Interesting Web Site--"All Mongolian Recipes"

When I was looking for the definition for "airag" the other day, I found this website: "All Mongolian Recipes: The Food of the Nomads."

As one might suppose, this website describes what Mongolians eat and drink today.  For example, today's Mongolians enjoy vodka, which they obtain by trade with the Russians; however, vodka was not available to them in Genghis Khan's time.  However, a lot of dishes still eaten are "traditional", and by the description of how they were made, likely were eaten in Genghis Khan's time.

Airag, by the way, is a mildly alcoholic brew made from mare's milk.  English speakers may be familiar with this item under its Russian name, kumiss.  The web site describes its manufacture in fascinating detail here; I commend this page to readers interested in kumiss, or in unusual alcoholic beverages in general.

"Viking" Flavored Liquor?

 Let's face it, Vikings attract almost as much attention (and money) as pirates (Caribbean-style) and zombies. So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that a Scandinavian vendor, Arcus, is using an herb, supposedly favored by the Vikings, to flavor liquor. According to this article from the Norway Post:

Pors is the name of the herb that apparently had such a strong effect on King Harald Hårfagre that he simply forgot to rain [sic] the country for about three years, according to the Snorre Saga. Now, a bus load of Arcus employees find the plant so fascinating that they want to produce liquor with it.

Pors (Wikimedia Commons)

Hope (Wikimedia Commons)

Wondering what a beverage flavored with pors would taste like, I turned to Google seeking answers. I didn't have much luck at first. PORS is an acronym for an American health care insurance benefits program. Adding the word "herb" made Google insist that I was looking for a recipe for herb-crusted pork.  Adding the word "Norwegian"  got me back into the realm of herbs, but only turned up the brief news articles about Arcus. So I tried plugging "pors" into Google Translate. The answer came back, "lane."

Continued searching turned up a reference--without a recipe, alas--to "Søgaard Randy’s Pors", a beer brewed by a man in Denmark. That started me wondering; is "pors" at all like hops, either biologically or in flavor? The Norway Post article has a picture of pors, which I was reluctant to use here because of copyright considerations. I figured it would be easy to find pictures of both pors and hops on Wikimedia Commons, and so it proved; the photographs appear with this post.

Though hops and pors look a little alike, they apparently have different flavors.  I could only find a Wikipedia article about pors in Swedish, but Google Translate worked well enough for me to learn the answer to my question about the taste of pors: "[T]he gray-green and vice versa oval leaves have a strong aromatic smell coming from the substances secreted by the small yellow resin dots (this is quite similar to black currant...") According to the Swedish Wikipedia article, pors, also known in English as bog myrtle, grows wild in swamps in Sweden.

I also learned that the use of herbs like pors harked back to a much earlier stage in the development of alcoholic beverages.   Before hops came to be used to make beer (a development that began shortly after the Viking era), herb mixtures now referred to as gruit were used for flavoring alcoholic brews. The idea was to balance the sweetness provided by the wort, the mashed grains used to ferment and generate alcohol for the beverage. Depending on the herbs used, the gruit could help preserve the beer or add a hallucinogenic quality in addition to affecting its flavor.

So the Vikings liked black currant flavor? I do too. Though I generally avoid alcoholic beverages, I would love to have just a taste of Arcus's new product, just to experience a taste that a Viking might have achieved.

EDIT: Today I found an article on Viking drinking customs that mentions the use of herbs like bog-myrtle in gruit. Go here to download and read it.

Mixing Old and New

I haven't done much historic cookery lately, because it's been very hot here.  I suspect that, in Viking times, people would have simply eaten bread and cheese on a hot day, but my husband won't eat cheese.  But he will eat chicken salad, a much more recently invented dish, so I've been playing with chicken salad recipes again.

Our current favorite recipe is from About.com's Southern Food site, where I found a simple, spicy recipe called "Cajun Chicken Salad with Pecans." The novel ingredients in this concoction are finely chopped pecans and a quarter-teaspoon of Tabasco sauce. My husband, who is inordinately fond of hot sauce in general and Tabasco in particular, raved about the results.

When it was time to make up a second batch, he wanted to replace the green onions in the recipe with leeks. Now leeks are about as un-Cajun as you can get, being an old world plant that likely did feature in Viking era cuisine, if not necessarily in Scandinavia.

On the other hand, leeks have a mild oniony flavor that's not all that different from green onions, so I figured the substitution would work just fine. We tried it last night, and the result's just as good as the original recipe. I bet that any mild onion would work--maybe I'll track down some Vidalias for the purpose.

All of this just goes to show how wonderful it is to be able to visit your area supermarket, collect ingredients from two different continents and whip up an interesting multicultural experiment for dinner.