Rektún Food

What is rektún food?
I’m sitting on the wooden kitchen sofa, it is brown and has a rag rug on top where grandpa usually rests in the afternoons. The cat, Tudor, is stretched out beside me in the heat from the radiator beneath the big window that towers up and frames the picturesque Lake Kråksjön. It is autumn, probably moose hunting season, and perhaps I am waiting for my father to come home from the forest. I don’t really remember. The colours in the trees are almost supernaturally bright in the crisp air, as usual in that season. I hear grandpa’s heavy orange steel-capped boots coming up the steps and into the porch, the sound changes to that of feet in woollen socks and water splashing in a wash basin.
 
The air in the kitchen is hot and slightly damp, full of the scents rising from the stove and what grandma is cooking at the other end of the kitchen. I’m four, possibly five years old, and I really like being there, right at that moment. I don’t remember what was being cooked, perhaps stuffed cabbage or brown beans, it’s really not important; one of the scents that I still remember is that of melting brown sugar, the old-fashioned sort – white sugar mixed with sugar cane syrup, kept in a brown plastic tub. However, what is important is what grandpa says when he comes into the kitchen from an afternoon working on the farm. He sees what’s being cooked and exclaims with approval; “De dänne de e rektún mat de, mat at n kaer”. Real food, food for a man. The literal translation is quite bland and insipid, but it’s not the words’ literal meaning that is most important, rather the feeling that they convey. That entire moment condensed into one phrase, rektún food, is what I have afterwards spent so much of my time trying to create for others – often in very different and considerably more sophisticated places and contexts. Sometimes the phrase has almost been forgotten, making room for more exciting and transient things, but somehow it has always been a guide, one that has now developed into the basic premise for what we do at Fäviken.
 
We respect our raw ingredients for what they are, what they look like and where they come from. We strive to monitor the production of each ingredient from seed to plate. We accept nature’s own choices as the primary factor, and apply our own knowledge in order to maximise every product’s potential. We concentrate on harvesting, preparing, cooking and then serving it. We present every single ingredient in a manner that conveys the feelings that arise in the process to create rektún food.
 
Our ingredients are primarily from the Fäviken Estate, grown and raised in conditions that we control. After this, they come from people we know in the local area, Jämtland, and, lastly, they come from our Norwegian neighbours in Tröndelag.
 
We do not follow trends. We serve what we want, when we want.
 
Respect, control, selection, concentration, presentation.
 
Rektún food
 
/Magnus