Food Preservation and Storage in Viking Times

Recently, the Ribe Viking Center in Denmark published a YouTube video that serves as an excellent explanation of how, and with what kinds of foods, the Vikings likely stocked their larders. (The story is in Danish, but with English subtitles.) 

The video is in the form of a little story about how a couple of children try to raid the family larder but are foiled by their grandfather.  Grandpa's subsequent explanation of what is stored and why it is stored is educational for all of us, and the information is consistent with what I know of Viking food ways, including information I learned from An Early Meal.  

All kinds of foods were preserved to keep them as long as possible.  Meats were preserved, such as by drying, smoking or salting them.  Vegetables would be dried, fermented, or left in the ground as long as possible, fruits dried, nuts collected and stored.  Breads were stored in different ways depending upon their properties.  Milk was stored in many forms, as butter, cheeses, yogurt, buttermilk.  Herbs were dried and stored.

The video features a fascinating reconstruction of how salt could be produced by processing seaweed in labor-intensive ways.  The salt, it tells us, was mostly used for preserving meat; white salt for seasoning already prepared foods was typically obtained in trade and was expensive.

This video is the first episode in a planned series about the Viking larder.  I intend to follow the series, though I won't post the other videos.  Based on this first one, watching them is a worthwhile investment of time for what is learned.  If you're looking for videos to watch, try this one.

New Book--Eat Like A Viking

Earlier this week, I learned that there is a new book available about Viking era food:

Brooks, Craig. Eat like a Viking! A guide to Anglo-Saxon & Viking age food & drink.  (May 24, 2019).

Independently published by a British reenactor, this book is available on Amazon.com and possibly elsewhere also.  However, Amazon's page on the book includes enough text to suggest that it might be a useful edition to a Viking age food library. Mr. Brooks notes in his introduction that he wrote this text as a quick reference guide "of available food types" and to give ideas for recipes that could be cooked at reenactment events.  To my knowledge, the information in his Introduction is correct, and his attitude is appropriate.  He observes, in the close to his Introduction:

What follows is open to discussion, as these recipes are my take on what may or may not have been eaten by the Saxons and Vikings in the UK.  It's been an interesting journey, experimenting with raw vegetables, and new cooking methods, some of which have made it into our daily cooking routines, which I hope will give you some inspiration too.

Amazon is charging USD $19.12 for this slender (109 pages) paperback.  I would like to buy and read it, but at that price, I will not pay additional shipping for it; I'll wait until I can put together an order big enough to qualify for free shipping.  In the meantime, if any of my readers have had a chance to peruse this book, please let me know in the comments.

A Reenactor Take on Viking Flatbread

Alert readers may have noticed that I have edited my post about using Chef John's add-the-water-gradually-to-the-flour technique for making flatbread to mention a Facebook video showing a similar technique by a Canadian group called Ðrottin.

I couldn't figure out how to post the Ðrottin video here, but recently I found a YouTube video by a different Viking reenactment group called Marobud; that video appears to the right.  Like the Ðrottin video, it also shows a reenactor making flatbread in a similar way to Chef John's suggested method. Marobud appears to be a Czech group, and they have made several other videos showing the group's attempts to cook, Viking style, while camping in the wild.

This Marobud video shows a reenactor dumping flour into a large, mostly flat-bottomed wooden bowl, adding water, and then working the water-laden flour into dough and shaping that dough by hand into flat disks before cooking on a portable griddle (of a type also found in Viking archaeological sites) over an open fire.  As Chef John suggested, the breads were cooked until they developed at least a few black char marks, and no oil was used on the griddle.  It is true that the reenactor pretty much added his water all at once, instead of adding it gradually as Chef John suggests, and he hand-shaped his dough and did not "roll" it out, but that's because he was making the flatbread in the woods in winter and it was snowing.  :-)

Not The Scots' Fault!

Haggis, that infamous blend of meat and grain sewn into an animal stomach, has long been deemed to be a culinary joke played by the Scots on the rest of humanity.

Now, a Scottish butcher who has been researching the subject has announced that haggis was not invented in Scotland at all.  It was brought there... by the Vikings.  Seriously.

