>> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

>> Viestad: I'll leave the fish like this, smoking for about half an hour, but I must warn you.

If you do this with your tent, the tent will always smell like smoke.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hi, and welcome to "New Scandinavian Cooking" from Ringerike in eastern Norway.

I'm Andreas Viestad.

This is the land of fairy tales.

It's an area rich in folklore, where many of our national fairy tales were collected.

And in today's program, we'll visit forests that look like they're home to trolls and big farms that are fit for kings.

And I'll start off here by the edge of the forest, where I'll make barley pancakes served with blueberry preserves.

Then, we'll head deep into the forest and go fishing for local trout, and I'll smoke the fish in a camping tent.

Ringerike is home to many big farms, both modern and traditional.

I'm going to visit a modern salad producer, and I'm going to make a salad with a dressing that tastes like, well, salad.

And, finally, in the middle of the traditional agricultural landscape of Ringerike, on the historic Mo Farm, I'm going to make roast rack of lamb with peas and red cabbage.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you were living here 100, 200 years ago, you had to live off nature, and if you didn't have a big farm, you had to live off the forest.

You had to go hunting, fishing, foraging, and the forest represented a great, big resource but also a clear and present danger.

Sometimes people would go into the forest, and they just wouldn't come out.

♪♪ [ Animal howling ] ♪♪ That, combined with the sights, the sounds, and the smells of the forest, which can sometimes be quite spooky and reek of the supernatural, has been an inspiration for generations of storytellers and fairy tales.

And that, I think, is why this region is particularly rich in fairy tales.

[ Birds chirping ] This is one of my favorite places in Ringerike, where you can feel the presence of the forest, and you have an overview of the lowlands beneath.

Going hiking is really important in Norwegian culture.

It's a part of our national DNA.

And then there's an ever-returning question, "What to eat when you get there?"

And most people have packed lunches, but sometimes they actually do a little bit of cooking, as well, but it has to be very simple.

I'm going to make some pancakes with wheat and barley.

Here, I've got 2 1/2 deciliters, 1 cup of wheat, 2 1/2 deciliters, 1 cup of fine barley flour, full teaspoon of baking powder, and a good pinch of salt.

And then I just mix those dry ingredients together, and then I add some cultured milk, 2 cups, or 5 deciliters, so it's a fairly thick, or thickish batter.

Ideally, I should leave it for a few minutes and then add two eggs and stir them into the mixture.

And, of course, if you're not making a television program, you can make the batter before you go hiking and just bring the batter with you.

♪♪ Oh, that's really hot, and... but it's very nice, as well, when it's this cold.

And then I serve with preserved wild blueberries from this forest.

This is a really good pancake.

I love pancakes, but sometimes they can be just fluffy but also insignificant, as if you're eating air, but because of the barley, there's a little more texture to it, while it's still quite, quite light.

Mmm.

You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

♪♪ If you go back to the era of the fairy tales, the food was pretty robust.

It was porridge, porridge, porridge, bread, and, if you were lucky, perhaps a piece of meat, as well.

If you come to Ringerike these days, you'll find that most of agriculture is pretty innovative.

I'm here at Elstoen Farm, where they grow more than 40 different types of salad, most of them on free land.

But, Gjermund, growing salad in Norway, in the high north, sounds like a bad idea.

>> It's not a bad idea.

It's a good idea, if you ask me, because we have good soil, we have fresh water, and perfect light for growing salad.

>> Viestad: But it's quite cold.

>> It's good with temperature down to 4 degrees, 8 degrees in the night.

That helps the salad to be strong, crispy, and tasty.

So that's perfect.

>> Viestad: That's one of the recurring themes here on "New Scandinavian Cooking."

In the old days, chefs and producers really wished that they were in France or Italy, but more and more they're realizing that the fact that we are far north, that it is quite cold makes the quality of the produce quite unique and better or different flavor.

So can I taste one of your salads?

>> Yes, you can taste and cook what you want.

[ Chuckles ] >> Viestad: I'm going to use this wonderful lettuce to make a salad, and I think it's an interesting thing, if you look at salad.

We eat it a lot, but we don't care that much about the flavor of the lettuce itself.

It tends to be all about the dressing or all about what comes with it.

It's really better to use your hands than to use a knife, so to tear it into smaller pieces.

Then I'm also using this beautiful red lola salad.

One is very often left with these bits and pieces of lettuce that you tend to throw away, but this is very often where a lot of the flavor is, the kind of chewy parts and stuff.

Well, I'm going to use that as the base for my dressing.

Now, this juice is intensely flavored by the lettuce.

It almost tastes more lettuce than the lettuce itself, and I'm just going to add a little bit of dill, as well.

Look at this.

I'm going to use this salad juice instead of vinegar, instead of lemon juice.

I'm just going to add a little bit of mustard to give the dressing a bit of a kick and also to help to emulsify it.

Then I add oil.

This is rapeseed or canola oil.

And just a sprinkle of salt.

"Salad," after all, is from the Latin word for salt.

Some beautiful edible flowers... so this is cornflower, red clover, and pea flowers, and then finally some local charcuterie.

There's a rich tradition for charcuterie from this region.

