Customer Reviews

Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is not a perfect cookbook, by any means. Out of 19 recipes we tested, 12 gave excellent results and 7 were disappointing. That's not a very respectable ratio. But the good recipes are so startlingly good they make up for a multitude of sins. Some of my favorites are Juniper-Apple Soup (superb balance between fruit and meat flavors, especially when garnished as suggested with duck confit); Coffee-roasted Duck Breasts (a simple preparation resulting in a deceptively complex flavor); Salsify "Tagliatelle" with Smoked Salmon (a delicious and unusual dish faintly reminiscent of spaghetti al carbonara); Salmon Bundles with Orange-Fennel Broth (again a sophisticated balance of sweet-tart fruit flavors with the bass notes of seared salmon); Squab Toasts (irresistible treats in fig season); and many more. Less successful, to my palate, were the Pickled Herring Sushi-Style (harsh combination of strong flavors); Curried Cauliflower, Potato, and Sprout Salad (muddied, indistinguishable flavors); Salsify Cappuccino (no standout flavor I could discern at all); Pear and Fingerling Potato Ragout (too sweet); and Glögg-Poached Pears (not exciting enough to warrant all the work). Overall, it seems to me that this chef has a marvelous instinct when it comes to fish and meat, and creates many new flavor combinations that really work. He is less reliable with vegetable dishes and desserts, both of which tend to be excessively sweet. We cook out of this book frequently, however: if you have the patience to sift the wheat from the chaff, this book will reward you with plenty of delicious and inspirational meals.

If you have ever eaten at Aquavit in New York, you know how hard it is to resist buying this gorgeous cookbook. If the meals at the restaurant can be created to be even half as amazing at home, the book is weel worth its cost!
Luckily, they have turned out to be extremely successful in my own kitchen. And, might I add, most of them are far easier to make than they appear. I love this book and appreciate the chef's work so much that it blows my mind when I read some of the criticism in the reviews.
First of all, this book is so beautiful that I keep it in a bookshelf in the living room, not the kitchen. The pictures are so lovely but at the same time might intimidate certain readers who fear they won't be able to recreate the image. To this I have to say: "It's ok. You aren't putting the meal into a book to be published and you're not serving it to paying customers... It's allowed to look different, as long as it still tastes good." Samuelsson is a chef. The food is on a different level than that of Ina Garten, Rachel Ray or Nigella Lawson (as much as I like all of them.) Some of these recipes will take a bit more effort, but many you can make with very little effort! The soups, roast chicken, meatballs, salads, and many main courses are not as difficult as they appear.
Another gripe I've read in other reviews is that the recipes are not as much Scandinavian as they are Asian. Whoever said this knows very little about Swediesh food! As a Swede, I found all of the recipes to be based in strong Swedish tradition. But like the title says, it's the NEW Scandinavian cuisine, melded with tastes from all over the world. Ingredients like curry, have been used in Northern Europe for centuries now.
This book has brought a lot of joy to our home. The pictures and tastes make us homesick! His food is authentic and groundbreaking at once and I believe Marcus Samuelsson deserves all the praise he has received.

James Beard Award winning New York chef Marcus Samuelsson has headlined the writing of this book of his `New Scandinavian Cuisine' and the food of the restaurant of the same name `Aquavit'. This book is a coffee table foodie picture and recipe book in the same style as Eric Rippert's `Return To Cooking' and Thomas Keller's `French Laundry Cookbook'. The price is a typically high $45. The big question is whether the acoutrements attached to the recipes make it worth more than a $30 cookbook. It is also a valid question to ask if it is worth $30 as a cookbook alone.

I think the answer to the second question is a solid `Yes'. The cuisine and the recipes are interesting, inviting, and accessible to the average home cook. Samuelsson makes it clear from the subtitle of his book that he is spicing up the usual Swedish meatballs and gravlax with fusion elements. The surprise is that middle eastern spices arrived in Swedish cuisine several centuries ago through the Swedish East India Company trade between India and Stockholm.

