From the best comfort food recipes, baking tips to all the delicious flavors the Nordic region has to offer, I have collected a selection of the best Scandinavian cookbooks which I hope will inspire you to find that Scandinavian feeling in the kitchen.
1. North Wild Kitchen: Home Cooking From the Heart of Norway
North Wild Kitchen and its author Nevada Berg has in recent years become one of the best-known voices of Norwegian cooking around the world. Berg was born in Utah but moved to Numedal, Norway where she lives with her Norwegian husband and son. Written from her 17th-century mountain farm in rural Norway, Nevada Berg’s blog and Instagram feed are brimming with gorgeous-and achievable-ideas for home cooking and entertaining.
Berg is a self-taught cook, and her simple and charming approach focuses on seasonal food prepared without a lot of fuss. With dozens of mouthwatering recipes for Norwegian-inspired dishes, this book features beautiful photography of the food and the country’s landscape. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of Norwegian food culture-foraging, fishing, and farming; hunting, harvesting, and camping; baking, grilling, and frying. Along the way, Berg comments on the unique pleasures of Nordic life as she tends to her chickens, explores the outdoors, or sets a welcoming table. A beautiful collection of good food and great living from the heart of Norway.
Purchase it here.
2. Nordic by Nature: Nordic Cuisine and Culinary Excursions
Nordic by Nature presents more than 30 of the most original Danish chefs with their distinctive recipes and provides deep insights into the uniqueness of the contemporary Northern cuisine. In this cookbook, top chefs like Nicolai Nørregaard, Claus Meyer, Rasmus Munk or Kamilla Seidler take the reader on a journey through their creative realms by revealing the secrets of their own kitchen.
Far more than just a cook book, this volume includes more than 70 innovative and at times very unusual recipes of chefs coupled with their own personal interpretations of contemporary Danish kitchen. This has been visualised through stunning imagery of the kitchens, forests, or castle gardens where inspiration is drawn, created and consumed. Nordic by Nature invites you to immerse your senses in the intriguing world of Danish gastronomy by celebrating this contemporary culinary culture: a movement characterized by personal stories and ideologies, foraging trips, and geographical and seasonal limitations and possibilities.
Purchase it here.
3. Scandi Bites: 50 Recipes for Sweet Treats, Party Food and Other Little Scandinavian Snacks
This is the perfect gift for Scandi-philes who want to bring a little Nordic charm into their kitchen. With over 60 sweet and savory recipes for all sorts of bite-size snacks, treats, fingerfood, bakes, and pastries, Scandi Bites will provide plenty of inspiration for every occasion throughout the year.
Doyenne of Danish baking, Trine Hahnemann, shares all her favorite treats in this charming cookbook so that you can make your own delicious cardamom buns, almond cookies, honey bombs, coconut macaroons, miniature smoked salmon open sandwiches and asparagus tartlets, among many others.
Purchase it here.
4. Lagom: The Swedish Art of Eating Harmoniously
Lagom: The Swedish Art of Eating Harmoniously is a beautiful, fresh cookbook offering a genuine insight into how Swedes eat and cook by Swedish food stylist and blogger Steffi Knowles-Dellner. With recipes that fit around the seasons, occasions, times of day, and appetite, this cookbook is a great introduction into the unique Swedish concept.
Eating and cooking in tune with lagom means embracing food that is good for body and soul, unfussy, delicious and sustaining, and all in harmony. The Swedes understand that balance is everything – that you crave comforting food when a bitter wind is howling outside, that refreshing, lighter meals suit hot, hazy days, that a mid-morning bun is good for morale, and that a long, sociable lunch with friends and family on a Sunday is the most rewarding way to end the weekend. There is a time and place for every kind of food, and when everything is in equilibrium, you will be content and satisfied.
Purchase it here.
5. The Nordic Cookbook
The Nordic Cookbook offers an unprecedented look at the rich culinary offerings of the Nordic region with 700 recipes collected by the acclaimed Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson. The cookbook is richly illustrated with the Nilsson’s personal photography, unraveling the mysteries of Nordic ingredients and introduces the region’s culinary history and cooking techniques.
