Serving Season: 10 Nordic Pieces for Having People Over
From October the eating moves indoors and the table has to hold eight. Ten Nordic platters, bowls, a jug and a tray for food served in the middle.
Read More →Three Times a Day: 10 Nordic Pieces for the Cutlery Drawer
This weekend the clocks go back, and from Sunday the evening meal belongs to the indoors. No more plates carried out to a step while it is still light. For the next five months dinner happens at a table, under a lamp, with the curtains shut — and the objects that carry it there get handled more than anything else in the house.
Most of us never chose them. The drawer fills up by inheritance and emergency: a set from a grandmother, four forks bought in a hurry when friends moved in. Which is strange, because a knife and fork are the pieces of design you touch three times a day for decades. Nordic makers have always treated them that way. Ten pieces below, four full sets and six single tools, all in stock in the UK, Germany, Norway and Denmark, and all comparable on price on ScandiDeals.
⸻
1. Gense Fuga Cutlery Set – The Swedish Everyday Four
Sixteen pieces, four settings, and nothing on them to catch a tea towel. The handles are flat and taper gently to the end, the spoon bowls come to a soft point rather than a round, and the whole set is polished to a mirror that shows the room back at you. Gense has been making table steel in Sweden for generations, and Fuga is the pattern that looks equally right under a weeknight pasta and a Christmas goose. The Fuga set is the one to start a household with.
⸻
2. Iittala Artik Cutlery Set – Narrow Handles, Mirror Finish
Artik is the formal end of the Finnish table: twenty-four pieces in a gift box, six settings, each handle drawn out long and square-edged before it widens into the head. The fork is noticeably narrow, the knife blade rises to a single point, and the mirror polish makes a dark December table look lit. It is heavier in the hand than it looks in a photograph. The Artik set is a wedding present that stays in service.
⸻
3. Lyngby Porcelæn Rhombe Cutlery Set – Diamonds Cut Into The Handle
The Danish house took the lattice from its Rhombe porcelain and pressed it into steel. Every handle carries a field of fine diamonds that runs from the tip to the neck, then stops dead where the bowl or the blade begins. The texture is not decoration alone: it grips a wet hand and hides fingerprints. Sixteen pieces, four settings. The Rhombe set is for people who already own the plates.
⸻
4. Hardanger Bestikk Lykke Cutlery Set – Norwegian Weight, Soft Waist
Hardanger Bestikk has made cutlery in Norway for long enough that these patterns turn up in half the country's kitchen drawers. Lykke means happiness, and the handles earn the name: they narrow at the waist and swell again at the tip, so the weight settles behind the fingers. Deep spoon bowls, a long knife with a drawn-out point, twenty-four pieces for six. The Lykke set is bought once and handed on.
⸻
5. HAY MVS Cutlery Set – Dark Blue Handles, Brushed Heads
Four pieces, one setting, which is the point: you can buy a place at a time and stop when the table is full. The handles are flat bars of deep blue that meet brushed steel at a clean seam, and the heads are matt rather than polished, so the colour leads. On a plain white plate in lamplight the effect is closer to a stripe of paint than to tableware. The MVS setting is the cheapest way into colour at a Nordic table.
⸻
6. Rosendahl Grand Cru Steak Knife – One Knife That Cuts
Autumn cooking is slow cooking, and a table knife designed for fish will not get through a braised shoulder. This one is sold singly, so four arrive in the drawer over a year rather than in one go. The blade is long, ground to a fine point, and the handle is a smooth polished cylinder with no shoulder to dig into the palm. The Grand Cru steak knife is the piece guests notice without saying so.
⸻
7. Fiskars Functional Form Butter Knife – Eight Centimetres, Orange Line
Breakfast in the dark needs one small tool: a rounded blade eight centimetres long, wide enough to spread cold butter without tearing the bread. The black handle with its orange stripe is the Finnish brand's signature, shaped to sit in the hand the same way its scissors do. Keep it in the drawer beside the bread board rather than in the cutlery tray. The Functional Form butter knife costs less than a round of coffees.
⸻
8. Hardanger Bestikk Bjørklund Cheese Slicer – The Norwegian Breakfast Tool
The ostehøvel was invented in Norway in the 1920s, and the name on this one is the family name behind it. A triangular steel plate with a slot cut across the wide end shaves a sheet of cheese thin enough to curl — brown cheese, Jarlsberg, anything firm — instead of hacking a wedge off the block. The handle here is oiled birch, pale and slightly waisted, warm to pick up at seven in the morning. The Bjørklund slicer is the most Nordic object in the drawer.
⸻
9. Eva Solo Nordic Kitchen Serving Spoon – Bamboo, 29 Centimetres
Twenty-nine centimetres of bamboo with a wide round bowl, flattened at the bottom so it scrapes a pan clean and reaches the corner of a casserole. Wood will not scratch a coated pot or chill a sauce the way steel does. Rinse it by hand, dry it standing up, oil it twice a winter. The Nordic kitchen spoon does the work between the hob and the plate.
⸻
10. Kay Bojesen Grand Prix Sauce Ladle – Flat Handle, Pouring Lip
Eighteen and a half centimetres, polished steel, a shallow oval bowl with a lip drawn out on one side so gravy leaves in a line instead of a dribble. The handle is flat and almost plain, which is the Grand Prix pattern's whole manner — this is the Danish house better known for its wooden monkeys, in its quieter mode. Sauce is most of what a Nordic autumn dinner is. The Grand Prix ladle earns its place from October to April.
⸻
Final Thoughts
Cutlery is the last thing people replace and the first thing they notice in someone else's kitchen. It is also the easiest category in which to buy well: there are no trends to speak of, steel does not wear out, and a pattern made for decades can be added to one setting at a time. Start with four places rather than twelve, and add the sixth and the eighth when the winters prove you need them.
The tools matter more than the sets, in truth. A cheese slicer, a butter knife, a ladle with a proper lip and one spoon that can scrape a pan get used at every meal between now and spring, while the dinner forks wait their turn. Compare what the Nordic shops charge for each of them on ScandiDeals before the dark half of the year sets the table for you.
