The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e15 Episode Script
Documentation
Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
Support your PBS station.
The Faroe Islands, an archipelago found in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Norway.
One of the many islands is populated by a single family, whose ancestors have farmed the land for eight generations.
Almost all our income is coming from the sheep.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, it's an opportunity to document the traditions of a family deeply connected to their land.
We're about to pick northern fulmar eggs, and it's very, very steep here.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on until it's properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
This is the fourth time I've visited the Faroe Islands, which is a self-governed part of Denmark.
And I think it's really unique because the food culture here, the traditional food culture is still practiced and alive in people's everyday life.
In the North Atlantic coastal regions, the collecting of wild birds' eggs has always been very, very important.
It used to be something that people did to survive the winter because eggs, they keep pretty well.
We're standing now at the ledge above a 300-meter-high cliff above the ocean.
And we're about to pick northern fulmar eggs, and it's very, very steep here.
It's a very hazardous occupation to collect the wild birds' eggs because tumbling down there, you know, having a 200-meter drop either straight into the cold North Atlantic ocean or against some nice looking boulders below.
It will mean certain death.
This is something that, to me, seems to be very, very important for the people who lives on this island, both now and also traditionally.
When I was a child, I would come here with my father and my grandfather, who have always been picking up eggs.
Our family has been here for we're the eighth generation.
The owners before had emptied all resources and died because they fell down off the cliffs.
So the island was deserted, basically.
Deserted, so it was up for grabs.
So the story is the Faroese is the archipelago's smallest inhabited island.
It's basically a perfect natural fortress, surrounded by very, very steep cliffs.
Eva and Janus are from the original farming family on the island, brother and sister.
And they lived there Eva with her husband Jogvan Jon and their two kids.
And Janus lives there with his wife Ella and their two-year-old son.
Something that's really special here it seems to me is that all of you guys have actually moved away from here, and done something else somewhere else and then decided to move back again.
Yeah.
Because back home there are people who has never been anywhere else.
You know, they haven't decided to live that way, and that often means that they don't value, you know, those traditions and what they have.
It's a happier way of living, I think.
We think it is.
And I think that's one of the really special things with this that this is a sort of self-sustaining farm on a tiny, very isolated island populated by young people with kids that have decided that they want this lifestyle.
Mm-hmm.
To see these guys walking around like on a very leisurely stroll on these cliff sides is quite amazing.
They are so surefooted.
I think they walk with their hands in their pockets and you have these cliffs that are just dropping straight into the ocean.
I feel very, very clumsy when I'm here because I have to hold the ground.
So how does this work now? What are we going to do? When you spot a fulmar's nest, you approach and he will try to scare you off by vomiting.
Very wise thing to do is to keep a distance until he's finished.
And then you'll scare him off and then pick up the egg.
How do you know how close you could be before they vomit all over you? Well, that's the problem.
Years experience.
Okay, cool, that sounds good.
The trick to avoid being vomited at is to take up little pieces of vegetation, kind of try to throw that close to the bird to trigger their vomiting reflex.
And ultimately have the bird vomit out.
And then to scare it off so that you collect the egg.
Like the birds used to be like a trading commodity that people actually earned money from, right? Yeah, or at least they could trade to other merchandisers, yeah.
The only way that these things can survive, and, you know, have a meaning is if people still use them in their everyday life.
Because you can always decide that you want to keep things like in a museum, you want to preserve them like they've always been.
But then they die, you know, they disappear.
After one generation they're gone.
So I think that's the fantastic thing with this sort of situation on the island is that when the circumstances has changed, the way of living here has also changed.
It has adapted, but the culture is still alive.
And people are often talk about the history connected to the place.
But, for us, for me anyhow, it's make new culture as well as we are holding the old culture alive.
Yeah, you don't want to dwell on the old history.
Yeah, yeah.
Because then you're just stagnant.
A long time ago this subsistence of the people living on the islands was based more or less only on birds.
Today, it's kind of the other way around.
The collecting of birds' eggs and hunting of sea birds is something that the family does mainly to keep the tradition alive and to feed themselves a little bit in the summer.
