Imperium Romanum on Roman Food

 

Those of my readers here who also follow my historic costume blog, Loose Threads: Yet Another Costuming Blog, will be aware that I have found a new YouTube channel, Imperium Romanum, which has ambitious plans for a series of videos on Roman material culture and history.   

The embedded video below is a short, but very good, summary of the underpinning of Roman food.  (Hint:  It starts with wheat and barley, originally eaten as porridge).  Better still, the Imperium Romanum videos are gorgeously produced, full of historically clad reenactors and images of historical food.  I commend it to your attention, and am looking forward to seeing more of their work on YouTube in the future.

Hard Times Food

It turns out that there are a number of articles and blogs discussing, and giving recipes for, historical dishes that can be cheaply made with stock pantry staples.  Given the number of people who spent the COVID lockdowns trying to distract/entertain themselves by cooking, and the larger number of people who are out of work and trying to make do on an increasingly limited budget, I shouldn't have been surprised.  What surprised me more was finding several lists of the "X dishes from tough times that you can make at home!" variety.  Some of these look interesting, at least from an intellectual perspective.  An awful lot of them focus on 1930s/Depression era cooking, and I'm cutting the number of references I make to those foods to a minimum to avoid retreading too much old ground.

So here's a list my readers can amuse themselves with.  I may look for additional sites to add to this post as time goes on.

From Atlas Obscura: 

7 Dishes Born From Tough Times That You Can Make At Home.  Most of these recipes aren't that old, or even that unusual, but they do qualify as foods one wouldn't try without a financial or boredom-related need to do so.  The simplest of these is the Peanut Butter and Mayo Sandwich which is exactly what it sounds like; a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with mayonnaise taking the place of the jelly.  An item with potential if you like mayo; an abomination to be avoided if you don't.

Even More Historic Dishes Born From Tough Times to Make at Home  Most of these dishes are North American and date from about the Great Depression of the 1930s, such as Mock Apple Pie and Vinegar Cake.  

From msn.com and Food and Drink: 

These Recipes Were Invented in Tough Times.  This one is set up as a slideshow.  It includes foods I think of as modern classics that I don't associate with hard times, such as carrot cake and meatloaf.  

From 12 Tomatoes.com:

9 Foods We Grew Up With That Were Actually Poverty Meals. I grew up in the 1960s, and most of these foods I think of as working class meals, for example:  boxed mac-and-cheese, fried egg sandwiches, beans and rice.

From Prepper's Will:

Great Depression Foods That Helped Americans Survive Famine.  The blog's title indicates that this site comes from the "prepper" culture (people who spend a lot of time making sure their household can survive famine, natural disasters, or other events that could disrupt modern living).  This blog post purports to list the top 10 foods of the Great Depression.   Two items I had not previously encountered were Milkorno and peanut butter stuffed onions.

EXARC on "An Early Meal"

I have not yet succeeded in reading, let alone obtaining, a copy of the latest book on Viking age Scandinavian food, "An Early Meal", but there's an interesting review of the book on EXARC, a journal of experimental archaeology. The review can be read here. The gist of the review is that the recipes produce extremely good food. It has made me even more eager to obtain a copy.  

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.

Blogs about Viking Food

A friend on the Norsefolk_2 mailing list drew attention to two new and interesting blogs on Viking era food: Viking Food Guy and Eldrimner. I commend both to any readers specifically interested in food of that period.

EDIT: I will be going on a road trip, starting Sunday, and will not return until July 1. I may not be able to update this blog while I am gone, but that does not mean I am abandoning it. Posts will resume at the usual rate after I return.