The car is sliding out from under us, gathering speed as it slips down the hill. A note of angry panic enters the photographer-slash-driver's voice, as though he is embarrassed we are going to career off the mountain and die. In front of us is a wire fence, the kind designed to stop schoolkids losing their basketball, not to stop hire cars dropping off cliffs. My first thought is that I am going to bleed out in a blizzard at the bottom of a 500ft fall and no one will know for days. My next thought is: why here, why now? Was Magnus Nilsson's "broth of lamb filtered through the forest floor" really to die for? The answer, after we smash into a barrier and write off the car, is of course, no. But it was very good.
Backtrack two days and Nilsson is butchering a pig in the kitchen at Faviken, his 12-seater restaurant on a remote 24,000-acre hunting estate in Jämtland, northwestern Sweden, more than 600km north of Stockholm. Fast-moving clouds streak over the white-flecked mountains, the pine forest, the frozen lake. Bright Scandinavian light streams through the window. Killed only a day before, the pig had been weaned and fed on whey by a local dairy farmer, giving it thick layers of creamy fat. "This is not a fancy breed," says Nilsson, "eating acorns on a sunny meadow in Spain. It has been fed on milk, like pigs used to be, but it can produce 100kg of high-quality food, enough to feed a family for a year." He opens up the animal's insides, working quickly, efficiently, his knife slicing cleanly around legs. "You can see a pig had been bred over a long time to suit human needs," he smiles, neatly laying severed limbs, ribs and loin to one side. "You can eat it all, and the cuts come in squares as they stack up together."
Faviken's kitchen is a surprise: small, almost domestic-size with just three chefs (there are seven staff in total including a gardener shared with the estate, and Nilsson's business partner Johan Agrell, who is maître d', sommelier and the man who cleans the shower). There is no room or appetite for histrionics, instead an air of quiet concentration, a shared purpose of producing extraordinary food in a stunning setting for the dozen people who have made the pilgrimage.
I had been impatient to eat at Faviken since I saw Nilsson speak at René Redzepi's MAD symposium in Copenhagen last summer. He talked of burying produce to last the long Swedish winter, how it changes, and the challenges that brings.
The trademark long-haired leader of the Swedish chapter of the new Nordic food movement, Nilsson's aesthetic is more austere than that of Noma, built solely around produce from the estate or close by, with meat, fish and vegetables aged far past normal taste. Our dinner will feature "a slice of retired dairy cow aged for seven months" – a menu description you feel wouldn't even translate well to St John – as well as the freshly killed pig. Vegetables are sometimes stored for eight months.
The light dramatically drops as we head into the garden to cull some sprouts among the few cabbages still clinging on. In the past week, a passing moose had razed a winter's worth of kale to the ground.
Preserving – pickling, brining, curing – has long been central to the Swedish diet but the visit to the "root store" still comes as a shock. Cellared deep into a hillside, it looks like a hobbit house until you open the thick double doors. The floor is full of boxes of ancient root vegetables sprouting pallid shoots. Unearthed, they have a quiet beauty. Shelves of laboratory-style jars hold fruits and berries dry-salted like capers. Others are brined, preserved in vinegar or whey, along with otherworldly flowers suspended like drowned men. Small apples the size of plums (as big as they grow this far north) are wrapped in tissue. Bloated lumps of meat and tongue are packed in solution-like detritus from a carnie show. Among the most disturbing is an 18-month-old bottling of scallops bobbing in a milky soup, a fermenting fish sauce on speed. No one dares open it. This is food as alchemy, the unfinished product of an enquiring mind.
We choose two or three carrots, a turnip or two, before moving outside to select leeks for supper. An evil wind rips around our ears as we "pick" replanted yellowing leeks, their hearts still sound as though in suspended animation.
Nilsson had asked that I eat at Faviken before we talk much about his food so I return to my snug plank-lined room – more Little House on the Prairie than I had imagined – and await the call for dinner. We gather in the old grain store at 7pm for appetisers: a "four-minute-old cheese" in warm whey and an intense wild trout roe served on a small disc of dried blood. The latter mouthful miraculously balanced between salt and sweet and I wish there were more.
We head upstairs past an ancient wolfskin 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. The chefs carry up trays of scallops served on smoking juniper branches. It smells like church. Nilsson claps his hand like a circus master and instructs us to eat the flesh with our hands and drink the "juice" from the shell. The scallop is sweet and the size of a hockey puck, its liquor smoky, briny.
There follow another 14 "courses" with wine delicately chosen by Agrell. Some highlights here: daringly translucent monkfish with "a coverleaf of Brussel sprout steamed so briefly it is still dying on the plate"; barely cooked langoustine from the pristine waters off Trondheim. The food-theatre event of the evening comes when Nilsson saws through a giant marrow bone in the middle of the restaurant, like a field hospital amputation. Served with "dices of raw heart, grated turnips and herb salt" it makes for one of the great plates of food I will ever eat. The seven-month-aged slice of old cow is followed by a chop from the just-dead pig. Sliced like steak, its fat glistens and bursts sweet on my tongue, a Swedish "wagyu pork", if you will. Nilsson has done farmer and animal justice. The desserts dip just a little for me, but then they always do. We return downstairs to drink vodka steeped in musky forest mushrooms. At first, odd and faintly disgusting, it quickly grows on me.
