Gustav
Today, Gustav is just shopping for himself. Easy food for a night alone. Gustav loves food. It’s his biggest monthly expense, and whenever he has some extra money, he goes out and buys a new cooking gadget: Like a cupper pan worth 200 £, or a Japanese vegetable knife to a similar price. I ask him what matters to him when he buys his ingredients. “Freshness, season, taste, and organic”, he explains.
We start in the greens section. There are no organic cabbages, so he has to settle for a regular one. “I’m not fanatic about the ecological part. Just within reason. But in the ideal world, all the veggies would be ecological, fresh, from the season, local, and cheap”. “Why local?”, I ask. Gustav explains that local is fresh, and local is low CO2 outlet.
There are certain things which have to be organic, Gustav continues. These things taste much better than their non-organic counterparts. A cucumber, for instance. Or pork. And it has to be free range! When it comes to dairy he’s also die-hard organic: “Take an organic sour cream! It’s a completely different universe from a regular one. So much tastier.”
Freshness
In the meat section, Gustav checks everything for freshness. He will not buy three day old meat, even if it’s still good. “Freshness!!”, he repeats. For today’s meal he chooses non-organic scraped raw beef over organic 8% minced beef. “This meal doesn’t need a lot of fat, because I use very spicy seasoning for taste”, he explains. “And it doesn’t need lots of meat because it has a ton of cabbage. So it’s worthwhile to buy a small portion of expensive low-fat meat rather than a larger portion of cheaper meat.” But this does not mean that Gustav avoids fat in food. “Fat gives taste!”, he says with emphasis. After picking the low-fat scraped raw beef, he goes straight to the section for bacon and pork crackling. “I love this stuff!, he says. “You don’t mind the fat?”, I ask. “Fat gives taste”, he repeats to the dim-witted interviewer.
Butter
“What about butter, then?”, I ask. It turns out Gustav uses a lot of butter for cooking. Never for his rye bread. “Yuck, that’s disgusting. Why would I put butter under my fatty liver pate which has lots of taste already?” But when he cooks in the oven, he’ll often put a big fat lump of butter on top of the meat or the vegetables. When he fries food, he uses butter too. “This thing about tefal pans allowing you to dry fry – that’s nonsense. You need the butter for proper contact. Otherwise you just boil the meat on the pan.” Only when he has to fry hard, he’ll add oil, because butter does not cope well with very high temperatures. He muses about the fact that he usually buys spreadable butter. “Organic, of course”, he specifies, “for the taste”. But he considers it a bit of a failure that he buys spreadable butter. Regular butter is simply better quality. It’s the real deal without a lot of air and water to make it spreadable. But he’s simply too lazy to remember taking the butter out of the fridge to make it soft.
Metropolitan cooking
Describing himself as a cook, he uses the term “metropolitan”. Metropolitan means that he is founded in his own national food culture with seasonal vegetables, lots of dairy products and pork and beef. But he is inspired by international food, because the ingredients are available in a metropolitan city. When he experiments with food, he uses inspiration from cooking programs on TV – preferably BBC – and from great restaurants he has visited. “I only spend money on restaurants which cook something which I would not be able to cook myself, or which I would not bother to cook myself because it’s too time consuming”, he says. Then he offers me some of the potato chips we bought in the supermarket. “Always wavy, so you can really scoop up the dip!”, he smiles and winks.
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