And here you have it, a salad with what you can really term salad dressing and local charcuterie.

It is interesting how much lettuce can actually taste.

We think of it as the green stuff on the side, but it has its own flavor profile.

It is fresh-tasting.

It has these green flavors but also a hint of bitterness.

It's really, really nice.

You can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ Ringerike is not far away from Oslo, but in old times, it took almost a day to get here, and still, you can hike from the capital through the forest without seeing a single house along the way.

It's a perfect setting for fairy tales.

♪♪ [ Bird screeches ] ♪♪ ♪♪ My friend and colleague Erik Roed has moved to Ringerike, where he is farming, but he also has a keen interest in mythology and folklore, and, Erik, why do you think that so many of the fairy tales were collected just in this region?

>> Well, I think that this area had natural conditions for just fairy tales with the dark woods and the small lakes and the mist and everything.

>> Viestad: Yeah, and whenever you walk through them at dusk, you think that that little tree over there is a troll or something coming towards you.

>> Yeah, that's right.

And people have tremendous respect for being out in the nature at nighttime, so they all hurried home.

>> Viestad: A lot of a superstition.

Do you think there was an element of, sort of, natural religion?

>> Yeah, I think so, and I also think they kept these pieces from the natural religion as a protest against the big gap in society between the rich and the poor.

>> Viestad: Yeah, and I think that sitting around a fireplace like this, and especially cooking over an open fire, is such a unique thing, and that's a very Norwegian thing, as well, isn't it?

>> Yeah, I think so, and, you know, fishing has always been free for everybody to do, even if you were poor or you're rich, so... >> Viestad: Yeah, you didn't have to own the land in order to fish in the lake.

>> That's right.

>> Viestad: Hmm.

I'm going to smoke this trout over an open fire, then I rub the fish with salt on the outside and on the inside in the cavity here.

Then I hang it over the open fire, and in order to get a real smoky flavor, I've taken some dried wood shavings.

This is juniper and also a couple of fresh juniper branches, and to make sure that they don't just catch fire, I'm wrapping them in foil and just making some holes in the foil.

But now, of course, most of the smoke will just blow away, and very little of it will hit the fish, so we have to do something about that, as well.

And I'll leave the fish like this, smoking for about half an hour, but I must warn you.

If you do this with your tent, the tent will always smell like smoke.

It's quite common to serve salty and smoked fish or meat with sour cream, and I'm going to do precisely that, but I'm also adding two boiled potatoes that I'm just pressing through a sieve or a potato press like this, and then mixing into the sour cream.

It makes it a little bit milder, a little bit sweeter.

The fish is beautiful, and the skin has kind of yellowed because of the smoke, and it feels like it has mainly been cold-smoked, which is good.

Relatively low temperatures makes for the best smoking.

So here, you can see it's almost cooked near the tail, where it was closest to the fire, but otherwise, it's almost raw, just slightly salt-cured and smoked.

It really comes off the skin almost by itself, and a good spoon of the sour-cream-and-potato mixture, and I'll serve with powdered kale.

This is just kale that I've dried in the oven at very low temperature, and I'm just pressing it through a metal sieve.

Finally, some pickled mushrooms, and here it is.

Isn't this one of the prettiest dishes you've seen with tent-smoked fish?

Well, it is for me, at least.

Erik, do you want a taste?

>> Yes!

>> Viestad: It's a very nice, smoky, smoky flavor.

You can really feel the juniper, and I was a bit afraid that maybe the tent would catch fire, and you'd get that sort of plastic taste, but it, it does taste like, really, like the forest.

>> Yeah, it was really good.

>> Viestad: Mm.

And the mushrooms, you made the mushrooms.

They were delicious.

>> Yeah.

>> Viestad: Perhaps we should try and get in before darkness comes.

>> I never stay out when it's dark.

>> Viestad: I'm sure the trolls won't get anywhere near our tent.

[ Chuckles ] [ Animals howling ] [ Eerie music playing ] ♪♪ [ Bird squawking ] Most of the fairy tales were written down in the 19th century when Norway was a young nation.

We had basically been a Danish colony for centuries.

All recognized culture was Danish.

That was where the university was.

The Norwegian elites went to Denmark to get educated.

That was where the books were printed.

And now as an independent, or more-or-less independent nation, we were trying to figure out who are we, and we started looking inwards.

And what Asbjornsen and Moe did was they asked people, "What kind of stories do you tell each other?"

And what they found was a rich treasure of folk stories.

Some of the fairy tales have similarities to other European stories, like those collected by the Grimm Brothers or H.C. Andersen in Denmark.

Others were uniquely Norwegian.

They used the Norwegian nature, climate, and social fabric.

♪♪ Many of the fairy tales are classic rags-to-riches stories, and one of their recurring heroes is Askeladden, or the Ash Lad, and like his brothers and basically everyone he knows, he's poor.

He's from one of the small holdings in the forest.

But the Ash Lad is different.

All the others try to win the prize or win the princess by adhering to all the rules, by behaving gallantly and aristocratic and hiding their modest upbringing, but none of that for the Ash Lad.