I wake in the night to screaming wind with snow and hunker down deep under my duvet. Later, the half-light reveals braziers blown over, bits of the barn roof, too, the wind having hit a storm-force 55mph. Offshore from Trondheim, the waves had reached 50ft. There will be no seafood deliveries this week. After breakfast, I join Nilsson and his gun dog, Krut. He hunts the woods here, preferring to shoot black grouse, woodcock and big capercaillie to waiting by a road for a moose to cross – although moose was the main meat of his youth. He has mislaid the key to his gun safe so we won't be shooting today; instead, as Krut lopes around hunting out lemmings, we walk and talk.
Legend – or at least his mother – has it that Nilsson cooked his first meal aged three, breaking eggs and a piece of sausage into a pan while she was feeding his newborn sister. His first food memory, though, is of chopping cucumbers with his grandmother during long summer stays at their small family farm.
As a kid he wanted to be a marine biologist and there is still much of the mad scientist about Nilsson who, with New York superstar chef David Chang, is currently experimenting with the effect on food of wild yeasts and microbiology.
After graduating from his local cookery college, Nilsson moved first to Stockholm then to Paris, working in two of the city's most celebrated restaurants – L'Astrance, for three years, and L'Arpège. By the time he arrived at Faviken, though, aged just 24, in January 2008, he had fallen out of love with kitchens. "My plan was to become a wine writer," he grins. "I hadn't cooked for almost two years."
Hired to put together a wine cellar by the businessman who had bought the estate, he came for three months, extending it to a year when he realised the 20-year-old restaurant's potential. But his return to the stove, he says, was as much about necessity as desire. "I couldn't find a chef who wanted to come here," he laughs, "to work in the most famous moose fondue restaurant in northern Sweden." Recruitment is less of a problem now he is the best-known cook in the country (he has just poached talented British chef Sam Miller from Noma to start in the spring).
"It is not for everyone, living up here," he says, looking round at the snow, the stark landscape dotted with stunted silver birch, the gravestone of a worker from an old copper mine allowed to stay on in return for charcoal. "It takes a special kind of person," he says. "You have to appreciate solitude." And Arctic cold – last winter the temperature dropped to -40C.
The shift to the current Faviken philosophy was slow. "In the beginning we worked with all kinds of produce from all over the world," he says. "But as we sourced more and more from the region, the need to order in became smaller. You don't need a delivery for three lemons."
But was there a eureka moment, I ask? "Maybe, when I understood the most important thing," he says, "how good it is for your creativity to have some boundaries, some limitations. If you have everything to hand, at least for me, there is no reason to develop. If you want acidity, you just squeeze a lemon. If you don't have lemon you need something else."
It was a natural progression, he says. "It was never about constructing a concept. When we understood the effect on creativity, that was when we realised that, yes, this is it, we will work with food from our region. But our produce is not good because of where it's from, it is good because we have really good people working with us, who understand what we need."
Nilsson isn't even sure there is such a thing as New Nordic Cuisine. "To me, it is strange to lump things together," he says. "You wouldn't put Michel Bras with Ferran Adrià. Everyone sees Nordic Cuisine and what they mean is what René does.
"Some people who come here expect something like Noma in a rural setting," he adds. "Yes, we have some of the same produce, we like the same stuff, but we don't approach cooking in the same way."
Our walk is over, Krut happily rolls around and eats snow and we return to the kitchen where Nilsson has to prepare the staff meal. Today it's not the usual Saturday pineapple pizza – "the most popular by public demand" – but roast pork from the pig. We talk about the future. He is working on a cookbook and has written 100,000 words rather than the commissioned 25,000. It will examine the food, history and culture of his region and is to be published here in the autumn. Ironically, there may not be a Swedish language edition.
As to cooking, Nilsson's theory is "that chefs may only have one great restaurant in them where they invest a lot of themselves. I would like to run a beer hall," he laughs, "a chain of beer halls all over the world. I don't like beer but there would be great wine and the food would be 'sufficiently good'. Fine dining is hard work." For now though at least he is happy in his tiny restaurant at the end of the world, raising sheep with his student wife and two young children nearby.
We share crackling and succulent slices of pork and then it is time for the five staff to sit down to their meal before evening service: a party of 12 flown in from the US by the food-loving heir to an American fortune. The team sit quietly together like novice members of a commune about to meditate. The plaintive folk music kicks in.
I bid goodbye and leave. My photographer and I have a plane to catch, it is snowing and we are not sure we have been given the right tyres.
Allan Jenkins flew with Scandinavian Airlines (flysas.co.uk) which offers flights to Stockholm from £71 each way. For more information on Sweden, go to visitsweden.com