Apparently the word "haggis" itself appears to be of Scandinavian origin, arising from the Old Norse word haggw, which means to hack into pieces.  The earliest written recipe known in Scotland dates to about 1430 CE.  The butcher on whose research this claim is based, Joe Callaghan, also states that haggis, which is usually made from sheep, should actually be made from venison, since deer are indigenous to Scotland and sheep are not.  If you'd like to order some "staggis" from Mr. Callaghan's shop, go here.

There are news articles about this theory in the Telegraph and in Iceland Magazine for readers who want to know more, as well as a number of others that can be found with a Google search.  

An Intriguing Answer to the Viking Flatbread Question

If you're like me, you have attempted to make a flatbread that the Vikings might have made.  I've read any number of suggested recipes, but the ones I've tried have led to breads that were too thick, doughy and unappetizing.

Tonight, I found the video to the right of this post, which was produced by a modern chef/blogger/YouTuber who goes by the name "Chef John".  In the video, Chef John wasn't talking about Viking flatbread, or any one ethnic version of flatbread.  He was focusing on technique, not ingredients in any real sense.  He blogs about his technique here. 

Here's what Chef John suggests you do to make flatbread:

• Dump a quantity of flour (whatever kind of flour you choose to use), approximately sufficient to make as many flatbreads as you want, onto a smooth flat surface (such as a clean flat rock, a smooth board, a clean stone countertop).
• Make a depression or "well" in the center of your mound of flour.
• Slowly pour small amounts of water into your well.  Stir the water slowly into the flour.  As the water is incorporated into the flour, add a bit more and continue.  Stop adding water when you have a sticky dough that includes most of your flour.  Continue to mix the dough with your hand until it only sticks a little to your flat surface.
• Let the dough sit, covered, for about an hour.
• Remove a chunk of dough, and roll it into a thin disk-shaped piece of dough.  (Chef John points out that you can do this with a wooden dowel of a suitable thickness--you don't need a fancy "rolling pin".)
• Put the rolled-out dough disk into a flat, UNGREASED pan.  (My guess is that this works best on cast-iron or a non-stick surface.)
• Cook the dough until it forms bubbles.  Flip it over.  Do this until you have some char marks on both sides.
• Remove the cooked bread from the heat.

The Vikings had portable griddles--a flatbread-sized iron disk attached to a long handle that it's believed were held over the fire to cook flatbreads.  However, Chef John's technique could have been used with those, too.  

I think this is worth trying out.  I don't think I'll have time to do that this weekend, but Chef John's technique sounds like a better way to make "Viking" flatbread than overly complex efforts to try to deduce the right mix of modern flours or other ingredients to use for a "Viking" flatbread.  One thing that convinces me that this technique might have been closer to what the Vikings did is the fact that it doesn't require measuring quantities or a long list of ingredients.  Best of all (from both my point of view and the way the Vikings likely cooked) is that you can make flatbreads in this way in any quantity from tiny to large, just by starting with more flour or less flour--you add the water bit by bit either way.  

I plan to try this recipe with barley flour first because it's clear that barley was used by the Vikings.  When I get to try this technique out, I'll blog my observations.

EDIT:  2/2/2018  Great minds think alike!  On the Facebook page of a Viking reenactment group based in Canada called Ðrottin I found a video showing the making of flatbread, using a very similar technique to Chef John's! The page can be found here. (You want the "How to Make Viking Style Bread" video.)  The comments on the video did point out that the Ðrottin video uses modern flour, and the Vikings would have access only to quern-ground flour, whether wheat or barley, and such flour would be quite coarse.  I'll try my modern fine barley flour anyway and see what happens.

What Killed the Greenland (Viking) Colony?

Anglo-Saxon reliquary cross with walrus
ivory figure.  10th c. CE.  Source:
 Wikipedia (Modifications made by Johnbod).

It's well known that at least two Viking settlements were established in southern Greenland, sometime around the end of the Viking period. By about 1500 CE, however, archaeological evidence shows that the colony had died and its last colonists had either left or perished.  Why?

That's the question that archaeologists keep asking themselves.  It's true that the death of the colony comes during the so-called Little Ice Age, a time when the climate of Northern Europe in general and Greenland in particular became significantly colder.   But the Inuit, with whom the Greenland colonists had dealings, easily survived colder weather further north.

I'm writing about this question because it appears to be based, critically, upon food and food sources, making it relevant to this blog.  My immediate inspiration is this article from Science Magazine, which cites research that contradicts the currently popular theory on this question.