He is lacy, cool and cunning, and he wins every time.

[ Birds chirping ] The most important Norwegian collection of fairy tales is called "Asbjornsen and Moe," collected by the two friends, Asbjornsen and Moe, and you are the great-great-great niece of Jorgen Moe, one of these principal collectors of fairy tales.

>> Yes, that's correct.

>> Viestad: And he grew up here on this farm?

>> Yes, he was growing up here.

>> Viestad: I think that in the fairy tales, there are so many kings and princesses and kingdoms, but there weren't really that many kingdoms at the time.

And isn't it possible that a great, big farm like this was considered being a bit of a kingdom at that time?

>> Yes, I think so.

>> Viestad: If there was a king with just a daughter, everyone on the small holdings would think, you know, "If I capture that, that is like winning a kingdom."

>> Yes, I think there was thinking that.

[ Chuckling ] Yes.

>> Viestad: These fairy tales are a part of our, sort of, national treasure.

How important was it, do you think, that Jorgen Moe grew up just here and not somewhere else?

>> I think it was very important for him that he was growing up here, and he was told these fairy tales from he was a very little boy, and yeah.

>> Viestad: So those stories that we know today, they were told around the fireplace at night.

>> Yes, they were.

They didn't have so many things to do, so yes, they were sitting there and telling stories.

>> Viestad: That was the entertainment.

That was the television of the time.

>> Yes, it was.

Yes.

>> Viestad: The farming operation here on the farm is quite limited, but Gjermund grows some lovely cabbage just over there, and they still have some sheep and lamb, and I'm going to make rack of lamb, which is a beautiful cut.

It's quite tender near the middle, and it's got a little fatty flap on the outside, which makes it a little bit more hardy.

You can expose it to quite high heat without the interior drying up.

I'm just going to add a bit of salt.

What I think is best when it comes to rack of lamb is to sear it in the pan first and then finishing it off in an oven that's not too hot.

But first, I'm going to add a little bit of flavor of thyme and mushrooms.

But in order to make them adhere and in order to add a little bit of sweetness, I'm just brushing the meat with some honey, as well.

The thyme is really at its best when it's at the end of the season and is just so incredibly aromatic.

This is dried chanterelle mushroom.

You can also use dried porcini.

And then I bake the meat in the oven at 150 centigrade, 300 Fahrenheit, for about 25 minutes.

The temperature should not rise above 65 degrees Celsius, or 150 Fahrenheit.

I'm going to serve the lamb with local peas, and these peas have a peculiar history.

Peas have been grown in Norway for at least a thousand years, but the last century or so, one has started to grow bigger peas, more uniform peas that give really high yields, and something has been lost while we lost these old heirloom and heritage varietals.

But then a couple of decades ago on a farm not far from here, they found a bag of dried peas, and they just started growing them, and they found that it was this old varietal that had been grown here for centuries.

And now it's a local specialty, much-loved, and as you see, they're quite small, and they all look a little different.

So it's a cultured plant that has kept more of nature.

I've soaked them in water overnight, and you see they come out as beautiful green, some a little whitish, some a little darker and browner.

So I just pour off the water, and I boil it with a couple of bay leaves, and then I just let it simmer for 15 to 20 minutes until the peas are softened.

Now the peas are done.

I think that they're at their best when they're... they're soft enough so they don't have a hard core in the middle, but still that they're a little bit chewy.

They don't totally disintegrate, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to halfway mash them, keep some of them whole and some of them mashed.

When these peas are quite mushy, I'm adding the whole peas and then just adding a bit of butter and stirring it into the mixture.

Mmm.

This has got this deep, lovely pea flavor, quite old-fashioned.

I love it, but I also want a hint of freshness, therefore I'm juicing some whole green sugar snap peas.

Mmm.

And it tastes even more of peas.

It tastes like a millennium of agricultural history of what has been grown here.

It also has that freshness of a pea that was just picked this morning, and I'm going to serve with a simple red cabbage coleslaw.

Try and cut the cabbage into as thin slices as possible, so you need a really sharp knife.

One of the things that I find boring with a lot of coleslaws is that there's just a little bit of cabbage and a lot of mayonnaise.

It's as if they're trying to hide the cabbage.

I think it's much better to make a temperamental coleslaw, so I'm adding mustard, some oil, a sprinkle of salt, and I mix in an herb like garden cress for that extra bite.

With a real coleslaw, you must always mix at least 27 times.

Now the meat is done.

Remember that you can find all the recipes at our website, newscancook.com.

And some baked beets.

♪♪ And here it is, peas and cabbage, beets and lamb.

This is food that must have been eaten here for a thousand years.

Hi, hi.

>> Hi.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ ♪♪ >> For more of the "New Scandinavian Cooking" experience, visit our website or Facebook page.

♪♪ >> Funding for this series has been provided in part by the following... >> Up Norway, curates Norwegian travel experiences in the footsteps of "New Scandinavian Cooking."

>> ♪ No, take me home ♪ Take me home where I belong >> Vgan, the full taste of chocolate.

>> Grieg Suites.

Chocolate with apples from Norway.

♪♪ Havila Voyages.

Pure Northern.

♪♪