Whilst mutton, which used to be important only to produce meat for the population of the island has been the general source of income for the family.
This room is, to me, something very special because, you know, as far as I know this is pretty unique to the Faroe Islands.
Yeah, this is a building which we use for wind drying the meat.
So in Faroese it's called hjallur.
And how long has this been hanging? This is six, seven months.
And you can eat it now, but it is better in two months maybe.
So to me, this particular method of preserving meat is very, very fascinating.
Because you find these saltless sort of preserving methods only the very sort of outskirts of the Nordic countries.
And this might even seem kind of counterintuitive because we're surrounded by seawater, but because the temperature in the summer here is not warm enough to actually evaporate water efficiently in salterns, salt was a very, very expensive commodity until perhaps 100 years ago, when all of these traditions were already shaped.
You can have a taste if you want to.
I'd love to.
This is from the lamb.
And I usually take first layer off because it's almost just fat.
That's a beautiful color.
Yeah, really nice color.
It's colored almost like a very good Spanish cured ham.
And of course you're welcome to have a slice.
You want me to cut it? Yeah, yeah.
As Swedish, I'm used to salt-cure charcuterie.
Like a lot of dried meat and dried fish and stuff, but it's all been salted.
And in this one, because of the lack of salt, to me it smells like something you should not put in your mouth.
It really does, you know.
And I've tried this before, so I know that it actually tastes really, really good in the end.
It tastes of bleu cheese, and meat and grass, and it tastes like it smells on this island, basically.
And it tastes almost the same as it smells on the island, which is fascinating to me.
You know, that sort of dark, omega-3-rich kind of meatiness that you only find in animals that had only grass in their diet.
So there is something about the island which is really special.
It's located so far north, but yet it's almost impossibly lush.
Because the gulf stream pretty much passes just by these islands.
And if you look out across the sea here, you can see how quickly the ocean moves.
It's like looking onto a very fast-moving river, but in the middle of kind of normal ocean.
We are very far north now, and without the gulf stream, this place would be probably covered in winter most time of the year.
If you look at these, so these are sorrel leaves.
But they're almost kind of unnaturally green and sort of lush and thick.
And this is a result of all the birds' manure that drops down from the cliffs, making the ground here extremely fertile.
The birds are really like the key to these islands being inhabited today because without those, these would just be like stony lava rocks thrown out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Yeah, so I found our nests with the fulmar.
And I think you should have a go, grab the egg.
It's just down below us.
I can just barely see his head.
Okay, so I'm going to climb down there and try to get the egg then.
Yeah.
So I think it's just around here, this corner.
If I remember right.
Yeah, this is the spot.
And the trick is to take some of the grass or Actually we use it to kind of throw it against the bird before you loot it? Yeah, that usually scares him off.
Sometimes it doesn't, then you have to get close and personal.
Good success.
Very good.
So now it's just grab the egg.
You have to pull yourself up.
Very good.
My first northern fulmar egg.
Still same temperature as the bird's the inside of a bird.
This was probably lied or laid an egg like today or yesterday.
It's very, very fresh.
I'm really looking forward to cooking this.
To have the fresh eggs, it's a very special thing.
It's something you do once a year, right? Yeah.
And when you go out like we did yesterday, I think I at least realized how valuable these eggs must've been once upon a time because people must've put so much effort and also risk into getting them because it is a dangerous thing to walk around on these cliff edges just to pick these eggs.
Yeah.
It's also something really special when you're out close to where food comes from, regardless if it's in the wild nature or if it's in a barn or something.
Like when you get that special connection, like yesterday, you know, with the fantastic views and all of the impressions you get from, you know, everything you get from the view to the fear of falling down the cliff to the smell of the egg when you pick it up and you smell it straight from the nest.
I have like even if they don't smell that good, I always like the smell.
I remember the good days when we have collected them.
And how long are these going to cook now? 12 minutes.
A lot of the traditional food in the Nordic countries actually contains a lot of seasoning that you wouldn't expect to find there, like curry powder, for example is very, very popular.
And there's a lot of ginger, a lot of black pepper, a lot of allspice.
