Historically, green salad was never a big part of Scandinavian food culture because it only grew for a few months in summer. The diversity in vegetables has also been limited and very seasonal because it was not possible a few hundred years ago to transport vegetables over long distances. But even with a challenge like that, old cookbooks and archives show that lots of different vegetables were served throughout the year – most of them locally grown.
In 1996 I founded my company, Hahnemanns Køkken. The whole concept is based around salads – not the green ones, but the vegetable salads where you make use of all vegetables, herbs and spices to create exciting ways of eating. This is the way I have enjoyed vegetables all my life. As a child I was lucky to be exposed to cooking from the whole world because of my parents’ friends and their lifestyles. I experienced how spices, rare vegetables, beans and seasonal produce came together to create whole new ways of eating that were not traditional or in any comparable to how my grandparents ate. It was an alternative, cheap and very global approach; it was also a rebellion against the Scandi nuclear family meal of meat, potatoes and gravy, every day.
So when I got the idea for my company in the late 1990s, I thought the best way to increase the amount of vegetables we should eat every day was to focus on salads. Over the years, this way of eating has evolved immensely due to a lot of wonderful cooks’ sharing of ideas. I have been so lucky to work with many of them, and they have all inspired me. Here in this chapter are some of my classic salads as well as some of my new favourites. I also recommend letting your leftover vegetables guide you.