[OKC] From NY Times: Green Cuisine in Legoland

[Miles, Karen]

Green Cuisine in Legoland


By ROGER COHEN

COPENHAGEN - Every now and again nations rebrand themselves. The process can be painstaking, as in Germany, or can occur with the sudden lurch that has turned Denmark, which never made anything more mouthwatering than a Lego set, into a culinary destination. 
Denmark was always big on design, and not just of toys. It did form rather than content. It made beautiful china, and chairs with clean lines, and pleasing tables and wine glasses, but its contribution to what is placed in or on these objects was paltry. In frosty Denmark food was about survival, little more; pickled cabbage to get through the winter months. 
Then along comes a chef with a Danish mother and Macedonian Muslim father and a Jewish wife, a young man of eclectic interests, and he starts wondering whether Scandinavia has not sold itself short, ignored its ingredients, gone for olive oil when it might have explored the oil of hazelnuts, spurned the potential of scurvy grass, looked afar when the prize was near. 
In thinking this way, René Redzepi reflected the zeitgeist. I'm not sure he did this consciously. In the late 1990s, he worked at Ferran Adrià's El Bulli in Spain, the signature restaurant of a frothy, foamy moment where boundaries, molecular or otherwise, were broken with outrageous exuberance. 
Since then, the world has closed in, with its now more than 7 billion people demanding sustenance, food prices rising, and economies battling to emerge from near-collapse. Redzepi's Noma restaurant, which relies heavily on foraging of Scandinavian forest floors and the shoreline, is an interesting avatar of an age of limited resources (even if the resources required to dine there are considerable.) 
It's no coincidence, surely, that Copenhagen is now a city that heats itself in winter largely by incinerating its own waste, and has serious plans to cut all dependence on fossil fuels by 2025, while at Noma, Redzepi talks of "trash cooking" - the use of everything that is cast away to create delicacies: deep fried fish scales crisp as chips; broths of an "umami" richness made from vegetable peels; grilled whole cods' heads yielding flesh of succulent tenderness just below the eyes. 
Nor, I think, is it a coincidence that Denmark has entered a period of dizzying gastronomic creativity at the same time as it is pioneering new green technologies. 
The theme is consistent: more from less. Necessity is a mother of invention while the illusion of plenty may be first cousin to lost opportunity: America, take note. 
Noma opened in 2003 in an old warehouse overlooking the water - part frozen when I visited - and within a year Redzepi had decided a Nordic accent was not enough. He would go all local: no eggplant, no pineapple, no ratatouille, nothing from the sun-drenched Mediterranean world (apart from some wines). The gamble was evident: The frosty north hardly seems fecund terrain. Yet last year Noma was voted the best restaurant in the world in the annual poll of serious foodies conducted by San Pellegrino, the evergreen Italian mineral water. 
Article continues at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/opinion/11iht-edcohen11.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212&pagewanted=print
 
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