairy cow? Let me see what I have in the back here. Give me one second.

Remillard: No retired dairy cows?

Mitchell: No, no retired dairy cows here. We’ll massage ‘em too while they’re growing.

Schachter: You know what would be great is if give ‘em this jazz music for a massage.

Mitchell: Oh, yeah, definitely. Headphones.

Schachter: Headphones. And then he’s retired and we can eat him.
[clip ends]

Schachter: That was a butcher at Whole Foods, Robert Mitchell, helping me out with my shopping list. I am joined now by Swedish chef, Magnus Nilsson, one of the top ten chefs in Europe. Magnus, thank you for joining us.

Magnus Nilsson: Thanks for having me.

Schachter: Now, we poked a little fun there with that tape.

Nilsson: It was great.

Schachter: But, as you could tell, it was a little hard to get any ingredients for your . . .

Nilsson: I think you did pretty well actually.

Schachter: Really?

Nilsson: Yeah, at least you found the femur.

Schachter: Yeah, that’s true.

Nilsson: Yeah.

Schachter: I had to order it though. It takes about ten days. But a lot of your food takes time to cook doesn’t it?

Nilsson: Yeah, it does. And a lot of the food needs to be planned ahead a long time in the restaurant as well.

Schachter: A year, one of the recipes, right?

Nilsson: One of them is probably a year, yeah.

Schachter: I have to tell you, I was fully prepared to just make a complete joke out of this book, but the fact is, whether or not you can cook these meals, the book is absolutely stunning.

Nilsson: That’s very nice of you. Thank you.

Schachter: But who is the book for then? I mean some of the other celebrity chefs, Jamie Oliver comes to mind, make food that they hope people will go out and make. They will get the book on Tuesday and make the dinners on Wednesday. That’s not going to happen with your book.

Nilsson: No, and that’s probably not the idea. From my part, the idea is that to write and produce this book and have people read it. It’s all about sort of explaining the context of my restaurant.

Schachter: Your restaurant, Faviken?

Nilsson: Yeah, exactly. For people who haven’t got the same cultural background as I have, to kind of explain why it makes sense what we do up there.

Schachter: Yeah, I’m looking through the book now and, as I said, it’s very beautiful, very interesting, but a bit hard to understand, this kind of food. Tell me about what it is you do up there.

Nilsson: So I think that like actually if you look at every chef everywhere, the most important that everyone makes in a kitchen is to try to make the most out of whatever possibilities and difficulties you have in your situation, in your surrounding.

Schachter: Local food you mean?

Nilsson: No, not necessarily, but you have to make the most out of whatever you have. Now, for us, that’s local food. We live in the countryside in the northern parts of Sweden and that’s something that works for us, it makes sense, but if you’re in a city, it might be something else, so . . .

Schachter: The restaurant seats about twelve people. It’s very hard to get to. There’s a great story at the beginning of the cookbook from a travel writer about him getting there. It sounds like quite the trek. Is this sort of one of those restaurants out of James Bond or something where diners pay a thousand dollars each, all twelve of them, and get this fantastic meal?

Nilsson: They don’t pay quite a thousand dollars each, but it’s definitely a costly restaurant, and it has to be because it costs a lot of money to get those products in and to be able to prepare them the way we do.

Schachter: Now, Magnus, yesterday, we asked listeners to send in questions to ask you and I’d like to read you a few if you don’t mind.

Nilsson: Yeah, sure. Go ahead.

Schachter: OK. What time of year is best to visit Faviken?

Nilsson: Well, it depends kind of on what you like. Summer is probably the time of the year when we’re most like most other restaurants and there’s a lot of fresh vegetables, for example, there’s a lot of thing straight from the garden. Autumn, there’s a lot of game birds, mushrooms, things like that. Winter is quite particular because everything we serve in terms of vegetables then has been stored or prepared in some way to keep. And then in Spring there’s a lot of foraged food, so it depends on what you like.

Schachter: That is celebrity chef, Magnus Nilsson, voted by some one of the top ten chefs in Europe. His restaurant, Faviken, one of the fifty best restaurants in the world according to the Wall Street Journal I believe it was. Congratulations. Thank you for joining us.

Nilsson: Thank you for having me.

Schachter: And in about ten days now my cow’s femur might be ready and maybe I can try a recipe from your book.

Nilsson: Give me a call and tell me how the cow’s femur turned out.

Schachter: OK. I will do.

Nilsson: Good.

Schachter: You can see a slideshow of Magnus’s restaurant at theworld.org and a video of him at work in his kitchen. This is PRI.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.