Yeah.
And I think that's probably because the people of the Nordics have always been travelers.
From the Vikings.
From the Vikings, yeah.
To the East India traders and all those people, you know.
Bringing these flavors back to the Nordic region.
Yeah, yeah, I often thought about it.
Can I peel one? Yeah, go ahead.
They're pretty large, huh? Yeah.
And the white is also extraordinarily firm.
Yeah.
It doesn't feel at all like the egg from a hen or a duck or something like that.
It's almost like jelly candy like in the texture when you squeeze it.
Yeah, and that is quite typical for sea birds' egg.
It is? Yeah.
This is beautiful.
Most foods are designed for sort of immediate consumption, which means that if people stopped practicing the traditional ways of doing them, after one generation, all the primary knowledge about how to do something is gone.
And after two generations, also the secondary knowledge, basically that people have seen someone else do it, that's also gone.
So we often think that it's interesting when elderly people from this island tell about some old tradition with food or with work.
It's fun to try it out.
Because maybe later on you can combine that old theory with something new, smarter.
Exactly.
And you don't want to lose that connection.
In this place we are so few, it's just one string of history.
And it's so easily cut.
Yeah.
After the third generation, which is not that long, it's just perhaps, I don't know, 70 or 80 years.
Everything that's left is written or otherwise recorded knowledge, and that's not the same as practiced knowledge.
Because even if you read a recipe you can never actually know how something is supposed to taste by doing so.
So this is the raest that we saw earlier hanging out in the hjallur.
Yeah, right.
So this one here, can you tell me a bit more about this because this is something that I've never seen it anywhere else.
To me this is very unique to the Faroe Islands.
This is the colon of the sheep, it has of course been washed well and then it's filled up with different kind of meat of the sheep too.
And then it has been hanging in the hjallur.
After three or four weeks it's raest and ready to eat.
Okay, and what's these called in Faroese? We call this skerpikjøt.
Skerpikjøt, okay.
So this is the first traditional cured Faroese meat that is done for the new season, something like that.
Yeah, yeah, so that's something special for us.
And why is it that you have to wash it before you cook them? It's just to make sure that it's really clean because it has been hanging in the hjallur.
There's a little bit of green mold and a little bit of other stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah.
These are all different back parts of the mutton, right? Yeah, this is from one sheep.
You can smell it, it's stronger than Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It really comes out that way when you're wetting it, when you're washing it.
And like will you add anything else to the cooking liquid or is it just water? I put some salt in it and after one half hour or so I will take the kohlrabi and put them in too.
Some kohlrabi.
Yeah.
It seems to me that the sheep are something that's really, really important here.
You can say almost all of our income is coming from the sheep.
Because we are selling the meat and tanning the skins.
And also we don't cut them.
Yeah.
I just got told off.
Show me how to cut them.
Just in four pieces.
In four pieces, okay.
I made it too small.
And also because we almost eat sheep every day.
Yeah, but it didn't used to be.
Like you didn't used to sell the sheeps, right? In the older days we had about the same number of sheep, but there were more people on the farm, more workers.
So of course instead of selling the meat we ate it ourselves.
Yeah.
It smells fantastic.
Very strong and almost gamey, animal character coming up there.
And then let it cook for a half an hour or so.
And then the vegetables are done, the dish is done.
Yes.
Wow, that smells so intense.
Yeah, yeah.
It smells of like warm bleu cheese, gamey, mutton meat and the rutabaga has completely changed now from being like tough and hard and like a real winter vegetable.
It now has this color of a mango and it's just glistening with the lamb's fat.
And it really has this sort of sweetly aromatic smell coming off it.
I'm really looking forward to trying this.
Yeah? The one thing that I find sets the Faroe Island as a nation apart from most other places where I've been is that there is a very clear policy in place that the traditions and culture of the sparsely populated outer regions should be supported, you know.
So that the people living there can stay there and bring the really important pieces of information with them into the future.
It's extremely inspiring because they are kind of a living proof that old traditions and cultures and practices can co-exist with a fully modern Nordic lifestyle.
Support your PBS station.
