Denmark is named after a bloke called Dan. Good old Dan. Your mate Dan. Dan, who always had your back. Everybody liked Dan. They liked him so much, they decided to name a whole country after him. I imagine they did it as a surprise, got him down the pub on a pretext.
Perhaps there was a Saturday-night fire-ship burial, or troll fighting. Dan walks in, and they all sing “For he’s a jolly good semi-mythical hero”, and Dan holds up his hands and says: “Oi, mates, what’s all this about?”
And someone says: “Hey, Dan! Where d’you think you live?” And he says: “You know where I live, numpty: 56 Pickled Fish Street, with your sister. And your mum on Saturdays.” And everyone laughs. “No, no. Where do you live here?” “You mean in flat, frozen north place?” “Not any more, you don’t. You live in Denmark. We named it after you, because you’re really good in a ruck and you’re everyone’s friend.” Then Dan probably got all teary and started punching people playfully, and said: “It’s lucky you didn’t get my brother Angle. Angleland would be a really stupid country.” And, substantially, that’s possibly true.
Dan and his brother Angle each had a country named after them. It’s a rather wonderful place, Denmark. Good for bikes. Very flat. And they’re modest, Danes. They have a collective dislike of conspicuous achievement — they call it Janteloven, named for a fictional Scandinavian town that had 10 social laws that boiled down to “Don’t think you’re special, or that you’re any better than the rest of us”, and included “Don’t think you can teach us anything. And don’t laugh at us”.
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This is a counterintuitive set of cohesive manners to try to run a country by. Danes have a hard time selling themselves in America, but it has worked incredibly well for Scandinavia. Janteloven grows out of a fundamental Lutheran belief in equality. So, in Copenhagen, you can never tell how successful or rich someone is by what they wear or the car they drive. Intellectually, they are very self-effacing. Snobbery, however remote, in any form, is an embarrassing faux pas that belittles you, and the obvious differential between richest and poorest is the narrowest in Europe. This has made Copenhagen the most liveable city in the world. You would have thought that extreme collective modesty would stifle enterprise and achievement, but apparently not. This is a nation with a population about the same as Scotland, and one of the highest standards of living and most comprehensive collective care.
This goes right across Scandinavia. High education, high standards, low self-esteem.
We are having a Scandinavian moment here, what with their novels and TV detectives, their food, their schools, their fishing and agriculture, their alternative energy and liberal political compromises — all look enviable and templates for plagiarism. But perhaps we should also be importing the Jante law and teaching modesty, that fame and celebrity are not merely empty and vain, but also embarrassing and antisocial, that a culture of boastfulness and one-upmanship is divisive and lonely, and that when you give up the vaunting ego of self-promotion, you are given something far more pleasurable, far more warmly sustaining. Something that wraps you in an eiderdown catsuit. You get Scandinavian smugness. Vanity is transient and fragile, but smuggery lasts a lifetime. It’s the Aga of character defects. Of course, the morning after they named the country for Dan, the new Danes were muttering, who does he think he is? Too good for the likes of them, what with a country named after him and all.
North Road is part of the second Viking invasion of our cuisine, if that’s all right with the rest of you. It is a modest but beautifully designed restaurant opposite St John, and as such might be seen to represent the border between Fergus Henderson’s Saxon Wessex and the Noma-inspired Danish Mercia. It’s not just the wood that makes this restaurant so redolently Scandinavian (although it has been polished to a dull sheen by the quiet tears of the northern soul), it’s the lighting. They do like that crepuscular twilight look, with the flickering candles, waiting to welcome a sailor lost at sea. We went there with Giles Coren and his wife, Esther, as part of the News International economy drive. We split the bill and get two reviews for the price of one. They’ve just been blessed with their first girl child, and are still in that blissful but slightly bonkers moment of grace, when everything looks and smells lactic. It must be said that it was lucky Giles wasn’t born in Trondheim or Gothenburg. He would make a bad Scandinavian.
It’s a short menu, and we ordered everything to share, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. Not the best way to eat this food. Because of its smorgasbord origins, I imagined it to be a bit more hands-on democratic. But, as at least three of us are very, very greedy, and one of us immensely competitive, as things arrived, they disappeared like a huddle of monks under a hacking flurry of Viking forks. We began with slow-cooked pork cheeks, an ingredient that needs a rest. It’s becoming this year’s lamb shank, a cliché that nobody now cooks. There were cured langoustines, rock oysters — the langoustines were particularly fine — and some pickled mackerel that I thought was interesting, but I don’t want again. An English rose veal that Giles pointed out I was bound to bleat on about not being real veal, like some old club bore off The Fast Show. And I did say that it wasn’t really veal. But he ate it all before I stopped explaining. There was an incredibly good wood pigeon that apparently came from Norfolk, and some mutton, which is rarely seen on restaurant menus, but is always welcome. And a Cornish monkfish, though I suspect it was the fisherman who was Cornish, rather than the fish. There was a stateless brill, accompanied by greens from Suffolk. And, for pudding, buttermilk, carrot and liquorice, which might be a description of the Corens, caramel, oats and milk, and steamed sago and beetroot, which isn’t going to find itself on the Marks & Spencer luxury ready-meal shelf.
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The kitchen goes a bit overboard with the seriously Nordic, walking off the depression, heritage eating and local sourcing, and the medical importance of rambling and gathered food, and only getting fish from day boats, and not using gas in the kitchen (though Denmark’s balance of payments is paid for almost entirely out of gas), and quite possibly cooking naked. It’s worthy and serious and hand-knitted smug. Every plate comes designed to look like tsunami detritus, artfully arranged into a miniature disaster. Which, after the kitsch of most English kitchens, I loved. Though the ingredients are British, the spectrum of flavour and texture is definitely from further north. Every plate has a gossamer lace of complementary essences and savours that are earthy and elemental, that hover on the edge of being unpleasant, decomposed, must and ash. But they’re always pulled back by being intriguing. Lots of stuff is smoked, cured, salted, brined, preserved after death. Everything tastes of outdoors, like the wind off a moor or autumn birches freshly turned out. Moss and peat, rain and fungal stumps. It’s clever and it’s poignant, quietly sad. It’s food that is very Scandinavian. The other side of Janteloven is the bitten tongue, the thwarted compliment, the stifled exclamation. A life of cordial fairness for the sake of the common good. There is a hint of the equality of the grave in this food. And that’s not a bad thing. But possibly not for a first date. Or for nursing mothers.