The popular theory was that the Scandinavian colonists refused to learn from the Inuit practice of living on arctic and subarctic marine mammals and continued to try to feed themselves with cattle and other agricultural products even after the climate had become too cold for such food sources to provide enough food to sustain them.  However, newer archaeological analysis and evidence tends to show that the Greenland colonists did turn to the sea, like the Inuit, for sustenance and trade:

• Excavations of the colonists' trash heaps shows that 60%-80% of the bones found were, not cattle or domesticated farm animals, but from seals.  That indicates that seals formed a large portion of the colonists' diet;
• Finds of buttons made from walrus ivory;
• Analysis of the bones of settlers, showing that, over the four centuries of the colonies' existence, the settlers ate increasing amounts of marine protein.

The article also notes that walrus ivory was highly prized in Europe and that there was great motive to hunt walrus for that reason, and the presence of walrus bone in the settlement trash heaps indicates that the rest of the walrus was not wasted.  Daniel Serra's book An Early Meal theorizes that the Vikings who did not leave Scandinavia probably ate more protein from the sea than had previously been assumed by scholars, especially during the lean time of the year (summer; after winter supplies of other foods had been exhausted but before the next harvest).  His research further supports the idea that the Norse in Greenland were not fatally averse to eating sea animals.  

Even more interestingly, other new evidence confirms that the settlers in Greenland did not practice wasteful agricultural techniques, as had previously been thought.  Newly gathered pollen and soil data shows that attention was paid to allowing fields and forests to recover after tilling and turf cutting, and that pastures were maintained with manure fertilizer and irrigation ditches.  

So what ended the colony?  The end probably was due to insufficient food, but that does not seem to have resulted from the colonists' intransigence and negligence as previously thought. Climate change made the once marginally viable possibility of agriculture in southern Greenland non-viable. Fishing may not have been sufficient for all the colony's needs (note that the evidence shows a steady increase in marine protein over time).  Economic changes may also have hastened the colony's end. According to the Science magazine article, some scholars now think that walrus ivory fell out of favor later in Europe during the late Middle Ages, when European visits to Africa brought increasing amounts of elephant ivory into European markets.   That suggests that walrus ivory was no longer sufficiently prized to make it possible to supplement the colonists' marine diet by trading walrus ivory for foodstuffs with the rest of Europe.

There is a lesson here, I think.  A neat, plausible, one-cause answer to a historical question is usually wrong--even if it comes from the experts!  Especially when it assumes that people from earlier times were willfully stupid about a survival matter such as food.   

Skerpikjøt and Garnatálg

Map, in Danish, showing the Faroe Islands in relation to Europe
(Wikimedia Commons)

When they lack firmer evidence, archaeologists sometimes reference "folk" practices about the making of food or clothing on the supposition that such practices preserve information about how such items were made when those items needed to be handmade by each household. Scholars are reluctant to make such references, because it is usually impossible to prove how far back in time such practices went, making any inferences that might be drawn speculative.

Recently, I saw an article about food that makes me wonder whether it provides information about Viking era cuisine.  The article appeared, of all places, in the on-line edition of Newsweek at the end of January. It talks about cuisine in the Faroe Islands and can be found here.

The Faroe Islands (named in Danish as Faerøerne on the above map), also called simply the Faroes, are an archepelago in the north Atlantic Ocean that was settled by the Norse around 600-800 CE; it remains unclear whether the islands were already inhabited by other people at the time.  The Faroes are now an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark; its official website may be found here.   The images on the country's website, as well as other pictures easily locatable on the Internet, suggest that the Faroes may be the real-world inspiration for the rocky islands that feature as the setting for the movie "How to Train Your Dragon."  They are a place where people have lived for centuries by using their ingenuity to obtain enough to eat.  In a country as small as the Faroes (where the total land area is only 1,399 square kilometers) that is surrounded by the north Atlantic, that means most of your food comes from whatever land animals you can raise, or from the sea. Moreover, before modern refrigeration techniques became available, other means of preserving meat had to be employed, and in this regard the Faroes were even more constrained than Scandinavia. Professor Jóan Pauli Joensen, one of the people the Newsweek reporter interviewed for the article, noted that the only technologies available on the Faroes in early times were drying and fermenting; even salt was rare.