The Faroe Islands, an archipelago found in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Norway.
One of the many islands is populated by a single family, whose ancestors have farmed the land for eight generations.
Almost all our income is coming from the sheep.
For chef Magnus Nilsson, it's an opportunity to document the traditions of a family deeply connected to their land.
We're about to pick northern fulmar eggs, and it's very, very steep here.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
Having some limitations can be very good.
Three minutes until the scallop goes on until it's properly hot.
You feel when a dish really sings to you.
This is the fourth time I've visited the Faroe Islands, which is a self-governed part of Denmark.
And I think it's really unique because the food culture here, the traditional food culture is still practiced and alive in people's everyday life.
In the North Atlantic coastal regions, the collecting of wild birds' eggs has always been very, very important.
It used to be something that people did to survive the winter because eggs, they keep pretty well.
We're standing now at the ledge above a 300-meter-high cliff above the ocean.
And we're about to pick northern fulmar eggs, and it's very, very steep here.
It's a very hazardous occupation to collect the wild birds' eggs because tumbling down there, you know, having a 200-meter drop either straight into the cold North Atlantic ocean or against some nice looking boulders below.
It will mean certain death.
This is something that, to me, seems to be very, very important for the people who lives on this island, both now and also traditionally.
When I was a child, I would come here with my father and my grandfather, who have always been picking up eggs.
Our family has been here for we're the eighth generation.
The owners before had emptied all resources and died because they fell down off the cliffs.
So the island was deserted, basically.
Deserted, so it was up for grabs.
So the story is the Faroese is the archipelago's smallest inhabited island.
It's basically a perfect natural fortress, surrounded by very, very steep cliffs.
Eva and Janus are from the original farming family on the island, brother and sister.
And they lived there Eva with her husband Jogvan Jon and their two kids.
And Janus lives there with his wife Ella and their two-year-old son.
Something that's really special here it seems to me is that all of you guys have actually moved away from here, and done something else somewhere else and then decided to move back again.
Yeah.
Because back home there are people who has never been anywhere else.
You know, they haven't decided to live that way, and that often means that they don't value, you know, those traditions and what they have.
It's a happier way of living, I think.
We think it is.
And I think that's one of the really special things with this that this is a sort of self-sustaining farm on a tiny, very isolated island populated by young people with kids that have decided that they want this lifestyle.
Mm-hmm.
To see these guys walking around like on a very leisurely stroll on these cliff sides is quite amazing.
They are so surefooted.
I think they walk with their hands in their pockets and you have these cliffs that are just dropping straight into the ocean.
I feel very, very clumsy when I'm here because I have to hold the ground.
So how does this work now? What are we going to do? When you spot a fulmar's nest, you approach and he will try to scare you off by vomiting.
Very wise thing to do is to keep a distance until he's finished.
And then you'll scare him off and then pick up the egg.
How do you know how close you could be before they vomit all over you? Well, that's the problem.
Years experience.
Okay, cool, that sounds good.
The trick to avoid being vomited at is to take up little pieces of vegetation, kind of try to throw that close to the bird to trigger their vomiting reflex.
And ultimately have the bird vomit out.
And then to scare it off so that you collect the egg.
Like the birds used to be like a trading commodity that people actually earned money from, right? Yeah, or at least they could trade to other merchandisers, yeah.
The only way that these things can survive, and, you know, have a meaning is if people still use them in their everyday life.
Because you can always decide that you want to keep things like in a museum, you want to preserve them like they've always been.
But then they die, you know, they disappear.
After one generation they're gone.
So I think that's the fantastic thing with this sort of situation on the island is that when the circumstances has changed, the way of living here has also changed.
It has adapted, but the culture is still alive.
And people are often talk about the history connected to the place.
But, for us, for me anyhow, it's make new culture as well as we are holding the old culture alive.
Yeah, you don't want to dwell on the old history.
Yeah, yeah.
Because then you're just stagnant.
A long time ago this subsistence of the people living on the islands was based more or less only on birds.
Today, it's kind of the other way around.
The collecting of birds' eggs and hunting of sea birds is something that the family does mainly to keep the tradition alive and to feed themselves a little bit in the summer.
