The first recipe in this book is Wild Garlic Soup. There is a lovely photo of this spring soup made with garlic leaves, potatoes, butter, onion and vegetable stock. Simple and subtle with early season garlic. A different recipe from most.
The second recipe is Creamy Sorrel Potato Salad. Sorrel is something not too many of us use. Here sorrel leaves are sprinkled over potatoes dressed with mayonnaise, sour cream, and mustard, plus radishes and hard-boiled eggs. Now, this recipe is distinctly different from the usual potato salad.
The third recipe is Beer-Battered Spruce Tips with Syrup [spruce syrup]. That’s not just different. No, this recipe is … Well, take a look:
Oh, it all makes sense now. These recipes come from the chapter on foraging in the new North Wind Cookbook. The cookbook may be brand new. The author, Nevada Berg, is most experienced, an award-winning blogger from Salt Lake City, but now happily married and cooking in a remote area of Norway. Really cooking.
This book is subtitled Home Cooking from the Heart of Norway. That’s a perfect description of this book. It is about home or comfort food, food of the farmhouse stove. It is not the food of a fancy Oslo restaurant.
It’s authentic down to the very careful specification of ingredients. Take the Rustic Savory Pear Tart. It’s whole-wheat puff pasty topped with “just” pears, blue cheese, honey and walnuts. This classic assembly of ingredients is presented here in a fastidiously written recipe: a page and quarter of text to take your through each step with precision.
Here are the recipes that caught my eye on a first pass through the book:
Beer-Battered Spruce Tips with Syrup
Wild Nettle and Honey Cake
Smoked Trout Mousse
No-Cooked, Stirred Strawberry Jam
Smoked Duck and Barley Salad with Lovage and Plums
Creamy Pheasant and Wild Mushroom Soup [book cover]
Moose Burger with Crispy Caramelized Onions, Forest Berry Relish and Root Vegetable
Reindeer Stew
Hare Fricassee
Blueberry Marshmallows
Each recipe comes with a photo that you might find on a museum wall. The styling is impeccable. And mouthwatering. Chapters are devoted to foraging, the waters, summer mountain farms, hunting, storage, and campfire cooking. Each chapter beings with an essay on the nature of life and food in Norway. In that chapter on the waters, we learn that Norway is the second largest exporter of fish and fish products in the world. Norway has a population of just over 5 million. I guess they all have fishing licenses. Or North Sea fishing boats.
The flow of information and facts, coupled with the perfection of writing and a most diverse recipe selection make North Wind Kitchen a book to be studied and surely enjoyed.
I grew up in Oregon with huge forests of Douglas Fir. We climbed our trees, we lumbered them, we hiked among them. We did not eat them. I started learning from North Wind Kitchen from the third recipe. There are wonderful lessons here for us all, and food to make you dream of mountains and fjords.