The book has thirteen chapters, mixing conventional with unconventional recipe categories. These are:

The Raw and the Cured is preparations of uncooked salmon, herring, tuna, bass, char, cod, duck, and beef.
Bites, Snacks, and Little Plates, appetizers and hors d'oeuvres
Sandwiches, more gravlax, plus wraps and crispbread
Salads, fairly conventional root vegetables, seafood, and trendy greens. Still delish.
Soups, with mushroom consomme, yellow split pea, chicken soup, and smoked salmon
Fish and Shellfish with char, snapper, halibut, cod, monkfish, sea bass, tuna, lobster, and more salmon
Birds, Meat, and Game with recipes using coffee, Glogg, lots of mustard, and fruit
Sides with lots of Mediterranean, Korean, Central Asian, and Northern European representatives,plus lots of mustard and even more smoked salmon.
Crackers and Breads with typical Swedish flatbread, potato mustard seed bread, and bread with blueberries.
Jams, Salsas, and Chutneys with mustard, berries, horseradish, and mangos
Desserts with lots of unusual berries and candied beets, citrus, and ginger.
Drinks with Aquavit, berrry liqueur, and glogg (a wine, spice, fruit, and sugar holiday drink)

Some of the most interesting recipes are for Crispy Salmon Skin, Slow Roasted Turkey Wings, Tuna Burger with Cabbage Tzatziki, Salsify Cappuccino, Seared Tuna and Sfcallops with Soy Beurre Blanc, Prune-Stuffed Rack of Lamb, Crispy Duck (breasts) with glogg sauce, Carrot Parsnip cake. One of the most unusual pantry items in the book is Berbere, a hot Ethopian spice mix similar to Middle Eastern and Indian mixes. Other unusual ingredients are berries which appear to be exclusive to Scandinavia. Fortunately, few recipes include these berries.

The very best part of the recipes, as it always is in book of this type, are the chef author's notes and comments regarding how the dish came about. The value of this text is what makes the difference between just another cookbook and something worth the extra bucks. The discussions of smoking are especially interesting, seeing how it is done outside the world of the great American barbecue. One comment is especially interesting in showing how Samuelsson used smoking farm raised fish to simply reproduce some of the gamy flavor found in wild fish.

I generally feel that a fusion cuisine must do just a little more than a purely ethnic cuisine to prove itself. Ethnic cuisines such as Italian, Indian, Thai, Japanese, and French have stood the test of time. A particular interpretation of Gnocchi may be a little off, but the dish is generally very reliably tasty and satisfying. Samuelsson has two things which more than outweigh this innate disadvantage. First, just like in Venetian cuisine, much of the fusion of diverse cultural influences was done for him three centuries ago by the trade with India and the middle east. Second, Scandinavian cuisine is not well known to American tastes outside the north central plains states. Thus, his successes will be more interesting than an Italian / Thai fusion dish.

Like many books of this type, it is as much a creation of a team as it is by a single person. The copyrite page gives credits to a book designer, a food stylist, a prop stylist, and a team of photographers, who happen to be the same pair of photographers who did Eric Rippert's `A Return to Cooking'. All this artistic talent has paid off, as the photography is almost as luscious as the food and they avoided some of the design errors of Ripert's book. However, the photographs of the completed dishes do not always match the recipe. I found at least two cases where the food in the picture was prepared using a different set of directions than those given in the recipe, and, the method in the picture was clearly better for both presentation and logical cooking. I will not say there would be a difference in flavor and I'm sure the intent was to write out the easier method for the home cook, but it did spoil my appreciation of the book just a smidge.

Overall, this is a very well done book of it's type and well worth the money to acquire the recipes, the comments, and the much better than average food styling and photography. I learned from it.

If you've ever eaten at Aquavit, then you know what to expect from this world class chef's first cookbook. It's loaded with wonderful recipes reflecting Marcus Samulesson's multi-cultural
backgroud and it's beautiful book to look at. While there are many classic Swedish dishes in this book, Marcus also shows us his creative approach to Scandinavian cooking. As a novice chef, I found the the recipes informative and easy to understand. I also liked the fact that many of the recipes had variations and included some background information or cultural history. And, just as you might expect from a restaurant named Aquavit, there's a nice selection of aquavit recipes in the drink section. This is now my favorite cookbook.