The highlight of the Newsweek article was its discussion of how a Faroese restaurant called Koks is taking the native foods of the Faroes and re-inventing them as haute cuisine.  The title of this post names two of the traditional Faroese foods featured in the Newsweek article: skerpikjøt—air-dried and fermented lamb, and garnatálg—a rolled sausage made from sheep’s fat and innards. Apparently, such Faroese meat dishes have exotic flavors and mouth qualities rivaling those of sushi, according to Newsweek's reporter, who writes about an entree consisting of fermented whale meat and salt-cured whale blubber:

After explaining the region’s specialties, Johannes Jensen, managing director of the Hotel Føroyar [where Koks is housed], offered me a platter of waxy new potatoes and instructed me to place one atop a canapé of fermented pilot whale and a square of salt-cured whale blubber the size of a pat of butter. “First the whale meat, then the blubber and last the potato,” he said, layering the ingredients on his plate. The whale meat was the color of onyx, arranged in thin slices that resembled black truffles. The translucent pieces of blubber looked like miniature daikon-radish cakes and gave off a faintly floral aroma. The potato was a potato. ....

Within seconds my palate was flooded with a cacophony of intense flavors. High-toned treble notes of herbaceous and floral flavors were followed by deeply funky, musky earthiness. The texture was thick and oily, and the potato had prolonged the act of chewing it. The experience remains firmly fixed in my memory.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Jensen shrugged, before adding with a note of concern, “I hope we haven’t shocked you.”

Of course, most exotic, gourmet foods are an acquired taste, from Limburger cheese and caviar to durian fruit and olives. If the fermented meats and whale blubber of the Faroes have taste qualities that can be described in such imaginative terms, there may indeed be a market for them as international delicacies--especially if the "Viking diet" takes off in popularity in the U.S. and Western Europe. Keep your eyes open for skerpikjøt and garnatálg to show up in a gourmet food store near you.

A "Viking" Restaurant

Readers who were amused by my Christmas posting discussing the fact that the "Viking" diet is apparently becoming the new "healthy" diet fad may also be amused by this article from The Daily Mail, interviewing a chef who has opened a restaurant devoted to serving "Viking" food.

The chef, Jesper Lynge, has opened his restaurant in Aalborg, Denmark.  He has clearly done some reading about Viking cuisine, as one of his dishes is a risotto-like side dish, made from barley.  That idea for a dish reminds me of the rye-based "ryesotto" recipe that appears in A Culinary Journey Through Time, which I reviewed for this blog when the English language edition was published back in 2012.  However, it does not appear that Mr. Lynge has read An Early Meal a more recently published book attempting to reconstruct Viking cuisine, since venison and other game meats appear to be a mainstay of his menu. Game may not be inappropriate for a "Viking" restaurant, though. Restaurants are often places to get a celebratory meal that is more elaborate and substantial than one's daily fare, and Serra and Tunberg's comments that game seems to have rarely been eaten by the Vikings might indicate that a meal with game as the main course would have been rare and celebratory meal for them.

Interestingly, Mr. Lynge is quoted as saying that pork "one of the most festive animals that were present in the Viking time" though archaeological finds suggest that beef was more commonly eaten. Mr. Lynge asserts that he does not use ingredients that were not available to the Vikings, and from my reading of the article that seems to be quite true (though one could argue about whether the proportions in which he uses period ingredients were characteristic of the Vikings' actual diet). The dishes discussed in the article (which included a few of Mr. Lynge's recipes) sound very tasty, though, and if I ever manage to visit Denmark, I will definitely visit his restaurant.

Pig Stew

My "Viking" pork stew

While I was reading An Early Meal, I kept an eye out, as I always do, for a recipe or two that might suit my taste and that of my (primarily) carnivorous husband.  

It was surprisingly hard work.  Serra and Tunberg emphasize, rightly, that the Viking age Scandinavians were largely dairy farmers, and at many locations in the Scandinavia of the period, cheese, skyr (a soft cheese very similar to yogurt), and butter were key components of the diet. I happen to like yogurt and cheese, but my husband, Eric, detests almost all forms of cheese and doesn't care much for yogurt--making that class of recipes a non-starter in my home.

There are recipes for roasted meats in An Early Meal, but my kitchen set up does not make roasting meat easy to do on a weekly basis.  Frying fish would be possible in my kitchen (and Serra and Tunberg theorize that in the spring and summer months Viking age Scandinavians increased their protein and food intake with fish), but, again, my husband is not fond of fish.  Unusual meats (such as the calf-tongue recipe in the book) drew a spousal grimace, and vegetarian porridges are always a hard sell for someone as meat-oriented as he.

