It's amazing for me to think that it was 2008, the year when I lived in Sweden, when Magnus Nilsson was getting his little restaurant in the North of Sweden off the ground. That so much has changed since then, not just for me, but for the entire idea of Swedish food.

Perhaps it is because Swedish is a small country, that a relatively small food movement can have an impact the way it has there. Back when I moved there, traditional Swedish food was considered an austere thing fit only for pensioners eating brown bland things while staring off into the dark Nordic rain. As Jonathan Gold, a food critic I otherwise respect very much, said in a recent interview:

JG: Look at Europe, for example. You have the land of plenty—in the low country, plenty of meat and cheese—it’s the cuisine of abundance, and it’s boring. Guys like [René] Redzepi are making huge inroads in Nordic cuisine, but the cuisine of southern Sweden is, like, giant portions of meat and gluey gravy eaten in complete silence in ten minutes.

But how wrong! And unfair!

First, Sweden has a long tough history, one of poverty and famine. In my archeology seminar there, we saw the remains of peasant houses, built before the potato arrived there, with huge cellars for turnips and rutabagas. The people's bones were gnarled from malnutrition, their whole lives surrounded by nutritious game that they were forbidden to kill, as it belonged to the king. Many traditional Swedish foods are just scrap meat extended with scraps of bread bread or potato starch. Many traditional sausages, and the famous meatballs, are often more bread than meat. 

But there are gems in Swedish cuisine, though most often they have not been available to the average visitor. Husmanskost, the traditional Swedish food, is hard to find in a restaurant. There isn't much of a culture of eating out, it is something special, and until recently, nice restaurants were completely dominated by French and other foreign styles of cooking. To a visitor, the experience of Swedish cuisine, which is characterized by foraging and cooking at home, was largely very remote. IKEA's food, which while satisfying on a long shopping trip, is a bland caricature made with industrial crud livened up with a dash of real lingonberries adulterated with sugar. It hasn't done much to enlighten. 

And then there is the fact that a lot of it relies on ingredients that are not going to show up in Ikea anytime soon.

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time. Swedish dairy is the best I've ever tasted, and yes, I've been to Switzerland. Herbicides are forbidden in woods, so foraging for plants like mushrooms and berries is widespread. It is legal to serve hunted meat in restaurants. And the flavors that have been alienating to many foreigners in the past, the funky fermented ones, are now fairly trendy. 

When I lived there, there was already another movement afoot, which was the low-carb high fat (LCHF) diet, popularized by doctors like Annika Dahlqvist. Even within a year, "old fashioned" high-fat foods were becoming easier and easier to find, a rebellion against the reign of the insipid virtueless canola oil which had wormed itself into all manner of foods. 

Living in Sweden was my chance to do something I'd always wanted, but never had the guts to do, which is to walk around forests and eat things growing there. In America this is considered insane, particularly when it comes to mushrooms. Mere children in Sweden forage for mushrooms, but the idea of me harvesting them as an adult woman who has taken mycology classes at university makes some of my more urban relatives a little upset. I was at a park earlier this year with a friend and I reached into a tree as we walked by and grabbed a handful of mulberries. 

"You are really going to eat those?" my friend said.

"Yeah, they are mulberries" I replied

"Are you really sure? I mean they could be ANYTHING!!!"

"Um, yeah, I think I'll be OK"

The comments on Reader's excellent article on Chicago Chef Iliana Regan, who is perhaps the person most similar to Magnus here are pretty telling, with many commenters dismayed at the idea that people would serve foraged food in a restaurant, even incorrectly stating that foraged food is illegal to serve. 

Reminds me of this essay on poisonous plants

Of course, it isn’t true, but the fear of wild plants runs very deep in Western civilization. While it certainly is true that people can poison themselves with wild vegetation, the fear that we attribute to plants is monstrously out of proportion with the actual danger they pose. Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse...

Our culture is spellbound and beguiled by the story of someone mistaking a poisonous plant for an edible one and dying from the error. It is a magnetic motif with a suite of admonitions that we find economically and socially useful: don’t stray too far from the beaten path; what civilization has given you is better than you realize; Nature cannot be trusted; be normal and live a predictable life of routine. These messages are compelling when a torturous death is presented as the cost of disregarding them.
 

Of course there are some wild edibles that are a bit dangerous since they resemble a few poisonous plants, but mulberries are not one of them in Illinois. With attitudes like this it is amazing the human species existed for most of its history eating wild plants every single day. I've had similar experiences discussing butchery. It if were really rocket science, we wouldn't exist. Butchering small game and deer is not difficult. 

Not only that, in America, landscapers plant sterile fruit trees so we can enjoy the blossoms without all the "inconvenience" of fruit. In the Autumn in Uppsala, an apple or a plum was a convenient snack found in nearly every roadway or park.  And since herbicides are forbidden in forests and there is a "right to roam," wild foods are accessible to all. 

