Eating the North: An Analysis of the Cookbook “NOMA: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine”

| A portmanteau of the Danish words nordisk (Nordic) and mad (food), Noma opened in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003. Seven years later, it was crowned first in Restaurant Magazine’s Best Restaurant in the World competition. That same year, 2010, the restaurant published its first English cookbook NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, authored by chef René Redzepi. In this article I analyze this cookbook, focusing on how the visuals, texts, and recipes signify time and place for diverse publics. I begin with a literature review—discussing cookbooks as tools of communication and marketing—and consider the role the visual plays in this process. How does the cookbook represent Nordic food and the region from which it comes? How does the composition of the book as a whole shape not only what is considered Nordic food, but also the Nordic region? I then closely read NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, demonstrating how the cookbook does not represent a time and place, but instead constructs one. keywords | Cookbooks, New Nordic, visual culture, haute cuisine The day after Noma was crowned first in Restaurant magazine’s Best Restaurant in the World competition in 2010, the restaurant had 100,000 online requests for reservations. That same year, the restaurant published its first English language cookbook: NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Authored by chef René Redzepi, the contemporary Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson penned the book’s introduction, titled “Milk Skin with Grass.” This introduction sets the tone for the book: poetic and understated. Photographed by Ditte Isager, the images throughout the cookbook depict messy arrangements of delicate food, black and white portraits of the restaurant’s suppliers, blurry shots of the restaurant’s interior, and romantic renderings of the Nordic landscape. If food acts as an expression of cultural identity, how is identity visually expressed? How do text and design support the visual? What does the visual language of this book communicate about, as the title suggests, the restaurant’s time and place in Nordic cuisine? In a conversation with Charles Harrison in a 1969 issue of Studio International Magazine, Seth Siegelaub remarked: “For many years it has been well known that more people are aware of an artist’s work through (1) the printed media or (2) conversation than by direct confrontation with the art itself.” With its month-long waiting list (for a restaurant that seats only forty-four) and the high cost of a multicourse meal (the menu, without wine, is 1.700DK, nearly 230€ or $245 (US) per person), the same can be said about Noma. More people, the author included, experience Noma through its cookbooks, press coverage, and social media channels than through eating its food. Noma’s cookbooks complement, as well as completely substitute, the restaurant experience. The visual plays an essential role in this process. Food and eating can be studied as both material and visual culture. One can take an economic, social, or political approach to discuss what people eat and how. Here I focus on how the medium of a cookbook communicates and constructs the food from one of the world’s best restaurants, as well as how this cookbook creates an image of the region in which the restaurant is based. Beyond the physical and visual, food and its composition also channel emotions. I do not discuss how the food tastes or what it does nutritionally; instead, I discuss where it comes from, how it is presented, how it looks in front of the camera and on the printed page, how food is contextualized, the atmosphere this context creates, and what this all suggests about constructing a sense of time and place in Nordic cuisine. As the name indicates, NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine is much more than a collection of recipes. The cookbook contextualizes the recipes with stories of people and places that assign them a specific cultural value related to ideas of the North and the Nordic. The recipes tell the stories behind the food, stories that express a sense of cultural identity. This makes cookbooks valuable marketing tools for the restaurant. So, in what way can a cookbook construct and communicate a sense of time and place? How does NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine represent Nordic food and the region from which it comes? With this question in mind, I analyze the Noma cookbook, focusing on how the visuals, texts, and recipes signify time and place for diverse publics. In this artiG R A D U A T E J O U R N A L O F F O O D S T U D IE S 8 case of the Noma cookbook, it is autobiographical as it tells the story of Redzepi and how he became a chef. It also tells the biography of the restaurant. Furthermore, the cookbook is also historical as it constructs an idealized image of the Nordic region, both past and present, in which Noma holds an important position. As he explores cooking in the domestic sphere, Appadurai describes only one of the many different types of cookbooks, books that operate in both the public and private spheres. Women author many books about home cooking with the intention that these books will be cooked from, typically for a family, as the standard cookbook often features recipes that serve four people. This type of cookbook follows a formula, as these cookbook authors write and test recipes in their kitchen and then share them in the format of a cookbook: as if from one home kitchen to another. Equipment is often simple and ingredients familiar. Another type of cookbook directly links the public and private spheres of cooking. Written by a chef—or perhaps a ghostwriter whose responsibility it is to shadow the chef and translate their, sometimes chaotic, cooking into standardized measurements and easy-to-follow instructions—this type of cookbook is often developed for the home cook, but with a different intention. In American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a National Cuisine, Leslie Brenner writes: “Although there are certainly exceptions, chef cookbooks are notoriously difficult to cook from, since they usually assume that one has elaborately made or hard-to-find ingredients at one’s fingertips.” NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Food is such a cookbook. But why does someone purchase a cookbook with no intention to cook from it? Brenner continues: But chef books sell . . . many people don’t actually cook from cookbooks anyway; instead they read them like novels. The professional cookbook lets amateurs dream about elaborate constructions they’ll never have time to make, featuring ingredients they may not be able to find. These books allow readers to cook vicariously to revel in fantasy meals. As Brenner suggests, some people purchase cookbooks without the intention of ever cooking from them. This makes some cookbooks more about inspiration and aspiration than utility. As she writes, it also frames these cookbooks more like novels: books read for their stories. These stories can tell us a lot about a place and a time. As Jessamyn Neuhaus puts it in Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America: “...cookbooks reveal much about the societies that produce cle, I begin by reviewing literature that discusses cookbooks as tools of communication and marketing, and consider the role the visual plays in this process. I then closely read NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, demonstrating how the cookbook does not represent a time and place, but constructs one. I analyze the narratives formed by the visuals. I also examine the way the book is written, structured, and designed, and how this composition of the book as a whole shapes perceptions of not only Nordic food, but also the Nordic region. THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIVES OF COOKBOOKS Cookbooks are about much more than just cooking and they communicate more than recipes. A cookbook is a medium for storytelling. The social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai opened his 1988 article “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India” with a description of what cookbooks do and what studying them reveals: Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the properties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies. According to Appadurai, cookbooks reveal shifting relationships between people, food, and values. This makes them cultural artifacts. Instead of merely demonstrating new ways to cook old ingredients, the Noma cookbook also introduces new ingredients. Noma highlights foraged ingredients and works with a laboratory—the Nordic food lab— that specifically focuses on developing or discovering new ingredients. Noma’s generative efforts reflect a shift in what is considered edible, a perspective specifically relevant to NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. How do cookbooks tell the “unusual cultural tales” that Appadurai describes? The range of unusual tales a cookbook can narrate is diverse. Anne L. Bower discusses this spectrum of stories in Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Although she writes specifically about community cookbooks that serve to fund-raise as opposed to generate a profit, her findings can be applied to cookbooks in general, as she writes, “. . . cookbooks tell stories— autobiographical in most cases, historical sometimes, and perhaps fictitious or idealized in other instances.” In the