By Charmian Christie

Inspiration often strikes where you least expect. A while ago, I attended the San Antonio New Food & Wine Festival. While I anticipated being impressed with the Texas barbeque — and I was — I never imagined one of the standout dishes of the Southern celebration would be a cold water fish –  marinated salmon — and by a Danish chef no less. But Trina Hahnemann‘s orange twist on an old standard had me asking for the recipe. Instead, she gave me a copy of The Scandinavian Cookbook.

Browsing through the photo-rich pages, I was struck by the similarities between the Nordic landscape and Canada’s. If I hadn’t read the title, I’d have guessed the shots were taken throughout Quebec, The Maritimes and Northern Ontario. Scanning the recipes, it seemed we also have similar culinary struggles — great crops, short seasons.

I caught up with Trina a while after the show. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation. The salmon recipe follows.

What are some of the culinary cliches you’re trying to overcome?
Really heavy gravies and really bad salmon. You can get really great salmon but there are also 100 different ways to make really awful salmon. Oh, and fish roe paste.

Does your book address these not-so-pleasant cliches?
I have put everything into a more modern, more tasty version. Everyone in my family is a very good cook, so I was brought up with really good food. My grandmother did very traditional food but it was good. My mother taught me to use olive oil and other things from around the world. Some of it I’ve taken into the cookbook, like garlic and olive oil, so it has a modern feel. It’s still very regional and seasonal but some of the things we’ve been taught over the past 30 years are part of it, because it’s how we cook today. This is a modern book. It’s not about history. This is about what we do right now.

How has Scandinavian food changed?
We need to eat what grows in our back yard but we need to be realistic. So, some of it will come from other places in the world. I looked at how I eat myself, more modern version of the classics. I don’t’ eat gravy, but my grandmother would never cook a meal without a gravy. I only do it for Christmas Eve.

Thirty years ago, you wouldn’t eat pasta and rice in a Scandinavian country — only boiled potatoes. Now they’re common.

And porridge. When I was a  girl and my parents were poor, we’d have porridge once a week for dinner — all kinds of different ones. And it stopped. Through the ’70s people stopped eating it as a dinner, only doing it for breakfast because it was a sign that you were poor. And now we’re so rich we can eat what we want every night. But now, due to our health and the planet, it would be a really good idea to have porridge once a week.

There are so many paradoxes when it comes to eating.

Your book is organized  month-by-month and not by season. Why?
We don’t have a lot of food that lasts a whole season. Asparagus and strawberries and new potatoes — they don’t last for 3 months. If we’re lucky we have asparagus for 5 weeks but most years it’s only 3 weeks.

Month by month also has a lot to do with the light. The light influences our style of living. Like in the winter, when it gets light at 8:30 or 9:00 and gets dark at 3:30, so you really need a stew and a soup and a cup of hot chocolate. You don’t want a salad.

I also wanted to show the difference month by month because they’re a big difference from January to March due to the light. And then you have the summer months when it doesn’t get dark until midnight. Then you want a salad and something light like a glass of white wine. The light has  big influence on our lifestyle.

The orange salmon was one of my top three dishes from the festival. How did you come up with it? Is it traditional?
That is my signature dish. It’s not traditional. I had to come up with a version for a party, and I thought why not try it with orange zest with the lemon? So, it gets a little sweetness from the orange and a little acidity from the lemon. More of a perfume. And it just worked so beautifully.

You now have a second book, The Nordic Diet. What’s its focus?
The Nordic Diet is about being healthy on wild game. It could be enormously well-received in Canada because we have the same animals. Wild boar, venison.

What cuisines do you look to for inspiration? Do you think we can learn from our Scandinavian colleagues?

Marinated Salmon

Excerpt with permission from The Scandinavian Cookbook by Trina Hahnemann. Published by Andrews McMeel 2009.

For Marinating

• 1 orange
• 1 lemon
• 1 ½ cups superfine sugar
• 10 ounces sea salt
• 1 side of salmon, filleted

For Serving

• 1 orange
• 1 lemon
• toasted bread
• green salad

If you have a zester, use it to remove the zest from the orange and lemon because it will look fresh and tasty. Alternatively, finely grate the zest from the fruit. Mix the zests with sugar and salt.

Use tweezers to remove any pin-bones from the salmon fillet. Spread the zest mixture evenly over the entire surface of the salmon, then wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 3 days.

After 3 days, take the salmon out of the refrigerator, remove the plastic wrap and wipe off the marinade with a paper towel. Wrap the salmon in clean plastic wrap and freeze it for 12 hours, then take it out of the freezer and defrost it.

Put the salmon on a board and cut it into thin slices with a very sharp knife. The traditional cutting technique starts diagonally at one corner of the salmon, and the works back towards the centre of the fillet.

To serve, remove the zest from the remaining orange and lemon and sprinkle it over the salmon. Serve with toasted bread and a green salad.

Classic Pyrex Bowls

Imagine yourself as your reader — a novice cook who finds an appealing recipe for trifle in a popular magazine. It serves the number of people you are having for a dinner party. It’s perfect for your dessert. You think.

However, when you make it, there isn’t nearly enough custard to cover the cake like in the picture, and somehow it doesn’t have the flavour you anticipate. Naturally, you think you’ve done something wrong and doubt your ability.

While an experienced cook, like my assistant and friend (who actually had this experience), would know how to adjust the recipe so the trifle wasn’t a complete disaster and waste of ingredients, the inexperience cook is at the mercy of the recipe.

Writing correct recipes is hard work and testing them well is essential. When a recipe is published and put into the hands of someone who will prepare it, the procedure is like teacher to student. When a cook follows clear instructions carefully, even a novice cook can get perfect results.

Creating interesting flavour combinations with new ingredients is exciting, but let’s have them work.

Experienced cooks take a lot for granted and relaying this information can’t always be done by memory. Here are four simple tips for testing to perfection:

• Write out the recipe as completely as possible and have the worksheet in front of you as you proceed, making notes and corrections in red.
• Always test a complete recipe, not just a portion of it.
• Use a timer at each stage of cooking, beating, etc. instead of relying on memory or guesswork.
• Have others help check for taste and texture if possible.

With a little care and attention, your recipes will produce solid results and you’ll earn the trust of your readers.

Photo © House of Sims. Published under a Creative Commons License.