My roommates thought I was strange because I really was very interested in the very old foods. To be honest, not all of them are good. The liver pate I had is only good if you stack butter on it an inch deep. It seems to be mainly flour anyway. Many of the cheeses are a bit boring. Mucous-like fermented milk known långfil might still be a hard sell even among fermented food lovers, though I find it a bit fun to eat. I'm not really crazy about falukorv, the ubiquitous fairly flavorless cheap sausage. Falukorv comes from the legacy of poverty and industrialization, in general the best, the foods that make up the Scandinavia's terroir, are from a time much longer ago, that I fell in love with when I read Sigrid Undset's novels about the Middle Age farms nestled within forests and mountains. 

“It’s good when you don’t dare do something that doesn’t seem right,” said Fru Aashild with a little laugh. “But it’s not so good if you think something isn’t right because you don’t dare do it.”- Kristin Lavransdatter
 

Magnus' work is considered by many to be modernist, and in its plating perhaps it is and the perfectionism is very classically French, but it is profoundly conservative at its core, hearkening back to those times. When I met him during his book tour at Publican here in Chicago, it was as it he had walked right out of the pages of Undset's Kristin Lavransdattar. The core ingredients would have been recognizable to the people in those books and even to the people living in Sweden before the advent of agriculture and later, Christianity. It is fitting that he starts his first chapter with a Norse legend. 

Much has been written about Noma, but Noma really is a modernist restaurant, utilizing the region's terroir to great affect, but creating very globalized concoctions. To contrast, many of the techniques and recipes in Faviken, Magnus' new cookbook, would be familiar to his great grandparents. For example, messmor, a caramelized fatty spread made from whey, or calvdans (Calf's dance), an extremely rich creme brulee of sorts made with colostrum, the first milk of a cow after birthing a calf. These are old country foods. Or even really his great^24 grandparents. For all the papers on starch granules on Neanderthal teeth, who is actually bothering to gather these foods? Wild legumes for example, how many of you have even thought of these? It's not like agricultural foods came from nowhere, there is strong evidence their ancestors were utilized in the wild seasonally in small amounts long before the first farmers. Magnus uses them in several recipes, precious morsels, hard to gather, paired with things like raw or lightly steamed sea creatures. 

There is a tendency to think of those people in that long ago past as being utilitarian creatures, only thinking of the basics of food, reproduction, and shelter. Forgetting that these peoples stretched across the world, thousands of tribes we will never know. As striking as the diversity is between different foraging people now, that is but a small fraction of what was then. It has become clear that their paintings and sculptures and possibly texture arts were finely honed and painstaking, requiring much devotion to craft. It's hard to imagine food was immune from this. Bits of yarrow and chamomile found on Neanderthal teeth, were they medicine as speculated by the archeologists or could they have been flavorings? If gathering food was so much of your life, how could flavor be something you could not consider? Could not turn into an art? These are chefs we will never know. Some puritans consider the art of food a decadence, but the delights we now enjoy on that front, are a product of millions of years of evolution, they are not trivial at all. 

Magnus is a hunter, and his restaurant features his game. Having worked in local food infrastructure for some time now, I think he also personifies the kind of chef that a farmer would love to work with, the one who doesn't just write out his menus a month in advice and call the farmer looking for 30 grass-fed tenderloins, which of course is an impossible order for a small farmer to fill, and ends up buying his items labeled "grass-fed' from unspecific farms from some food service distributor. I find a lot of these restaurants end up emphasizing toppings on burgers more than the actual meat itself, which is often fairly mediocre in flavor.  

Magnus cut ties from his food distributor and does his own butchery, buying whole animals from small farms he works closely with because he recognizes that each animal has its own what I would call micro-terroir, it's life story written into every sinew, bone, and streak of fat. I remember when my family bought our herd, some folks told me that a lot of the cows I owned were useless as meat because they were older than a year. Thankfully we started working with a more knowledgeable meat processor, AKA someone who actually likes meat for meat, like Magnus appreciating the grassy, the gamey, the earthy. The pictures of meat in Faviken look like blood oranges, a depth of ruby red that comes from an animal that has roamed the pastures and forests of Northern Sweden. Magnus explains in his book that he prefers older dairy cows because of their deeper more complex flavor which he enhances through dry aging. According to him, this meat has real marbling caused by the use of the muscles as the cow ages, interspersing it with fat, whereas corn-finished young cattle marbling "is just blubber."

Faviken is unfortunately quite remote and I didn't make it there when I last was in Sweden earlier this year, but I did eat at Frantzen/Lindeberg, which is certainly influenced by Faviken's style. One of the dishes I had was a tartare made with meat from a 7-year-old dairy cow named Stina, topped with tallow. It was a dish I certainly won't forget. I was reading a discussion online today about buying grass-fed meat from Target and using it to make tartare. It was labeled comes from "farms." Which farms? Which cows? Which butcher ground the beef? When was it ground? When I eat raw meat, these are things I like to know. These are things that affect my trust, as well as the flavor, especially given the drought this season, which causing some farmers to cull cattle that would normally be sent to a feedlot and fattened on corn. What I've learned is that cattle lines that have been breed for feedlot finishing are not the same cattle that finish well on grass, if they are finished at all. I wasn't aware until my family opened our farm that a grass-fed cow should be finished for optimal flavor and texture as well. I learned this the hard way, after one bull that we didn't finish ended up being maddeningly inconsistent in terms of flavors. Once we started finishing, the meat had better flavor in general and was more consistent. 

