New Nordic cuisine has long used pine to flavour food. It works well with meat, fish and vegetable dishes, such as this roast carrot recipe
Three cuts of venison sat on my friend’s plate at The Clove Club in east London. One, a perfectly cooked rare loin. Two, a cube of pressed haunch. And three, a faggot of offal, skewered on a pine twig cleaned of its lower needles, and looking much like the shaft and fletching of an arrow.
Eureka, I thought – pine trees are semi-edible! Then again, pine is a key ingredient of New Nordic Cuisine, and adorns the menus of many of the world’s best restaurants. Which is just as well, considering we discard between six and eight million pine trees every Christmas.