Keynote Lecture
The New Nordic Diet and Danish Food Culture
Bi Skaarup
This is a story about how an old inherited food culture was rejected, how a new food culture was created, and how the old food culture came back in from the cold.
In 1995-1996 I was given the chance to lead the Danish part of a large EU-financed project called Euroterroir which dealt with what was called the specificity of food products. The expression ‘specificity’ is a typical example of the kind of terminology fostered by the EU. The best way to describe the meaning of specificity is to say that my job was to find typical Danish foods in a range of defined categories such as bread, meat products, fruit, fish, and so on. ‘Typical’ was defined more precisely to mean food that had been produced in Denmark for at least one hundred years. As a result of the project I got a chance to carry out research into Danish food culture. A basic question was: Were there any original Danish foodstuffs still in existence? One important aspect of this work was that it did not deal with quality, as the project concerned food culture, not gastronomy. When I embarked on the project I though that I would find a few products that met the requirement of being originally Danish, but to my great surprise I found that there were many such foodstuffs. Within the frame of the project, we had been allowed to deal with one hundred products – if we could muster that many – and apparently there were many more which met all guideline requirements.
As this European project progressed, it turned out that several of the countries involved had trouble getting the job done, as there were not sufficient experts on hand to carry out the research; so we in Denmark were given the possibility of describing a further thirty or so Danish products as part of the project.
The most important result of this work – from my point of view at least – was, that I realised that there was quite a lot to be proud of with regard to Danish food products. Like most Danes of my generation I thought that Denmark was – and indeed always had been – an underdeveloped country when it came to gastronomy.
Before I started on the project I did not know that some of the best sour cherries in the world, Stevnsbærret, are to be found in Denmark, and that the cherry tree in
question cannot grow and give quality fruit anywhere else. The same can be said about the pear, ‘Clara Friis’, a small, crisp, and very fresh-tasting green pear. But the most astonishing discovery was the many bread types and cakes that were to be found only in Denmark: e.g. the many different types of morning buns, wienerbrød (Danish pastry), and cream-cakes (flødekager). Nobody had actually described that situation before, and nobody, especially, not the people producing them, were aware of this.1
This was the time when discussion about Danish food culture had just started. In The Danish Academy of Gastronomy, of which I was a member from the early 1990s, we were worried about the extremely low quality of food manufactured by Danish producers, and we felt there was a need for a public debate about the matter. This resulted in the organisation of a conference in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, in the autumn of 1995. This was led by three ministers of government, and was attended by the best cooks and food writers in Denmark, as well as by some university academics, a few curators from Danish cultural museums, and many journalists.
The general feeling expressed at the conference was that Danish food culture was of poor quality. The typical Danish dinner was described as consisting of a ready-prepared dinner heated in the microwave and consumed in front of the T.V. I knew from my research that that was not true, but the interesting thing was, that that was the general perception of Danish food culture, especially among the younger conference participants.
But one thing was certainly true – the typical Danish consumer went after quantity rather than quality, and if he or she finally wanted something good to eat it was French, Italian or Spanish cuisine that was chosen. As a cultural historian I could not but wonder how this had come about. How did a nation reach a state of total neglect of its food cultural heritage? So I set out to try to answer this question.
To do this it was necessary to go back two hundred and fifty years. Denmark was then an agricultural nation with about eighty per cent or more of the population living on the land and occupied with farming. The Age of Enlightenment changed Denmark markedly during the eighteenth century. Enlightenment ideas favoured agricultural development and was led by representatives of the great landowners from the new aristocracy, many of whom had come up from the Northern dukedoms south of the Baltic, e.g. Adam Gottlob Moltke, originally from Mecklenburg, Andreas Peter Bernstorff and Christian Ditleff Reventlow, both from Holsten, who foresaw good possibilities in letting the peasants take over the land.