What I like most about this book is that I can prepare sophisticated meals with it without committing my entire day to the menu. I have the French Laundry cookbook, for example, yet I don't use it because of the enormous time commitment required by most recipes. Although none of the recipes in Samuelsson's book are meals-in-thirty-minutes, I can actually prepare them in a reasonable amount of time but have the kind of entree that I would often order in a restaurant. The outcome so far has always been wonderful and impressive.

I agree with other reviewers that the recipes in this book are more Asian fusion than Scandinavian, especially with such ingredients as rice wine vinegar, miso, and cardamom pods. Still, the recipes are fantastic, especially the seafood recipes. This book is a must for anyone who enjoys modern California and Asian style cuisine.

When Aquavit in Minneapolis closed, it was a sad sad day. However, this book allows one to remember what a great restaurant it was and still is.

This cookbook is honestly the best I have purchased ever. Being a 28 year old female that doesn't cook often, and has a taste for more daring food, this cookbook is the perfect blend, just like every recipe in it. The recipes take a fair amount of time to make, but the items do not cost that much. I have been pleased with every recipe made from this book. A must have.

Having become interested in northern european food of late, I decided to buy this book on a whim. Of my cookbook collection, which is a reasonable size, I rate this book in the top 5. Comparable to both of Thomas Keller's, this book combines inspirational recipes with different ideas about flavour and beautiful food photography. I read it 5 times over in the 2 days after I recieved it. I would recommend it to anyone who is a serious reader of culinary works and a great place for those new to collecting cookbooks to start.

I tried the recipes for My Grandmother's Chicken Soup, Dill-crusted Artic Char with Pinot Noir Sauce, and Corn Mashed Potatoes. All had major flaws in them: The chicken soup not only did not match the picture (which shows hunks of chicken, lemon grass, fresh thyme, and what look like tomatoes, none of which appear in the recipe) and gave no directions for a major ingredient (garam masala). The finished product was bland (I included the garam masala in the roasting step), but usable. The artic char was completely overwhelmed by the sauce, although the seared skin and potato layer (way to much dill, though) was a good idea. Finally, the potato dish turned into soup when I added even less than the specified half of the cooking liquid; I remedied this by cooking the mixture (not called for in the recipe) which, after all, did contain two raw egg yolks at that point, until it thickened up to a reasonable consistency. The product was quite good, and the corn is a nice addition to this simple accompaniment. In summary, the ideas in this cookbook are intriguing, and I will continue to experiment with them, but a lot more kitchen testing of the printed recipes was needed before releasing this beautiful, but expensive and inaccurate cookbook.

This book is a delight to read, and the photographs are marvelous. The recipes are excellent and have provided inspiration for exploring my cultural heritage in a delicious and healthy way. I particularly appreciate the emphasis on fish and seafood.

1. This is a book for serious foodies that cook. You need some knowledge of technique and you must enjoy the process of cooking. Otherwise, the recipes are going to me too time-consuming.

2. The recipes are inspired by Swedish cuisine rather than being identifiably Swedish. We get a lot of ingredients often used in Sweden, e.g. salmon, dill. Some recipes are really Swedish, e.g. gravad lax, meatballs, but most are not. There are loads of recipes with ingredients not at all seen in Sweden, e.g. kimchi, pine nuts, tuna. So if you want a better understanding of Swedish (or Scandinavian) cuisine this book is not at all going to deliver.

3. The food however, is very tasty. I would say that 50% of the dishes are solidly Northern European (cooking method, ingredients) and the rest is some kind of fusion dishes (typically with one or two ingredients from outside this region).

4. Another reviewer said that the chef was from Ethiopia. While genetically correct, he has lived in an upper-middle class Swedish family since he was three years old. So don't except any African touch. This is a guy that seems as Swedish in his thinking as Ingrid Bergman.

I can recommend this book, but it is not a must-buy so four stars will do.