It is a bit strange for Magnus to have a cookbook, given how tied his work is to the very specific part of Sweden where he lives and works. But I see the Faviken Cookbook as more more a style guide to Rektún mat- "real food" in all its glorious anachronistic devotion to specific farms, specific lands, specific trees, specific places. It is easy to dismiss this as being just the style of food for a fancy restaurants, but few restaurants achieve this style to any meaningful extent, yet I met many people of varying backgrounds that manage to eat this way for every day and for every meal. Maybe not in the intricate manner of some of the recipes in the book, but in the overall approach to sourcing and appreciating food. 

Dry-aged grass-fed tartare using McEwen Farms beef with fresh sourdough and brown butter from Thurk, a pop-up restaurant I've been hosting

Louise McCready Hart: Your philosophy about food is called Rektún mat.

Magnus Nilsson: It means real food. It is something my grandfather used to say when I grew up and it has so much meaning to me.

LMH: In the US, different organizations talk about real food as in not processed, not manipulated.

MN: It's food from the surroundings, from the farm and the earth.

LMH: I like your idea for a drivers' license equivalent for meat-eaters for which the test would be raising and getting to know the animal before killing and eating it.

MN: I think that would make a huge difference.

That's always been my own aim when buying food, to really know and understand where it comes from and cultivate a relationship and knowledge in every step. And why I started Meatshare, for example, to be able to do that in a way that is actually often more affordable than buying green-washed products from a supermarket that are divorced from context. The more I buy this way, the more passionate I become about it and it's one of the reasons I've avoided turning the concept into a "startup" where I would be forced to cut corners, instead of growing slowly and learning carefully as I go. Reminds me of this blog post from a farmer:

In the past year, we have been contacted by nubile entrepreneurs who have launched websites to connect farm products to customers. Except for one or two who are owned or managed by people who understand food and farming, most of the sites are run by twenty-something foodies who don’t know the difference between a rib or riblet and have never heard of rillette, confit or other meat goodies. And they are clueless about seasonality of food, inventory control, shipping and distribution. The only thing they have going for them is decent marketing and a snazzy website. I decline their offers to sell our products because we prefer to sell directly to consumers at the farmers markets and our farm store. We want to shake the hand of the person who cooks and eats our food. We enjoy face to face discussions about recipes, cuts of meat and sharing educational tidbits such as getting the tenderloin from the pig or loin chops but not both unless it is a mutant pig...While we applaud entrepreneurs, we think that food site managers need some education. They need to learn meat cuts, the seasons in which meat is available. Ideally they need to spend some time on the farm docking lamb tails, castrating rams and dealing with livestock mauled by coyotes and neighbor dogs. Perhaps then they’ve earned the credentials to sell my leg of lamb. If they pick it up at the farmers market and ship it themselves of course!

Unfortunately, I haven't encountered many meat-related startups that don't cut corners. I can't completely blame them though. You are working within a system created by monopolies and government regulations that makes it very difficult not to if you want to generate a fast-growing nationwide business. Sometimes I wonder if there is room to care about much of anything, much less the life and death matters at the core of this, in such a system? During this election season, I mused on what it really might mean to be a conservative, to want to conserve the good in the old ways as you move forward, and how little of that I see in those politicians that call themselves conservatives, besides that which is very shallow and easy, or even profitable, for those who live for that profit to follow.

The skinny waterfalls, footpaths
wandering out of heaven, strike
the cliffside, leap, and shudder off.
Somewhere behind me
a small fire goes on flaring in the rain, in the desolate ashes.
No matter, now, whom it was built for,
it keeps its flames,
it warms
everyone who might shay into its radiance,
a tree, a lost animal, the stones,
because in the dying world it was set burning.- from Lastness by Galway Kinnell

In contrast, I can work with really small farmers and hopefully come up with methods that work on that scale. It's interesting to compare Faviken to some of the farm/restaurant collaborations I've seen here. Unfortunately, most use poultry currently in a way that is modern and I feel is unsustainable for a farm that wants to be truly self-sufficient. First, they must rely on commercial hatcheries, which many feel, quite rightly, are a source of cruelty, because they do not breed their own line of chickens. Secondly, the breed they use is the Cornish Cross, which is a type of chicken that can't really free range because it is so deformed since it has been bred for that large insipid breast meat that has unfortunately become so popular. Contrast that with the chickens Magnus uses, slow-growing dual-use hardy Brahma. 