The resulting agricultural revolution happened quietly in Denmark, and the transformation of the peasants from serfs to landowners took place over a relatively short period of time. In a matter of twenty years Danish farmland changed hands and the field systems were altered from the old rundale scattered system to larger coherent
1 Euroterroir – the Danish contribution can be studied in Danish as well as in English, at www.
historiskmad.dk.
fields constituting each farm. Some farmers were allotted new land, as was the case with my family. Together with two other farmers, we were moved seven kilometres to the north of the village of Egelev where we had lived until then, out on the parish common at the uppermost northern part of the Island of Falster.
I had always found agricultural history particularly boring with its concern for field systems and property, and its lack of interest in the history of daily life and people.
But having moved to a farm away from the village, I felt I had to attempt to understand the place to which I had moved. So I took up farm history again.
What I realised when studying the history of farming in Denmark from 1750 to the early twentieth century was, that the first few decades for farmers as owner-occupiers – the fact that the farmers now owned their farms and the land – were not easy. Having lived in the close society of the village, where generations of family and friends had resided for centuries, and where they had worked in common as a community to farm the land, the farmers were now on their own. From an economic point of view, the fact that Denmark held on to the wrong horse, so to speak, during the Napoleonic Wars, also did not help the farmers’ case. Thus in the first half of the nineteenth century, the country’s economy was in ruin, and agricultural prices were disastrous.
Several attempts were made by the farmers to make new networks, to find new ways of working together – as a substitute for the lost community of the villages. But it was not until the defeat of 1864 when Denmark lost the war against Prussia and Austria, that something happened – a simple wholesale society – in Danish indkøbsforening or andelsforening – was founded, after which a whole series of such societies were set up, leading to what is now called the co-operative movement, andelsbevægelsen. The Danish farmers had started a system of co-operation that worked for them, and during the course of the last half of the nineteenth century and the decades immediately following, they established many successful dairies, bacon factories, and slaughterhouses, on the basis of co-operative principles.
The typical Danish farm around the year 1800 had been a self-sufficient unit producing the food required by the inhabitants of the farm. Other commodities were secured by means of bartering goods from the farm in a grocery store in the nearest town.
This natural resource economy was abandoned in the late eighteen hundreds, when Danish farmers directed their production efforts towards the British market, and in so doing started to earn money. Farm economy thus changed from a natural resource economy to one based on cash. This led to a marked change for the better in farmers’
lives, not least as far as the women and their work were concerned. This also had an influence on the food that was produced and consumed by people in the countryside.
A Food Revolution
Around the year 1800, the typical Danish farm produced all of the food needed for its residents. The women prepared the food from the products of the land and from the animals reared on it. At that time, Denmark did not, in the least, have a uniform food culture. The country was characterised by several different food cultures based on the conditions of the soil, geography and local climate, and the effects these could have on crops and animals.
We know this from the agriculturalist Gregers Begtrup’s description of the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He not only described the land and the crops but also the conditions under which the people lived and how they managed to survive. In doing this he naturally described the food of each part of the country and gave a typical summer and winter menu for a farm. The menus from the different parts of the country were mainly based on the following:
Fish: North- and West-Jutland Milk products: East Jutland and Fyn
Pork and peas: Zealand and the Islands south of Zealand (Lolland-Falster and Møn2
As a general rule, diets in different parts of Denmark consisted mainly of spoon-food, such as thick soups, porridges and gruel, that is, foods normally eaten by using a spoon.
Cereals, especially barley and rye, played an important role, while wheat appeared only in the South of Jutland and in Lolland-Falster, and only for special occasions. In the rest of the country, the bolted rye flour bread was the fine bread, while the coarse rye bread was the daily bread all over the country, and had been ever since rye was introduced after the coming of Christianity.
To most of us this peasant food sounds very coarse and unappetising, but after having studied it for some time, and after having made the dishes concerned, I must admit that it certainly had its good qualities, just as it, no doubt, formerly had when cooked by a good mistress. And to my mind, it is important to stress that when people grow their own vegetables and fruit, and rear their own animals for meat, they will probably do what is possible to make the food taste good, if given the opportunity.