That left me with Serra and Tunburg's proposed recipe for wild boar stew.  It features boar meat, leeks and kale gently simmered in butter, with pancetta to add an additional dash of flavor, and "3 dl of wheat, whole seeds without the hull" to add the starch that makes for a more complete meal.  The major seasoning was fresh thyme, which I had used in other recipes that my husband liked.  Best of all, I could see how to adapt the recipe for my crockpot, which  I usually use for stew-making.  So I decided that would be the recipe I would try.

To my surprise, our local butcher had wild boar available in the form of boar chops.  When I brought them home, Eric looked at me so appealingly that I didn't have the heart to reserve the actual boar meat (which we enjoyed) for the stew.  So I bought ordinary pork roast to chop into chunks for the stew.  I wasn't sure where to find wheat in the form of "whole seeds without the hull", or even exactly what they are despite the Wikipedia article on the subject, so I made do with buckwheat kashi.  Leeks, kale, and pancetta are easy to find at my local supermarket, as was fresh thyme, and I had mustard powder at home; that completed the ingredients I needed.

Serra and Tunberg's recipe directs the cook to boil the boar meat, gently fry the vegetables in butter, then add in the meat and stock created from boiling it, along with the mustard, kashi and thyme.  I don't have a pot appropriately sized for this approach, so my plan was to saute the kale and leeks in butter, transfer them to the crockpot, brown the meat in butter with the pancetta, add the meat to the crockpot, and then add in some beef bouillon and the kashi.  I had never cooked with kale before, and I was surprised at how coarse the leaves are and how much cooking they needed to be manageable.  In the end, I only used about 300g of the 500g of kale called for in the recipe.  

Despite all the compromises I made, my stew looked a lot like the picture in An Early Meal (see the photograph above).  Unfortunately, choosing domestic pork was a mistake, as it made the final product a bit bland, but overall I liked the result.

Eric, unfortunately, did not.  He complained that the stew had an "odd aftertaste" which we ultimately concluded was the flavor of the kale.  (This was confirmed later, when I made another batch of stew without the kale but with the sauteed leeks, a vegetable he really likes.)  Perhaps I'll try this stew again, without the kale but with boar meat and a different period vegetable, such as turnips.  Or maybe I'll have better luck with Serra and Tunberg's proposed recipe for goose stew.

A Thoughtful Meal

Flatbread

Turnips

Recently, I obtained a copy of Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg's new book on Viking food.  The citation is: Serra, Daniel and Tunberg, Hanna. An Early Meal: A Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey (ChronoCopia Publishing AB 2013).

Serra and Tunberg's book is beautified by a great many tasteful, full-color photographs of the stews, cheeses, breads, and other products of their recipes.  I have chosen to illustrate this review of their work with Wikimedia Commons images of foods that were commonly eaten in Scandinavia during the Viking period.  

Like other such books on Viking cuisine, the conclusions propounded by An Early Meal are grounded in deductions based on archaeological finds as to the foods, cooking techniques, and cooking vessels available in Scandinavia during the Viking period.  But Serra and Tunberg have taken a much deeper look at the available evidence than other books on the subject that I have read.  Unlike the other books, they have gathered much more information, and analyzed it more comprehensively, taking into consideration not only the food stuffs and cooking technology available to the Vikings, but also the seasons of the year during which particular foods would have been obtainable.  Then they considered these questions in terms of the different conditions extant in different major settlements of the Viking world--Lofoten, Kaupang, Lejre, Hedeby, Jorvik, Uppakra, and Birka.  The result is a more detailed proposed recreation of Viking cuisine that takes into account regional differences and is consequently more convincing than any other recreation of which I have read.

