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.

What the Chickens Were Really Up To....

Gallus gallus (Wikimedia Commons)

This month's (i.e., June's, which should still be in newsstands even though the month is drawing to a close) issue of Smithsonian magazine is all about food.  It includes some interesting articles about food history and about how foods are made.

One of the most interesting articles in the magazine is the history of chickens as a foodstuff for humans. The article notes that the ultimate forebear of the modern domesticated chicken is a wild jungle fowl called gallus gallus (see the picture on the right).  Gallus gallus looks and acts a lot like the modern chicken.  According to the article, DNA analysis has confirmed that modern chickens are descended from gallus gallus, but other genetic strains come into play; up to three other species (possibly subspecies of gallus gallus) seem to have been involved, though the full picture of the chicken's ancestry is not clear as yet.

Although the earliest bones in the archaeological record that appear to be chicken bones have been found in northeastern China and dated to about 5,400 BCE, and the Egyptians systematized the farming of chickens to maximize egg production, it was the Romans who developed techniques to grow and fatten birds to maximize the value of their flesh as food.  Apparently archaeology has discovered that the size of chickens shrank dramatically after the fall of Rome, and though they continued to be eaten, their popularity continued to be diminished until modern times.

Ironically, there is also archaeological evidence that chickens were not originally domesticated for food, but for sport. Yes, the cockfight not only dates back to the Egyptians, but many archaeologists believe that cockfighting was the original reason for taming the birds. (Sadly, the article doesn't give any more detail on this topic.) What this may say about homo sapiens sapiens I will leave as an exercise for my readers to deduce.

Though I liked the chicken article the best, there were other tasty articles in the issue, including:

• An article about a 95-year-old winery in Los Angeles (yes, Los Angeles) that survived Prohibition by making wine for Catholic ceremonies, and now caters increasingly to wine connoisseurs;
• An article about the harvesting of table salts, world-wide;
• An article that sheds light upon the process of how companies develop new breakfast cereals;
• An article about a peculiar mini-oyster, native to the San Francisco Bay Area, that enchanted Mark Twain.

It's a fun issue, and I commend it to my readers and people interested in the peculiarities of food everywhere.