Diet of the Month?

As I was doing some last minute holiday food shopping at my local Wegmans supermarket, I glanced at the latest issue of Vogue and saw this headline:  "Eat Like a Viking: The Next It Diet".  (It's the U.S. issue for December 2014 with Sienna Miller on the cover, in case you're wondering.)

I wasn't quite curious enough to buy the magazine, but I did flip through a copy and apparently there's a growing movement toward what is also called the "Nordic" diet:  fish, berries, nuts and game (according to the Vogue article).  

Although the latest scholarly account of what real Vikings ate suggests that game wasn't on the menu, and that yogurt, butter and cheese were, Vogue's description of the "Viking" diet is at least roughly accurate. Only time will tell whether it replaces the Paleo diet and the Mediterranean diet in the popular media as the new-old healthy-eating food trend.

Chicken Stew With Beer

As a person interested in Viking age Scandinavian material culture, I keep a lookout for recipes that could have been made by the Vikings. This generally means stews and soups, and pan-fried flatbreads to eat with stews and soups.

One of the recipes that has been kicking around on the Internet for a while comes from this recipe collection compiled by members of the New Varangian Guard, a reenactment group in Australia. Since I like making stews and soups in my crockpot, my cooking skills are a reasonable match for reconstructing the type of dishes believed to be characteristic of Viking cuisine, and some of the recipes I've experimented with out of intellectual curiosity have ended up on the list of recipes that I make for regular nightly dinners.

Recreation of a Viking cooking hearth**

Last night, I made up the Chicken Stew With Beer recipe from the NVG compendium.  I made a number of changes to the recipe as printed, as follows:

• The recipe calls for a whole chicken, about 2-3 pounds in weight; I substituted a bit more than 2 pounds of chopped, deboned chicken thighs so my husband, Eric, and I wouldn't have to pick out bones while eating the stew (there are limits to how far I'll go in the name of authenticity to the details of Viking cuisine). 
• The recipe calls for allspice, but there's a gloss in the compendium which observes, correctly, that allspice is a New World plant that comes from regions the Vikings never visited, so I substituted dried juniper berries instead, since I knew juniper was and is used in Scandinavia to flavor foods.
• The recipe calls for fresh thyme, which I included, but I added some fresh sage as well.
• The recipe also calls for dark beer. I didn't have any dark beer, but I had some non-alcoholic light beer, so I used that. 
• Finally, I added a parsnip to the turnips and carrots called for by the recipe, because I like having a bit of parsnip in a root vegetable mix. Parsnips are native to Eurasia and have been eaten since ancient times, and evidence of their use in food has been found in the Viking era levels at the excavation in York, England, but I don't know for certain whether parsnips grew in Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

We just ate some of the stew, and it was quite good. Eric said he could taste the slight sweetish flavor the juniper berries imparted; since I have no independent experience of foods flavored with juniper I couldn't tell whether its taste was present. I could taste the richness imparted by frying the chicken in butter before stewing it, as well as the sage and thyme. Eric pronounced it "husband approved", which means he's happy to eat it whenever I want to make it. I suspect I will make it again, though probably not in the winter, because it's a relatively light meal by comparison to the barley stews and beef stews I've made. Maybe I'll try to make some flatbread to eat with it for tomorrow night's dinner.


*   The compendium says that the recipe originally came from "Vikingars Gästabud (The Viking Feast)", which I assume is a Swedish-language book dedicated to providing speculative but plausible recipes that might have been eaten by the Vikings.  I would like to get my hands on a copy.

** Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber, taken of an exhibit at the Fotevikens Museum in Skanör, Sweden. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The Origin of Viking Bread?

Between the heat of the last few weeks here and various personal tasks, I have not been very interested in more speculative adventures into recreating Viking Age Scandinavian cuisine.

Bread found in the ruins of Pompeii

I was delighted to learn of this article which discusses a very interesting theory about how bread making came to Scandinavia.  The article is in Swedish, but Google Translate did a very good job of making it intelligible to this English speaker. You can see Google Translate's English version here.

Liselotte Bergström, at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University, has been studying archaeological remains of bread found at Mälarlen, Östergötland, Helgö and Birka, and she has reached some interesting conclusions.

It appears that the earliest finds of bread and bread-making equipment in Scandinavia date to about 200 C.E. Grain likely was eaten by Scandinavians much earlier, but in the form of porridges, not as bread. Bergström's theory is that Scandinavians learned how to make bread from Roman soldiers, possibly from serving with Roman forces as auxiliaries. Grave finds also indicate that bread was associated with male leaders--not females--and was not an everyday commonplace. So far as I can tell from the article, bread finally became a common part of the Scandinavian diet in the Viking age.

According to the article, the early forms of bread were more like small, round rolls, made from a dough consisting of two parts flour to one part water, and cooked in a frying pan over a fire.   The loaf above was found at Pompeii and may be similar to the Scandinavian product (except for the shape).  The idea sounds simple enough to try some weekend when I've gone back to making stew, possibly using barley flour.

The most important thing about Bergström's theory is not that it sheds light on food practices particular to Scandinavia, but that it demonstrates how archaeology can help us learn how such ephemeral tasks as the preparation of our daily bread were learned, and spread.  This kind of research has the potential to enlighten us about the development of cultures in a way that is difficult for written history to match, and it will be welcome to see more such research opening our eyes to the past.