A hundred years later – around 1900 – Danish food, both rural and urban, had changed completely. The Danes were now eating what I call ‘the-sauce-and-potato-cuisine’ that came to dominate the diet throughout the twentieth century, and a daily diet based on local produce was disappearing more and more all over the country.
To understand this remarkable change one has to remember the situation of the Danish farmer. After centuries of serfdom, the Danish peasant finally became his own master, and after travelling a long economic road he finally began to earn money. This
2 Begtrup, G., Beskrivelse over Agerdyrkningens Tilstand i Danmark, Bd. 1-7, København 1803-1812.
meant a complete reorganisation of the work on the farm. Danish agriculture was modernised much more thoroughly than that of any other European country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For the women, the fact that cash was coming into the house meant that it was not necessary to produce everything from scratch, as had previously been done.
Commodities were now being bought instead of being produced and processed on the farm. This meant relief for the women from much heavy work, but at the same time it also led, in the course of a few generations, to a loss of knowledge and understanding of product treatment.
This happened in a century of disaster for the Danish state. The Danes suffered several losses during the nineteenth century. As stated above, sympathy for the French emperor in the Napoleonic Wars resulted in national bankruptcy, then Norway was lost (1814), and finally the country suffered total humiliation as a result of its defeat by Prussia and Austria in 1864, after which Denmark became a small unimportant state.
This last blow resulted in a loss of self-esteem for all of the Danish people.
An attempt to restore some national pride was made by the Folk High Schools, but what has become very characteristic of Danish society since the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, is its growing dependence on institutional authority. This was definitely the case with regard to food. While young girls were formerly trained at home by their mothers or sent to another home to be trained there, institutions increasingly took over the role of training with regard to food and household economy.
Home Economics Schools, husholdningsskoler, began to appear from around 1900, and the daughters of farmers, as well as those of the bourgeoisie, were sent away for training as good housewives or housekeepers. And, where previously every good housewife had specialities and secrete recipes, and special ways of spoiling family and guests, there then emerged just one ‘correct’ way of doing things, courtesy of the home economic schools, in which hygiene and economic modesty were all-powerful rules.
The cookbooks from around 1900 and the following decades prove this clearly.
And while Danish farming concentrated on producing food for external markets, the Danes were coaxed into consuming what could be called the left-overs from the butter and bacon industries. Instead of butter, they were told to eat margarine, and they were taught to substitute the many parts of the pigs that were leftover for the finer meat that had been exported to Britain.
Offal, for example, had never been consumed to any great extent in Denmark.
But campaigns were initiated to show how dishes could be prepared from it and how healthy it was.3 Danes were invited, or rather coaxed into eating dishes that looked like the real thing but were actually something else. Like the mock-turtle dish (forloren skildpadde), which is made of veal organ meats, Danes developed many mock-dishes, which utilised pork left-overs instead of the usual veal, beef, chicken or venison. The
3 Boyhus, Else-Marie, Grisen – en køkkenhistorie, Gyldendal 1998, 62.
food representing the era before the agricultural and industrial revolution was now considered peasant food – and this designation was definitely not meant as a compliment.
In the 1930s, when photographic pictures started to appear in the cookbooks, this situation was well illustrated. For example, a housewife was depicted as working in a completely clinical environment. She was clad in a nice white clean and newly-ironed smock, she held her equipment in the correct way, and she was clearly working in accordance with the rules. There was no smile, no sign of enjoyment or satisfaction in the work. This was not for fun; it was a very serious business. As Else-Marie Boyhus, our great Danish food historian, said in her paper at the meeting in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1995: ‘all the enjoyment and fun had been taken out of the preparation of food. There was no prestige in housework anymore, and all the creativity and sensuality it could have involved had been drained away. When the economic situation finally allowed it, the housewives of Denmark were not persuaded to go into the labour market; they fled screaming out into it during the 1960s and 1970s.’
