Move Over, Redzepi—Your Wife Is Here

René Redzepi’s wife Nadine is pulling an ‘Ellemieke Vermolen’. The Portuguese-Danish woman is stepping out of the shadow of her successful chef husband with… her own cookbook. Downtime is packed with homely recipes. Including brownies.

René was not allowed to interfere with it in any way. That’s why Nadine Levy Redzepi didn’t even tell her husband that she was making a cookbook from the home recipes she had been writing down since the birth of their nine-year-old eldest daughter.

Coincidence

Something he had always encouraged her to do, but which she initially never wanted. She had once ended up working as a server in René’s restaurant by coincidence, where the two fell in love. But unlike her husband, Nadine had no desire for a career in the spotlight, the kitchen or the restaurant.

René Redzepi’s wife Nadine wrote a cookbook

And yet she did. What began as a kind of preservation project for recipes she wanted to save for posterity ultimately ended up as the cookbook Downtime.

Homely

Not a book full of fancy restaurant dishes, created in laboratory conditions, but real home-style meals such as lasagne with sausage meat, slow-roasted salmon and fudgy brownies. Her mantra: ‘pair the very best ingredients with restaurant techniques that bring out all the flavour.’

Downtime is structured so that there is always enough food for unexpected guests. That is something Nadine has learned through experience as the home-cooking wife of a chef whose house is always filled with unexpected visitors.

An Ellemieke

Just as with Sergio Herman’s wife Ellemieke Vermolen, the cooking blood apparently finds a way to flow where it shouldn’t. And Nadine opts not for fancy dishes, but for recipes for her downtime —rest time. Naturally, the book does ultimately include a foreword by her husband. He didn’t see the book until it was finished, in Tulum during Noma’s Mexican pop-up.

Incidentally, Nadine also does a little Nigella number with the subtitle of her book, ‘deliciousness at home’, which sounds an awful lot like the subtitle ‘A celebration of home cooking’ of Nigella’s latest book. Are we looking at a microtrend here?

Nadine Levy Redzepi
Downtime
Publisher Penguin Random House (English)
42.95 euros