Modern poultry farming is, with very few exceptions (at least in Scandinavia), a sad state of affairs with the fast-growing unhealthy birds deprived of the opportunity to pursue even some of their most basic instincts. Most of the animals, which are merely a tool for production of cheap meat, are no more than a few weeks old when they are slaughtered, having never set foot outside the coop in which they grew up. For some time after that experience, I didn't serve chicken or any other farmed poultry. At least not until I met Mr Duck, our poultry supplier. He is a man to whom I am very grateful for changing my views on poultry farming. For the last couple of years we have been developing our own breeding program, one that came about because of Mr Duck's sound philosophy of keeping poultry, and the fact that we couldn't find the quality we wanted any other way. Healthy, slow-growing birds, which live a happy life with plenty of outside space, good food and someone to care for them properly will produce better meat than most of what is served in restaurants...Our hens are fed a mixture of different cereals (mostly crushed barley) and kitchen scraps. They are never given anything to eat that would not be fit to serve a human. Commercial bird feed is strictly banned, as are cereals not native to our part of the world, such as soybeans and corn. We apply a very careful selective breeding program so that the birds stay the way we want them, generation after generation. Any bird that does not fully share the characteristics of our breeding stock immediately becomes part of a different stock. - Magnus

I think this book is rather useful for farmers who want to really do things in a traditional self-sufficient manner. I have it next to my set of other farming books, which includes that which inspires, as well as practical tomes. It is next to my Wendell Berry book of poetry and other volumes of farm poetry that serve to remind me and inspire me;

Like a man, the farm is headed
for the woods. the wild
is already veined in it
everywhere, its thriving.
To love these things one did not
intend to is to be a friend
to the beginning and the end.
- Wendell Berry, Work Song

I also hope it influences chefs. Even some really innovative chefs I know have set menus. And I see way too many "sustainable" restaurants that have just one set menu item, such as the now-ubiquitous natural/grass-fed burger place that typically sources from very large middleman and covers up the low-quality with all manner of elaborate toppings. They ask for products that fit their menus, rather than asking what the land and the season provides and shaping their menus for that, as Magnus and his chef friend, Sean Brock, of South Carolina. If Sean Brock came out with a cookbook, I'd definitely also have to add it to this shelf, as he has been so instrumental in bringing back old Southern foodways. 

Brock and his chef de cuisine, Travis Grimes, rewrite the menu at Husk every day, based on whatever arrives in the kitchen that morning. The food comes to the table in cast-iron pans and on carved wooden platters, the savory dishes paired with acidic sides: raw oysters and pickled ramps, rattlesnake beans with buttermilk sauce, sorghum-fried green tomatoes with goat cheese and wild peaches. "It's just a sea of plates all the time," Brock said. This is how Sunday dinner was eaten at his grandmother's house. You took a bite of biscuit, a bite of banana pepper, a bite of creamed corn, each taste enhancing the next, each ingredient given its proper attention.- True Grit, The New Yorker

An editorial in the Times today lamented that those who might be interested otherwise in "art" have devoted their energies to food, explaining "meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things." That is difficult for me to swallow, having felt upon this journey here, sorrow, anger, sadness, a deeper connection with something I felt was missing from my life for a long time, since I was a young girl in yellow boots clambering upon miles of creek land and pine forests in Georgia, some of which now is gone.

I remember once I found a bird, a woodpecker dying upon the brown pine needles, perhaps of age, or of accident. I didn't want it to die, so I brought it home in a box, hoping the next day my family could take it to the nature center. But in the morning it was gone. We buried it in a red clay ground, as we dug the soil clamored with black beetles and little pink worms, waiting there for their meals. I don't think things like this happen on the concrete playgrounds where later, as a young college student, I took my young charges to "play" beset with rules. They eat the food of death, which is all food, but do not think about death in their sterile playpens.

I remembered the bird when I was in Budapest, and by some enormous luck there was an El Greco exhibition there, paintings of radiant gloom and pathos, as if every story he portrayed was in an underground grotto only lit by pale cloudlight. The wings of angels like the wings of the birds I had known, that bird, and others I would know. Of living and dead commingled. Not all flavors I like are those of joy or delight. My favorite tea, after all, a puer'h of ancient leaves, so polarizing in its flavors of the leaves on the forest floor after many rains. There are other puer'h teas I own that taste like the bottom of the ocean. I think it makes people uncomfortable in the way that occurs when someone leaves the head or the feet on a bird served to eat. It functions as a Memento mori, all things that live must also die. For me, all these things are intertwined. 

Et in Arcadia ego- even in the idyllic world, death is there

It's also, I think, easy for those who are older to miss the facts of the days, that things are not going very well for "the lost generation" and many who would have otherwise been painters, writers, or musicians out of necessity are working in food. It is only natural that they would want to transform it into art. There is also an apocalyptic mood, a sense that the world is in decline, that is fostered in my own life by a general atmosphere of decay both in the city and in the place I grew up, where infrastructure is crumbling and housing prices have declined precipitously. I think that makes young people want to learn things that might come in need if the decline continues- butchery, hunting, growing your own food, basic survival skills if the world goes to hell.

When I was young I wandered the back fences where the honeysuckle grew. I've been many places, but never had a dessert as sweet as that I found when I pulled out the stamens. Each flower a different fragrant floral dust of sugar upon my tongue. I remembered that reading this book, I remembered fondly those days that will never be again. 