The problem with this situation was that these women, in spite of their full-time jobs, still had responsibility for the provision of the daily meals of the family. From skimming through women’s magazines of the period, it becomes evident that the mantras surrounding cooking were: fast, easy and cheap. It was just a matter of getting the family fed, and when mother finally needed to have a day off, it was celebrated with fast food from the pizzeria, a bag of chips, candy, a litre of cola, and a video-film from the store around the corner.
This was where Danish food was in the late twentieth century. Several generations of youngsters had grown up without having any knowledge of how to use typically Danish produce, and without any acquaintance with Danish food culture, and certainly without any feeling or memory of enjoyment or any other nice sensation connected to it. The general view of Danish food was that it was of poor quality and that it lacked any products of special quality.
The Politicians Take Action
This was the culinary state of Denmark at the time of the conference about Danish Food Culture held in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1995, which I have mentioned at the beginning of this paper. The outcome of this meeting was that the minister of cultural affairs set up a working group, the purpose of which was to find out how to turn the culinary boat, so to speak, and get Danish food culture to move in the right direction. Six people, including myself, were appointed to this working group.
After a few months we presented a report which proposed that an institution working with the Danish meal and inspired by the Swedish Grythyttan, giving academic training in food culture to people working with food in all walks of life, be established.
Efforts to establish the institution commenced in 1999 when a suitable house was found in the old and partly-abandoned slaughterhouse area of Copenhagen. National funding was forthcoming, and the building work commenced.
While all of this was taking place, the leader of the project set up a series of events focusing on different aspects of food and food culture. These food festivals – as they could be called – were extremely popular with the public. The right button had been definitely hit; there was no doubt about that.
Unfortunately, the social democratic government then in power, fell. As a result, the new food-establishment project and many more of the previous government’s schemes were dropped, on the basis of their alleged patronisation of opinion, by the new liberal government which came to power in 2001. But something had been started.
The debate about Danish food and its qualities, or lack of them, continued apace.
The New Nordic Food is Born
In 1996, Claus Meyer, the famous Danish gastronomic innovator, had asserted in an interview that if Danish food culture were to be recreated or revitalised, it would be necessary to look towards France in this connection.
I was strongly opposed to that view. As I had just completed the Euroterroir Project I knew that there was much inspiration and useful knowledge about good quality products to be found in Denmark. Claus Meyer was never a cultural snob, but, just like everybody else who was actively involved with food at that time, he lacked knowledge and historical awareness of traditional Danish food culture. Food, as a cultural phenomenon, was not an accepted topic of study in academic circles in Denmark in 1990s.
In the course of the next few years, Claus Meyer changed his mind about the necessity of looking to France in order to transform Danish cuisine, and he was in fact the guiding spirit behind the movement for New Scandinavian Food. The New Scandinavian Food manifesto was formulated by eight cooks from the Scandinavian countries at a conference held in Noma restaurant, Copenhagen, on 1 November 2004.4
Many of us attending and, indeed, giving papers, at this meeting were doubtful about what, if anything, this manifesto would lead to. Were these just the fine words of a group of excellent cooks, and would the idea of New Scandinavian Food ever be mentioned, let alone acted on, again? Would it all end up as a small storm in a teacup?
But time was on our side. Nationally – in the Scandinavian countries – and internationally, the subject gained much attention. The idea that the food products of our part of the world had many good qualities and possibilities, and that they could provide a sensible and healthy alternative to the conventional industrialised food of the western world, caught on.
But it ought to be stressed that what was envisaged for the new Scandinavian food was not that the Danes should eat reindeer from Lapland or musk ox from Greenland,
4 The manifesto of The New Nordic Diet, now more often called New Nordic Food, or New Nordic Cuisine, is published at: http://www.clausmeyer.dk/en/the_new_nordic_cuisine_/manifesto_.html.