Whilst mutton, which used to be important only to produce meat for the population of the island has been the general source of income for the family.
This room is, to me, something very special because, you know, as far as I know this is pretty unique to the Faroe Islands.
Yeah, this is a building which we use for wind drying the meat.
So in Faroese it's called hjallur.
And how long has this been hanging? This is six, seven months.
And you can eat it now, but it is better in two months maybe.
So to me, this particular method of preserving meat is very, very fascinating.
Because you find these saltless sort of preserving methods only the very sort of outskirts of the Nordic countries.
And this might even seem kind of counterintuitive because we're surrounded by seawater, but because the temperature in the summer here is not warm enough to actually evaporate water efficiently in salterns, salt was a very, very expensive commodity until perhaps 100 years ago, when all of these traditions were already shaped.
You can have a taste if you want to.
I'd love to.
This is from the lamb.
And I usually take first layer off because it's almost just fat.
That's a beautiful color.
Yeah, really nice color.
It's colored almost like a very good Spanish cured ham.
And of course you're welcome to have a slice.
You want me to cut it? Yeah, yeah.
As Swedish, I'm used to salt-cure charcuterie.
Like a lot of dried meat and dried fish and stuff, but it's all been salted.
And in this one, because of the lack of salt, to me it smells like something you should not put in your mouth.
It really does, you know.
And I've tried this before, so I know that it actually tastes really, really good in the end.
It tastes of bleu cheese, and meat and grass, and it tastes like it smells on this island, basically.
And it tastes almost the same as it smells on the island, which is fascinating to me.
You know, that sort of dark, omega-3-rich kind of meatiness that you only find in animals that had only grass in their diet.
So there is something about the island which is really special.
It's located so far north, but yet it's almost impossibly lush.
Because the gulf stream pretty much passes just by these islands.
And if you look out across the sea here, you can see how quickly the ocean moves.
It's like looking onto a very fast-moving river, but in the middle of kind of normal ocean.
We are very far north now, and without the gulf stream, this place would be probably covered in winter most time of the year.
If you look at these, so these are sorrel leaves.
But they're almost kind of unnaturally green and sort of lush and thick.
And this is a result of all the birds' manure that drops down from the cliffs, making the ground here extremely fertile.
The birds are really like the key to these islands being inhabited today because without those, these would just be like stony lava rocks thrown out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Yeah, so I found our nests with the fulmar.
And I think you should have a go, grab the egg.
It's just down below us.
I can just barely see his head.
Okay, so I'm going to climb down there and try to get the egg then.
Yeah.
So I think it's just around here, this corner.
If I remember right.
Yeah, this is the spot.
And the trick is to take some of the grass or Actually we use it to kind of throw it against the bird before you loot it? Yeah, that usually scares him off.
Sometimes it doesn't, then you have to get close and personal.
Good success.
Very good.
So now it's just grab the egg.
You have to pull yourself up.
Very good.
My first northern fulmar egg.
Still same temperature as the bird's the inside of a bird.
This was probably lied or laid an egg like today or yesterday.
It's very, very fresh.
I'm really looking forward to cooking this.
To have the fresh eggs, it's a very special thing.
It's something you do once a year, right? Yeah.
And when you go out like we did yesterday, I think I at least realized how valuable these eggs must've been once upon a time because people must've put so much effort and also risk into getting them because it is a dangerous thing to walk around on these cliff edges just to pick these eggs.
Yeah.
It's also something really special when you're out close to where food comes from, regardless if it's in the wild nature or if it's in a barn or something.
Like when you get that special connection, like yesterday, you know, with the fantastic views and all of the impressions you get from, you know, everything you get from the view to the fear of falling down the cliff to the smell of the egg when you pick it up and you smell it straight from the nest.
I have like even if they don't smell that good, I always like the smell.
I remember the good days when we have collected them.
And how long are these going to cook now? 12 minutes.
A lot of the traditional food in the Nordic countries actually contains a lot of seasoning that you wouldn't expect to find there, like curry powder, for example is very, very popular.
