OP: The Wizard's Cookbook

After stints in some of Spain’s most notable restaurants, like elBulli and Mugaritz, and time spent as the personal chef to the Danish royal family, Ronny Emborg became the chef at Marchal in Copenhagen’s Hôtel d’Angleterre. Now he runs the kitchen at Michelin’s two-starred Atera in New York City. 

Emborg’s signature approach was what he called a “sensory kitchen,”, in which particular attention is paid to exciting all five senses with the experience of each dish. Certainly the visual stimulation afforded by Signe Birck’s photography here is extraordinary. Fantastically crisp images convey great excitement through such dishes as grilled white asparagus with pickled unripe black currant, skate wing with frozen dill juice and leek roots, or beef tenderloin with beet shavings and smoked bone marrow. Notes on the use of mp3 players and aroma pots detail the aural and olfactory stimuli employed, as well. But it is the explicitness with which the recipes are written which has made The Wizard’s Cookbook (2014) so invaluable to professional chefs. 

In line with the work of other chefs reinvigorating Nordic cuisine, Emborg’s dishes emphasized traditional Scandinavian preservation techniques such as drying, smoking, salting, freezing, and fermentation. However, once he left Denmark, the book went out of print, no longer reflecting Emborg’s current thinking. It remains, however, one of our most requested titles. Due in part to the low number of copies produced and also partially to its enduring popularity among professional chefs, the book has remained quite scarce and we often see copies offered online for well over $1000.