Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock for the past year, you can’t have missed the hype. The New Nordic ‘Thang’. You know, the New Nordic Kitchen. The New Nordic Diet. The New Nordic Cuisine. The New Nordic Lifestyle. The New Nordic etc, etc, etc… Getting back to nature. Going out to the forest, dales and streams and foraging for food. Viking roots, slow-food-rub-a-dub-stylee. It started a few years back and has been building and building…
Three years ago, DDH (Dear Danish Husband) took me for my birthday to Noma (at that time, the Best Restaurant in the the World for the second year running) and we had the full whammy of their New Nordic dishes. Prawns so fresh that they were still alive and wriggling as we swallowed them. Deep fried moss. Eggs we should fry ourself on hot iron plates, on top of smoking hay (washed down with champagne). Yep, it was hard not to sit and think, “The Emperor’s New Clothes?” Here we are, paying the best part of kr.5,000 (US $950, UK £560) for lunch for two, eating glorified fried eggs! 😉
But, as usual, I digress! Anway, the New Nordic ‘Thang’ has been trickling down to the man in the street ever since. First of all, we have the renaissance of rough-and-ready-rugbrød (ryebread). Which is back with a hearty, healthy vengeance as a lunchbox staple. But then again, did it ever really leave?
Then someone had the bright idea of marketing rugbrød (ryebread) as a tapas delicacy. Slice the ryebread, roast it, add salt (big, manly flakes, selvfølgelig), put it in little bags and sell it at highly inflated prices [said the canny Scot]. Dang! ‘Cos these rugbrødschips (ryebread chips) are actually very addictive!
But you know when the trend has finally gone mainstream when it hits the lowest supermarket shelves. Yep, even the humble potato chip has had a New Nordic makeover. They even came up with the cheesy name of Sbrød. A combo of sprød (crunchy) and brød (bread)… 
Just add a glass of beer micro-brewery-unfiltered-pilsner or apple juice some freshly-tapped-birch-juice and you’re all set!
Diane 🙂