Fresh kale is 'dying on the plate'

Faviken is not the kind of book you would immediately think of cooking from - not, that is, unless you're one of the boutique band of cooks who would shoot a grouse carefully, and serve it with a paste of its innards, cooked briefly in a Thermomix at 60C with grouse broth, and served with the rowan berries and gypsy mushrooms just gathered from the forest, and fresh honey from your bees.

Actually, these kinds of cooks exist. We discovered one in Canberra prepared to take on the wild, bloody and cheffy recipes of Magnus Nilsson. Danielle Young's story leads this page.

Nilsson has turned what was a 120-seat fondue restaurant on a remote hunting estate in northern Sweden (posited on the World's 50 Best Restaurtants list as the most isolated great restaurant on the planet) into a 12-seater A-list destination eatery, through, presumably, the romance of the location, but more crucially the obsessiveness and precision of what he does with the food he can scratch from the extreme surrounds.

One of his much-talked-about dishes is warm beef marrow and raw heart. When ready to serve, the marrow bone sawn open in front of diners on an old chopping block. "I recognise the smell so well: the burning fat, drying beef, and bone pulverising under the serrated blade," Nilsson writes (confessing himself growing bored with this dish, given the time he's been serving it). It's a theatrical presentation, reminiscent, The Guardian notes, of a field hospital amputation. And it is both the theatricality and the thrill of his approach that gets him noticed.

Nilsson says he grew up hunting, as most in the region do, and the experience of hunting and butchering influences the way he treats meat. He goes so far as to suggest a licence for meat-eaters that would require them to raise an animal, then kill and eat it.

He chooses aged cows - the best beef, he says, comes from a cow between five and 10 years old, especially from former dairy cows, who have grazed on grass all their lives, and also have been productive, "instead of just standing there and growing".

He uses the entire animal - the kidney, heart and liver served on slaughter day or the day after, the rest of the carcass dried for a month before butchering. Some cuts are then dry-aged for up to 270 days, which gives, "a completely different texture and aromatic complexity that is hard to imagine if you have not tried it".

His menu describes his meat in evocative terms, as in a dish of "ribeye of a pensioner dairy cow aged since early January, fried in a pan and then rested on the grill, sour onions and wild herbs, fermented mushroom juice from last year". Or another, simply "shavings of old sow".

Nilsson, for whom food preservation is a necessity if you're going to eat locally in such a harsh climate, has also discovered something about the way langoustines age. While it's generally thought that mushy flesh in langoustines means they're not fresh, Nilsson says if they arrive mushy, they will often firm up over five days, a phenomenon Harold McGee suggested to him could be related to the way crustaceans shed their shells. Their muscles shrink to allow the old shell to shed, then expand again into the new shell, and McGee suggests the mushy-fleshed langoustines could be those about to shed when caught.

This is the kind of obsession with ingredients you'll find at Faviken, where root vegetables are stored in crates, layered carefully in sand so each vegetable is separate, and where he keeps bees and uses them not only for the honey, but also the propolis (and uses pollen, too), and where he ferments local beans and peas in the same way the Japanese ferment soy beans to make miso.

The diners are primed not only by the rhythmic gongs of death and age and by the exotic and difficult location, which has most likely involved hours of flying and driving, but also by the rules that surround dining at Faviken. Despite the difficulties of getting there, Nilsson doesn't like you late. Dinner is 7pm, and at 7.05pm the doors to this 1745 building are locked it begins without you. If you've run into trouble and call ahead, you are allowed up to 30 minutes leeway, and in that case you're led directly upstairs via an outside stairway and miss the appetisers being served downstairs.

And his food is not all old. Nilsson plucks emotional strings also with extra-young food. He starts your meal with a cheese course, explaining it to diners thus: "You have a little cup with a piece of very fresh cheese, which is just five- or six-minutes old and is served with some of the whey that forms when it curdles. This is a very delicate way of starting tonight's meal, since it is basically just the taste of a very good-quality unpasteurised cows' milk. It is seasoned with one petal of lavender picked this summer." Just five or six minutes old!

Later he serves monkfish with "a leaf of kale steamed so briefly that it is dying on the plate in front of you".

He serves cow's milk so young it's still colostrum. The recipe is 500 grams colostrum, 500 grams milk, 100 grams sugar and salt, mixed, then poured about 2 centimetres deep into bowls, covered with cling film and cooked at 100 degrees till just set - 10 minutes to an hour depending on the breed of cow, the freshness of colostrum and how close to birthing the cow was miked. Whether you find this kind of thing ludicrous, fetishistic and indulgent, or whether it thrills you to the bone, it precisely encapsulates the food most sought after right now by the food elite.

Here's The Guardian's writer describing the beginning of his meal at Faviken: ''We head upstairs past an ancient wolf-skin coat to the restaurant. Half monastic retreat, half outlaws' hideout, the dining room is punctuated with a curtain of cod roe; air-dried pieces of pig hang from the ceiling, giant jars of dried mushrooms and flowers line the side tables, the air is filled with wailing folk music played too loud for total comfort. The feeling that we have been kidnapped by a cult mingles with an eager, greedy excitement.''