Cod

Haddock

Although I have a general familiarity with the archaeological discoveries relating to the foods that were eaten in Viking age Scandinavia, Serra and Tunberg discuss some critical considerations that had not occurred to me, and that lead to conclusions that I, at least, found surprising.  The conclusions that surprised me include the following:

The hungriest time was summer.  We are accustomed to thinking of summer as a time of plenty. But that is because we can always import foods from areas where "harvest" comes earlier or later than it does for us, ensuring a fairly constant food supply (and a great variety of different types of foods) year-round.  Serra and Tunberg point out that most of the Vikings' food supply was local, and peaked in the autumn--which was when the cereal crops were harvested and food animals that could not economically be fed during the winter were slaughtered.   Although some food items, such as green herbs and berries, became available in spring or summer, they would not be sufficient to feed a hard-working populace, and milk had to be taken carefully, to avoid starving the animals' young and thus diminishing future meat sources.  Perhaps the answer to the question in my last post, "What did the Vikings eat during the hottest days of summer?" was simply "very little."  Or maybe the answer was "fish"--since ocean fishing and river fishing likely would have been an option, and might not have left many traces in the archaeological record.

Thyme

Kale

Sweets were rare. Serra and Tunberg note that apiculture did not seem to exist in Scandinavia during the Viking age, either because of ignorance of the relevant techniques, or because bees did not survive the winter months in such a cold climate.  Thus honey was an imported good (the authors speculate that it may have been imported from the Baltic countries) and when imported was probably used primarily to make mead rather than for sweetening everyday food. The authors point out that other than fruits (many of which were more tart than sweet), the malt remaining from the beer brewing process, and imported honey, there were no sweeteners available in Viking age Scandinavia.

Meats were eaten preserved more often than raw.  If most slaughtering was done in the autumn to conserve food resources to last through the winter, spring and summer months, it follows that most meat was preserved in some fashion. The authors propose that meat may have been pickled in whey, or in salt, or even smoked to preserve it.  Whatever means were most commonly used to preserve meat, the point remains that cooking and eating freshly killed meat (other than perhaps fish) was not a common occurrence.

Butter (Borough Market, London)

Angelica 

Game was eaten much less often than one might think.  My husband's first thought was that hunting could have obtained game animals, providing fresh meat for Viking age tables. But that game meat would have to be butchered and prepared for table somewhere, and Serra and Tunberg report that surprisingly few bones from game animals have been discovered by archaeologists in the vicinity of period settlements. Perhaps there simply was not enough small game in Scandinavia to make snares and small game hunting a profitable enterprise, and large game animals (such as reindeer) would be challenging, if not impossible, to butcher and preserve if killed during the hungry winter and early spring months.

Frying was limited as a cooking technique.   The authors note that most cooking was done in iron cauldrons or heavy soapstone (or in some parts of the area, ceramic) placed in proximity to a fire. Such equipment would allow for slow sauteing of onions, ramsons or leeks (and many of the recipes in An Early Meal make use of this technique), but would not cook meats effectively.  

Consideration of these techniques leads inevitably to the conclusion that the dominant flavors in Viking cuisine, as in Scandinavian cuisine today, are sour ones.  Yogurts and cheeses were popular with the Vikings as they are with their descendants, though they were much more important for the Vikings because they provided a means to use milk long after the liquid product would have spoiled. Serra and Tunberg observe that whey likely was used served to preserve meats, which would give them a sour taste also.   Vegetables such as kale could also have been preserved by pickling. Even the berries and crabapples most commonly eaten by the Vikings were tart rather than sweet.

I have long been fascinated by the material culture of Viking age Scandinavia, but it had not occurred to me before how very different their foodways were from the ones familiar to me. I don't mean the scarcity of fried foods, the shortage of sweets, and the large number of sour-tasting dishes--though those are important differences.  But an American living in the 21st century CE does not have to follow the seasons very closely in choosing food.  The Vikings had to do so as a matter of survival, and the variety of foodstuffs available to them was small by comparison to what I can buy inexpensively at my local supermarket just a few miles away.

I was even more forcibly reminded of the vast cultural difference between us and the Vikings when I attempted to select a recipe from An Early Meal to feed myself and my husband--but that's a matter for another post.

Flatbreads

Shortly after I'd read Serra and Tunberg's book An Early Meal, I followed a link from Katrin Kania's blog, A stitch in time, to an article about a food writer who has been experimenting with recreating ancient flatbreads.

The author's name is Paula Marcoux and her book is called Cooking With Fire.  Her book is very different from Serra and Tunberg's.  Instead of working primarily from the evidence of foodstuffs and kitchen equipment, Marcoux focuses on the actual physical techniques of early period cooking--details such as how to build a proper cookfire and how to make the stone-lined pits Serra and Tunberg discuss--and teaches the reader how to perform those techniques.  The link Katrin provided was to an article about Marcoux's book on io9, but you can read a better article about Marcoux's work here, at SplendidTable.org.