The quartet also bears the subtitle 'Under the Ancient Maple Tree'. Hovhaness remarked about this quartet: There grew a "Marvelous tree on my uncle's farm in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where I had many happy times. From under its branches were spectacular views in every direction. Later, lightning struck the tree and destroyed it. This piece is my memorial to that beautiful tree."
 

 This blog wouldn't exist if food wasn't important to me, but it amazes me how I can continue to have experiences relating to food that change my view of things. That's one of the reasons I haven't written a book. I'm just not there yet in terms of experience, even though I've made great improvements in my life and maintained them, there is still much to learn. How could I ever put the pen to the page knowing that my words would be a static representation of my views for months and even years?

Last year when I lived in New York City there was a little tiny diner on a remote corner of Long Island City, one of my favorite parts of the city. It's so close to Manhattan, but oddly desolate. Standing alone amidst the glittering lights of the city, with the roar of the highways in your ears, is a surreal Blade-runner esque experience. One that many people miss out on because of an irrational skepticism towards Queens, which has some of the best food in the city.

But M. Wells, that little diner, was special. And I ate there at exactly the right time. It's hard to explain, but it was during a time when I was trying very hard to make myself someone I wasn't for the sake of a relationship. I have an unfortunate predilection towards this whole "destiny" thing, perhaps that is just the way my mind works. It helps me craft narratives, but it also makes me try to craft my own life into a story sometimes, with signs and wonders guiding me. Doubts that don't fit the story often get ignored in the name of these destinies. 

And there were many doubts about all kinds of things in this relationship, one of the major ones was that I had to adopt a particular religion in order to go forward with it, a religion that required very regular fasting from almost all animal products. There were many beautiful things about this religion and I felt drawn to it in many ways. 

And I thought, well, I can do this. With all I knew then, compared to when I was vegan, I could make it work for me. But I was miserable. One priest told me I could try vegetarianism instead, but it didn't seem to help.

I might never know why. I was reading The Meat Fix recently, which is the story of a man who was vegan and suffered from terrible health problems which went away when he added meat to his diet. Why does this happen? There are so many potential explanations, but for me even supplementing with carnitine, taurine, b12, and DHA didn't make a difference. I was depressed all the time. I started having menstrual irregularities. My list of food sensitivities seemed to just keep growing and growing. All the sudden, for example, I was sensitive to shrimp, one of the few animal products legitimately allowed. One thing I have been proud of with my dietary experiments was that they have allowed me to travel. But here I was throwing up violently in a bag on the train to Manhattan. And missing work because my period cramps had become crippling, so painful that they brought me to tears. 

I felt more socially isolated than ever too. Why me? Why this? Why can't I just make this work like it's supposed to? Why does my body seem to rebel against me after even a week without meat? I was told to pray harder. 

FAUST. The pain of life, that haunts our narrow way,
I cannot shed with this or that attire.
Too old am I to be content with play,
Too young to live untroubled by desire.
What comfort can the shallow world bestow?
Renunciation! - Learn, man, to forgo!
This is the lasting theme of themes,
That soon or late will show its power,
The tune that lurks in all our dreams,
And the hoarse whisper of each hour

And then one day I read about M. Wells, opened by Hugue Dufour and his partner Sarah Oberatis. I found myself there almost as if in a trance, I found myself there at the counter, eating bone marrow, brain, liver, and butter...lots and lots of butter. I was eating everything I wasn't supposed to eat, dusted with gluten, cheese, and irrevocably impious in its decadence, but I felt so energized, so alive again. I continued to cheat on my destiny there, becoming more bold to live the life I really wanted to live, powered grilled cheese sandwiches layered with liver. 

At the same time, I was also reading the book Blood, Bones, and Butter, the autobiography of chef Gabrielle Hamilton. I never reviewed it here. It was so well-written, but her relationships made me intensely uncomfortable. I saw in her tense relationship, what my own could become if I continued to try to make myself into someone I really wasn't. Mired in doubt and contempt, irrevocably tied together by children.  

I gave up on my "destiny". I ended my relationship, quit my job, and moved to Chicago. I have never regretted this.

Now I am wise enough to realize that I should only be with someone who accepts me for who I am now, whether then what I might be. And now I really do feel like I'm living rather than just coughing under a constant miasma of doubt and misery. 

M. Wells tragically closed when the landlord doubled the rent. I would have felt worse about leaving Queens though if it had stayed open. But I had fallen in love with that ridiculously fatty food from Montreal. And looking up the Dufour online, I found he was once involved with a restaurant in Montreal called Au Pied Du Cochon. I made it my mission to someday eat there despite my inability to pronounce it correctly. 

I added Joe Beef to the itinerary after reading it about it in Lucky Peach, which was fortunate since Au Pied and Joe Beef are "friends" if restaurants can be friends. The staffs share ideas, friendships, and meals together.  

I ate there first, with fellow blogger Easy as Pi, one of the few dietetics students in the world who could enjoy such a meal. The thing about Joe Beef is that there is only one menu in the entire restaurant. And it is written, in French only, on a chalkboard we were facing away from. It was also really dark. So we asked our bald tattooed waiter for a recommendation. He said "no." I was a bit miffed, but just named two random things I had heard the restaurant is good at: bone marrow and horse. He said we also needed the guinea hen. OK...

