Why we brought Henriette Schønberg Erken back to life

In 1914, a woman from Kristiania published a book that would come to sit in nearly every Norwegian home. Stor kokebok for større og mindre husholdninger ("Great Cookbook for Larger and Smaller Households") was not merely a collection of recipes. It was an entire system for how to run a household: how to slaughter a goose, salt the fish, preserve the berries, use up the leftovers and make a tight budget stretch without the food turning dull. The author's name was Henriette Schønberg Erken, and for more than a generation she was the closest Norway came to an official authority on food.

This service exists because we believe her legacy deserves more than a dusty spot in the used-book shop. We believe it has something to say to us right now.

The woman behind the book

Henriette Schønberg Erken was born in Kristiania on November 6, 1866, and died at the Dystingbo farm in Vang near Hamar on October 22, 1953. Her father was a professor of medicine, keenly interested in the importance of food; her mother was an accomplished cook. Both left their mark on the daughter. She became a home-economics teacher, ran her own household school, traveled the country giving courses and demonstrations, and published almost every year from 1895 to 1951.

Stor kokebok first appeared in 1914 and was revised right up to the twentieth edition in 1951 — more than 200,000 copies sold over that period. In the first four decades of the 20th century, her books accounted for between a quarter and as much as forty percent of all cookbook sales in Norway. She was awarded the King's Medal of Merit in gold in 1916, and collaborated with figures such as the nutrition professor Carl Schiøtz. Her book is one of the few in Norwegian literature that can be identified by the author's surname alone. Her own favorite dish, incidentally, was fårikål (the Norwegian mutton-and-cabbage stew).

Why now, of all times

Two things make this project both possible and timely at once.

The first is legal. Erken's work entered the public domain on January 1, 2024, seventy years after her death. That means we can lawfully publish the entire original text — word for word, as she wrote it — and build freely on it. It's a rare opportunity: a complete, encyclopedic work of national cultural-historical value that now belongs to all of us.

The second is cultural. Just as Erken's work was set free, Norwegian eating is in the middle of a debate about the very thing she was an expert in: real ingredients. Recent estimates suggest that Norwegian adults get around half of their calories from ultra-processed food, and that nearly half of what we spend on food goes to such products. One in three Norwegians says they want to cook more from scratch. Erken's kitchen is the answer to that wish — not as a moralizing finger-wag, but as a practical, thoroughly tested how-to guide from a time when industrial shortcuts simply didn't exist.

Not a museum — a living cookbook

It would have been easy to scan the book and call it a day. We're doing something more.

We let you travel through time. For every recipe you can page between the editions and see how the dish changed — how war, rationing and new knowledge altered the ingredients and quantities from 1914 to 1949. It's Norwegian history told from the kitchen counter.

We translate it into today. Old measures like pægl and lod, and baking temperatures worked out for a wood-fired stove, make the food cumbersome to cook now. So every classic gets a modernized version, adapted for the induction cooktop and the convection oven — but without letting go of the whole point: clean ingredients, no shortcuts.

We make room for you. Erken revised her books her whole life because the kitchen never stands still. In that spirit, you can make your own version of a dish, upload photos and video, and share it. The best interpretations are lifted up by the community — and can become challenges set to some of the country's leading chefs.

The values we inherit

Erken wrote for ordinary people, with clear explanations and respect for both the ingredient and the wallet. She taught people to use up leftovers long before anyone talked about food waste, and to pickle and preserve long before "sustainability" became a buzzword. She combined thrift with the joy of food, the everyday with the festive.

Those are the values we build on: local, honest and economical food, conveyed with the same teacherly clarity that made her one of modern Norway's most important voices. We aren't bringing her back to life out of nostalgia. We're doing it because she's still right.

This project publishes Henriette Schønberg Erken's public-domain works and builds on them with modernized versions and contributions from users.