And there's a lot of ginger, a lot of black pepper, a lot of allspice.
Yeah.
And I think that's probably because the people of the Nordics have always been travelers.
From the Vikings.
From the Vikings, yeah.
To the East India traders and all those people, you know.
Bringing these flavors back to the Nordic region.
Yeah, yeah, I often thought about it.
Can I peel one? Yeah, go ahead.
They're pretty large, huh? Yeah.
And the white is also extraordinarily firm.
Yeah.
It doesn't feel at all like the egg from a hen or a duck or something like that.
It's almost like jelly candy like in the texture when you squeeze it.
Yeah, and that is quite typical for sea birds' egg.
It is? Yeah.
This is beautiful.
Most foods are designed for sort of immediate consumption, which means that if people stopped practicing the traditional ways of doing them, after one generation, all the primary knowledge about how to do something is gone.
And after two generations, also the secondary knowledge, basically that people have seen someone else do it, that's also gone.
So we often think that it's interesting when elderly people from this island tell about some old tradition with food or with work.
It's fun to try it out.
Because maybe later on you can combine that old theory with something new, smarter.
Exactly.
And you don't want to lose that connection.
In this place we are so few, it's just one string of history.
And it's so easily cut.
Yeah.
After the third generation, which is not that long, it's just perhaps, I don't know, 70 or 80 years.
Everything that's left is written or otherwise recorded knowledge, and that's not the same as practiced knowledge.
Because even if you read a recipe you can never actually know how something is supposed to taste by doing so.
So this is the raest that we saw earlier hanging out in the hjallur.
Yeah, right.
So this one here, can you tell me a bit more about this because this is something that I've never seen it anywhere else.
To me this is very unique to the Faroe Islands.
This is the colon of the sheep, it has of course been washed well and then it's filled up with different kind of meat of the sheep too.
And then it has been hanging in the hjallur.
After three or four weeks it's raest and ready to eat.
Okay, and what's these called in Faroese? We call this skerpikjøt.
Skerpikjøt, okay.
So this is the first traditional cured Faroese meat that is done for the new season, something like that.
Yeah, yeah, so that's something special for us.
And why is it that you have to wash it before you cook them? It's just to make sure that it's really clean because it has been hanging in the hjallur.
There's a little bit of green mold and a little bit of other stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah.
These are all different back parts of the mutton, right? Yeah, this is from one sheep.
You can smell it, it's stronger than Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It really comes out that way when you're wetting it, when you're washing it.
And like will you add anything else to the cooking liquid or is it just water? I put some salt in it and after one half hour or so I will take the kohlrabi and put them in too.
Some kohlrabi.
Yeah.
It seems to me that the sheep are something that's really, really important here.
You can say almost all of our income is coming from the sheep.
Because we are selling the meat and tanning the skins.
And also we don't cut them.
Yeah.
I just got told off.
Show me how to cut them.
Just in four pieces.
In four pieces, okay.
I made it too small.
And also because we almost eat sheep every day.
Yeah, but it didn't used to be.
Like you didn't used to sell the sheeps, right? In the older days we had about the same number of sheep, but there were more people on the farm, more workers.
So of course instead of selling the meat we ate it ourselves.
Yeah.
It smells fantastic.
Very strong and almost gamey, animal character coming up there.
And then let it cook for a half an hour or so.
And then the vegetables are done, the dish is done.
Yes.
Wow, that smells so intense.
Yeah, yeah.
It smells of like warm bleu cheese, gamey, mutton meat and the rutabaga has completely changed now from being like tough and hard and like a real winter vegetable.
It now has this color of a mango and it's just glistening with the lamb's fat.
And it really has this sort of sweetly aromatic smell coming off it.
I'm really looking forward to trying this.
Yeah? The one thing that I find sets the Faroe Island as a nation apart from most other places where I've been is that there is a very clear policy in place that the traditions and culture of the sparsely populated outer regions should be supported, you know.
So that the people living there can stay there and bring the really important pieces of information with them into the future.
It's extremely inspiring because they are kind of a living proof that old traditions and cultures and practices can co-exist with a fully modern Nordic lifestyle.