It is only lately that I have been learning to appreciate meat as it really is, not the meat that most of us are used to, bland and standardized, but the meat of animals that have had varied, often long, lives. In Sweden earlier this year they had on my menu at Frantzen/Lindeberg tallow and tartare from a 7-year-old dairy cow. I thought it was intoxicating, earthy, and maybe just a bit eccentric. And then I met Magnus Nilsson, a renowned Swedish chef, on a book tour here in Chicago. His cookbook is a revelation to me, especially since I help my family with our relatively new farm where we are raising our own beef. Old cows, I thought, were not much good, except for ground beef that maybe you could turn into chili. But Magnus explains in his book that he prefers older cows because of their deeper more complex flavor which he enhances through dry aging. According to him, this meat has real marbling caused by the use of the muscles as the cow ages, interspersing it with fat, whereas corn-finished young cattle marbling "is just blubber."

Joe Beef's Bathroom Bison

I think Magnus would have loved the horse at Joe Beef. It had so much savoriness and character that it tasted much like an aged cheese. The guinea hen was also very powerful, with the dark meat tasting almost livery, amongst wild mushrooms with their own characteristic umami flavor enhanced by the gamey fat. What can I say about the bone marrow? It was perfect. We were stuffed, like the giant bison head that startles you in the bathroom. 

Breton buckwheat wheat with butter, cheese, ham, and mushrooms

The next day I ate a Breton buckwheat crepe at La Bulle au Carré and then we had coffee with the awesome people of Eating Paleo in Montreal, at secret paleo hangout The Knife/Le Couteau, which serves amazing coffee and properly-brewed tea, as well as very good "paleo" treats from Almond Butterfly. Joshua, the organizer, compared it to Bierkraft in Brooklyn, which also serves a paleo crowd despite being a beer store (my kind of paleos). 

Unfortunately I had a little too much coffee and felt like my heart was beating out of my chest when I ate my wild boar and mushroom risotto at Bistro Cocagne, which has a nice late-night tasting menu that is pretty cheap for the quality. 

The next day I knew I had to eat lightly in order to prepare for my meal at Au Pied. I ate some little treats at the Jean Talon Market, where I mostly bought things to take home. I love that Quebec has a wild food movement that is all about reflecting the local northern boreal terroir. There were a variety of places selling things like cattail shoots, birch syrup, Labrador tea, and spruce beer. I wish I had known about Les Jardins Sauvages, because I would have loved to do one of their wild food dinners. I was interested, as I always am, in local cider, but was skeptical when I found most of it was "ice cider." When I lived in Sweden, I visited a vineyard there that made ice wine, which is created from grapes left to wither on the vine in the frost, the sugars concentrate as the fruit shrivels. It wasn't far off from very very oversweet mead. Ice cider is largely made the same way, with frosted apples, but the ones I tried were really nice and dry, so I actually brought some home.

Mushrooms and ice cider 

I had a light lunch at Omnivore, a Lebanese spot that uses locally raised meats, and then a perfect afternoon tea with Japanese snacks at Maison De Thé Camellia Sinensis, a peaceful little tea house with a large variety of very good teas, as well as a nice boutique. 

It rained much of the time I was in Montreal, which I don't mind, but later that afternoon the rain broke. And as I walked to Au Pied there was a perfect double rainbow arcing between the fiery autumn leaves. And one end led right to Au Pied, where the staff joyfully gathered outside to see it. And I try very hard not to believe in destiny now, but this was hard not to notice. 

I was very lucky to be seated at the bar far end of the bar where the drinks are made. I'd heard some complaints from friends that service is bad at the tables. The service I had was excellent, from Florant, who came from the border of France and Italy. He stopped me from ordering several things, urging me to order things that were the most distinctive about the restaurant and that also wouldn't be impossible for little folk to eat. I started with the half order of the duck fat poutine, which is a signature dish there. It was good, but of course it was good, it's duck fat poutine after all. It's covered with gravy and cheese and fatty liver. The real skill was displayed in the second dish I had, which was fresh eel wrapped in pastry with potato, apple, and sage. The dish wasn't beautiful, but in all other respects it was perfect. I had their own beer, which was only so-so, but Florant gave me resinous spruce beer, which was amazing and I only regret I didn't bring any home, but I've made my own before and when spring comes and the spruce shoots are out, I'll have to make it again. Amazingly, the whole trip I was able to tolerate alcohol, even my arch-nemesis red wine, which normally gives me leg cramps. Maybe it was the sheer fattiness and richness of the food? I don't know. 

Food at Au Pied was not photogenic, but it was delicious!

It was interesting that the people there seemed pretty svelte, not much different than the people in Sweden, despite having such meaty fatty food. It is also a place where you can get non-aged raw milk cheese. If the FDA's pronouncements were true, it's amazing that Quebec isn't a wasteland of food poisoned zombies. Either way, I ate plenty of it. 