This beautiful book is full of authentic recipes Nilsson has collected while travelling extensively throughout the Nordic countries – Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – enhanced by atmospheric photographs of its landscapes and people. Organized by food type, The Nordic Cookbook covers every type of Nordic dish including meat, fish, vegetables, breads, pastries and desserts. These recipes are achievable for home cooks of all abilities and are accompanied by narrative texts on Nordic culinary history, ingredients and techniques including smoking and home preserving. Additional essays explore classic dishes made for special occasions and key seasonal events, such as the Midsummer feast.
Purchase it here.
6. Scandinavian Comfort Food: Embracing the Art of Hygge
Scandinavians excel in comfort – family, friends, a good atmosphere, long meals, relaxation and an emphasis on simple pleasures. We even have a word for this kind of cosiness that comes with spending quality time in hearth and home when the days are short: hygge.
Trine Hahnemann is the doyenne of Scandinavian cooking and loves nothing more than spending time in her kitchen cooking up comforting food in good company. Scandinavian Comfort Food is her collection of recipes that will warm you up and teach you to embrace the art of hygge, no matter where you live.
Purchase it here.
7. Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking
Bringing the best of Scandinavian home-cooking into your kitchen, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking offers over 100 delicious recipes that showcase this region’s most beloved sweet and savory dishes. Scandinavia is a region of extremes where effortlessly chic design meets rugged wilderness, and perpetual winter nights are followed by endless days of summer, and this cookbook proves that Scandinavian cuisine is no exception.
Founding editor of Gastronomica and the West’s leading culinary authority on the cuisines of the European North, Darra Goldstein explores the rich cultural history and culinary traditions of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. From the bold aroma of smoked arctic char to the delicate flavor of saffron buns, and from the earthy taste of chanterelle soup to the fragrant aroma of raspberry-rose petal jam, this beautifully curated cookbook features inspiring and achievable recipes that introduce home cooks to the glorious and diverse flavors of Nordic cooking.
Purchase it here.
8. Nordic Light: Lighter, Everyday Eating from a Scandinavian Kitchen
Nordic Light will take readers on a delicious Scandinavian journey towards a healthier lifestyle. Presenting a new angle to the trends in Scandinavian recipes and techniques, this cookbook shies away from the classics and instead presents lighter, cleaner, and modern recipes.
Focusing on seasonal fresh produce and vegetables, Swedish chef, food stylist, and photographer Simon Bajada prepares dishes with clever touches to make them interesting and diverse in our daily diet. Putting a Nordic twist on food from all cuisines, recipes include rye crêpes with banana and salted caramel; flourless almond tea fiber balls rolled in pollen and hemp; Icelandic flatbread served with cashew cream and caviar; flourless matcha millet and blueberry buns; kelp noodles, smoked mackerel, radish, elderflower vinaigrette; and many more.
Purchase it here.
9. The Little Swedish Kitchen
Learn how to cook the Swedish way with the Little Swedish Kitchen cookbook of over 100 delicious recipes for sunny days or cosy evenings, celebrations or nights curled up at home. Spring picnics on the archipelago; barbecues at the summer cabin; cosy autumnal suppers; and dark snowy winters filled with candlelight, gingerbread and glögg – the Swedes love to celebrate every season via the food they eat.
Written by renowned food writer Rachel Khoo who bid farewell to her Parisian kitchen and moved to Sweden in pursuit of love. Complete with stunning location and food photography, and beautiful, fuss-free recipes, this cookbook lets you in on what the Swedish call lagom; the art of not too little, not too much, but just the right amount. Explore the nation’s simple and balanced approach to cooking, sample their best-loved ingredients and discover a must-try cuisine that is about far more than just meatballs, fika and cinnamon buns.
Purchase it here.
Hope this selection of Scandinavian cookbooks can help inspire you to find delicious and healthy recipes so you can find that Scandinavian feeling in the kitchen.
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