And when it came time to leave, I was sad and I hope to go back, maybe to visit Au Pied's Sugar Shack or Les Jardins Sauvages. And to see all the amazing people I met again. I also connected through Toronto and from the Porter lounge stared out at that glimmering city. I'd like to visit there some time too, and Porter seems to fly there from Chicago 17 times a day. A bonus for being a cold-loving creature is that I didn't encounter many tourists at all and none of my flights were full. 

It was an adventure, and adventure I might never have had in another less happy life. Sometimes I imagine there are parallel universes, that versions of me from them reach out, to tell me even there I would have made similar decisions. That this is why the pilot mistook me for someone for Toronto, that a man at a coffee shop there told me "hello again," that someone had checked in under my name before me at Joe Beef. But these are once again my brain trying to make a grand story out of a mundane life. The word "mundane" comes from the Latin root of "belonging to the Earth", and if my life is about that which comes from the Earth, that is the home of apples, mushrooms, wild geese, birch and all I know that is good and green, then I don't mind. 

 Over the years I've been involved in this community, I've met many many people who have seen their health improve when they eliminated wheat gluten from their diet. But I also see it as part of a worrying trend that relies all too much on self-experimentation and self-diagnosis. Often when I meet these people they are noshing on a burger without a bun at a regular restaurant or ordering a salad a restaurant like Hanna's Bretzel where gluten-free ingredients are laid side by side with non-gluten free ingredients.

If these people actually have celiac disease, this is probably not an acceptable behavior. To be clear, celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder, is an extremely serious disease. Any gluten in the diet can contribute to long-term health problems and even cancer. 

Scary stuff. Scary enough that celiacs need to seriously consider cross-contamination at places like restaurants. Fries that are fried in the same oil as breaded chicken nuggets, eggs cooked in a pan that was used to cook French toast, salad made from lettuce served with tongs used to pick up croutons, these can introduce damaging gluten into a celiac's system. So it's not acceptable to just go to a regular restaurant and order a burger with a bun and some fries. Doing so might mean subjecting yourself to chronic damage. Senza, which is the gluten-free restaurant I reviewed recently, does not allow any gluten at all in its building ever. That is the level of strictness required to achieve remission of damage in most celiacs.

It's not surprising to find that in our culture where eating out is so common, many celiacs still present with intestinal damage years after initiating a gluten-free diet. 

I've asked many of these people who eliminated gluten from their diets and saw an improvement why they do not get tested for celiac. Sometimes it's a financial issue. They feel they cannot afford the tests. Other times they are concerned because a true diagnosis by intestinal biopsy requires that they eat gluten for some time before getting the test. I'd say that a month of feeling sick is worth it in order to avoid years of chronic damage. The alternative would be to commit to a truly strict gluten-free diet and stop eating at the local Irish pub. 

Which is think is totally unnecessary and silly for those of us who are not actually celiac. There is growing evidence non-celiac wheat sensitivity exists, but none that show that trace gluten could cause the kind of damage seen in celiac. It is likely it is more similar to lactose intolerance, which is dependent on dose (few lactose intolerants can truly never tolerate any lactose ever), than an autoimmune condition like celiac. 

I'm completely against strictness when it is unnecessary. For me it absolutely is. I was able to avoid a biopsy because I did a genetic test that showed I completely lack any of the genes related to celiac. Through the FODMAPs elimination diet, I found out it was the fructans that were causing trouble for me. I do occasionally consume wheat products, primarily fermented wheat and those made with heritage grains. They are not a staple for me because I don't think they are particularly great for you (that doesn't mean they are "bad") and they require quite a bit more effort than just making a meal with fresh meat and vegetables. I will continue to eat whatever I can get away with on special occasions and when traveling unless I see conclusive science that says any gluten ever is bad for anyone. 

But if you have the genes, that doesn't mean you have celiac, it just means it's possible for you to have it and you should pursue the matter further. I created this chart once to explain it to a friend:

Yes, it's crappy to have to go through all that to get a diagnosis and it can be hard to find a doctor that cares, but I truly believe it's worth it to know. Especially since celiac is becoming more and more common. I'm not a fan of Wheat Belly, (also see Dr. Deans' review) which essentially took a blog with some interesting ideas, and I suspect the publisher said "find everything that could possibly be bad about wheat and mention it without any nuance whatsoever." You can write such a book about almost any food. It reminds me of Whitewashed, which is about milk. I'm still waiting for the book about how evil shrimp is because some people are allergic to it. 

Shrimp is Actually EVIL SEA BUGS THAT CAUSE LEAKY GUT- the book

 On that note, a professor associated with the grain industry recently published a critique of the book. There are some good points there on Davis' hyperbole, misuse of studies (not citing the follow-up that disproves his theory, irrelevant in vitro studies, studies on genetically engineered mice) and use of the same tactics that plant-based zealots use (acidification! AGES! glycemic!), but right off the bat I spotted a bunch of mistakes. One of the most obvious is that the author mentions the Joe Murray study on historical blood samples. It says "the analysis shows that 0.2% of recruits had the gene in 1950 compared with 0.9% of recent recruits." And then it goes on to say increase prevalence might be due to better identification and awareness. But that study specifically refuted that, as it was not even studying genes, it was studying antibodies. It was an important study in pointing to increased prevalence, which should surprise no one who studies autoimmune diseases, most of which have increased in prevalence. 

“This tells us that whatever has happened with celiac disease has happened since 1950,” Dr. Murray says. “This increase has affected young and old people. It suggests something has happened in a pervasive fashion from the environmental perspective.”

Dr. Murray lists several possible environmental causes of celiac disease. The “hygiene hypothesis” suggests the modern environment is so clean that the immune system has little to attack and turns on itself. Another potential culprit is the 21st century diet. Although overall wheat consumption hasn’t increased, the ways wheat is processed and eaten have changed dramatically. “Many of the processed foods we eat were not in existence 50 years ago,” Dr. Murray says. Modern wheat also differs from older strains because of hybridization. Dr. Murray’s team hopes someday to collaborate with researchers on growing archival or legacy wheat, so it can be compared to modern strains.

Murray's team also used those blood samples to show that the undiagnosed airmen were more likely to have died young, possibly as a consequence of undiagnosed celiac. Undiagnosed celiac is frankly dangerous, particularly since it takes so little gluten to cause damage. There is still an argument about whether or not gluten is bad for everyone, but we aren't going to win over the medical profession if we use hyperbole instead of saying "hey did you consider whether or not your patient with diabetes/ibs/osteoporosis/arthritis/etc. might have celiac or wheat sensitivity?" 

So if you suspect that wheat is an issue for you, I strongly recommend taking time to get a firm diagnosis so you can know if you need to be 100% gluten-free. 

There is no doubt that gluten-free options are growing. However, at least in the places that I've lived, most gluten-free options are kind of sad. They are either bundled in with "health food" options and are also whole-grain/vegan/low-fat bundles or misery or are just regular menu items made with an assortment of mediocre processed gluten-free breads and pastas. Since the main problem for me with wheat seems to be the complex carbohydrates, often these options are worse than regular food. For those with celiac, it's not exactly fair to be banished to a butter-free ghetto just because you can't have wheat. 

So I was excited to eat at Senza, which is a new gluten-free restaurant in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Except they don't want to be known as a gluten-free restaurant, just as a really good restaurant that happens to be gluten-free. The concept reminded of of a restaurant I read about in Berlin called Ma Restaurant and I expect Senza will share a Michelin Star with Ma considering the level of cuisine here. 

The lighting was not very good for taking pictures myself, but their website has some great photos like this one of the steak entree:

The cuisine, as you can see from the photos, is very modernist, but still very filling and satisfying. I ate off the A La carte menu at this visit, but I'd love to try their tasting menu some day. Everything was cooked with the utmost skill with excellent use of classical techniques. Of course my favorite classical technique, the flavoring with stocks and broths, was showcased in the prawns dish, which features a lovely savory consomme (a type of broth clarified with egg whites) made with Virginia ham. I should try this myself as I have seen it in cookbooks as a use for the hardened ends of a good ham. The scallops were perfectly seared and my halibut and arctic char dishes made it clear that the chef really does seafood very well. Each dish also features a wealth of interesting little textures and flavors. One of my favorites with a tiny little s'more on top of the chocolate ganache for dessert, served alongside a lovely little cup of creamy chicory "coffee." The scallops came with mini choucroute, which are bundles of pork wrapped with sauerkraut. 

I would probably skip the bread and pasta next time. I tried a little, but especially compared to the meats and fishes, it's just kind of clear that this isn't where the restaurant shines. I do think it's possible to do bread service that doesn't just remind you that gluten-free bread will never be that nice sour crusty french bread you miss so much. Cassava, also in Lakeview, does "bread" in the form of cheese puffs made with cassava that are really good. Also, personally, I can't tolerate high alcohol beverages like wine or cocktails very well and gluten-free beers don't agree with me, so I would love to see some ciders on the menu, especially considering that they are experiencing a bit of a revival these days.

On Saturday I paid a visit to the local wine and spirits shop Lush and there were doing a cider tasting. I tried a few really good ones, my favorite being the Eric Bordelet Poire Granit. Later I learned this was a perry, a pear cider, which I am glad I didn't know because I had only had really horrifyingly sweet perrys. But this was dry and almost buttery. I also was a huge fan of the Isategi Natural Cider, though the staff at Lush noted this was a hard sell to most people. But I love very sour barnyardy tastes. If you like gueuze or kombucha, you'll like this. And I think Senza's food would pair well with these. 

Either way, I'm glad that Senza is showcasing the fact that there are many good real naturally gluten-free foods that don't require creating elaborate mediocre substitutes. And given that trends in restaurant food are moving away from things like grain and sweet-heavy dishes and have been for some time, it was only a matter of time that such a restaurant would open. And Senza is very serious about gluten-free. They told me that there is absolutely no gluten allowed in the restaurant ever, which is a must for people with celiac disease.