In the Splendid Table article, Marcoux describes her version of a Scandinavian flatbread that Vikings might have made:  she calls it  Protohistoric Multigrain Flatbread, to poke a bit of fun at archaeologist pretensions. Marcoux devised this recipe from remains of carbonized bread found in Scandinavian cremation graves.  She observes:

When things are burned, they are often partially burned, lightly carbonized, and that preserves grain extremely well. Archaeologists have been able to determine exactly the components and shapes of these flatbreads, which I found entirely fascinating. Once I'd learned what types of grains they were made of, the types of fats that were in there, the shapes of the grains, the shapes of the flatbreads, there's nothing more to it -- that's basically a recipe.

I picked out a few of my favorite combinations and made them. It turned out they were really delicious, they keep very well and they are fun to make. You can leave a little hole in the middle, string them up and they keep for ages -- that's how people in Scandinavia used to keep their grain crop. If they kept the grain in its own natural state, it would go moldy or get mildewy. But if they made it into bread right away and then strung it up in their houses, it would keep for the entire season until the next harvest time

Although I'll put Marcoux's book on my wishlist, her Protohistoric Multigrain Flatbread recipe can be found here. It's made from a combination of oats and rye flour. I may give it a try, as best I can manage in my kitchen, on a gas stovetop with just a skillet. If the taste is appealing enough, I may invest in a long-handled griddle of the type the Vikings reputedly used to make flatbreads, hoping to have an opportunity to cook them over a fire sometime.

Vikings--Summer Food?

Lingonberries, a period fruit
(Wikimedia Commons)

I haven't updated this blog in a long time because I haven't been doing a lot of experimental cooking, or reading new books about food, and those are the two things I enjoy doing most with this blog. 

A major reason I haven't been making a lot of experimental recipes is that it's been warm here for the past week or so.  The Vikings ate a lot of soups and stews, and although I enjoy making and eating soups and stews, I haven't had much interest in hot food or experimenting with new hot recipes.

It occurred to me that, although Scandinavia is very far north it does have a summer, and in the Viking era, which took place during a warm spell before the mini-Ice Age of the late Middle Ages, it must have been warm enough to make hot food seem unappetizing, at least sometimes.  What did Vikings eat when it was too warm for stew?  It occurred to me that the likeliest foods would be fruits and nuts, flatbread, cheese, and skyr, those being the foods available to the Vikings that require little (flatbread) or no cooking (the other foods listed).

This past weekend, I finally bought a copy of Daniel Serra's and Hanna Tunberg's book, An Early Meal.  It may have information in it that will shed light on the summer food question.  I expect to enjoy reading it, and after I finish it I will review it for this blog.

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.  

Real Viking Grog

I recently found an interesting report of archaeological research suggesting that Viking age Scandinavians consumed an alcoholic grog made with locally available substances, "including honey, bog cranberry, lingonberry, bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper, birch tree resin, and cereals including wheat, barley and/or rye" but that also often included imported grape wine.   Clearly, the Vikings were as interested in exploring ways to give their booze an interesting taste as any culture has been.

As my readers may deduce, Patrick McGovern is behind this research.  You can find a news report on the research, as well as a link to download the researchers' full article, at http://phys.org/news/2014-01-evidence-nordic-grog-scandinavia.html. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Bog Butter

Bog butter find*

Ful medames, as I mentioned in my post on that beany breakfast dish a few weeks ago, may originally have been prepared by burying a container of fava beans in the ground.  Yesterday I learned from the Nordic Food Lab that there's a more common food that was prepared, or at least stored, through burial: butter. 

Archaeological finds in Scandinavia and Ireland include caches of long-buried butter, changed by centuries underground into a waxy substance that can be confused with tallow.  However, because bogs create an anerobic environment and highly acidic environment, bacteria do not proliferate, and butter buried in an appropriate container does not spoil once buried.

Most bog butter finds feature some kind of container. Often that container is a wooden barrel or churn, as is depicted in the image to the left. Baskets apparently also were used. In addition, sometimes the butter was also wrapped in plant material, such as sedge leaves or moss. 

The folks at Nordic Food Lab believe that such burials were motivated, not just by the desire to preserve butter in a milieu where refrigeration technology did not exist, but by a desire to impart different flavor qualities to butter, making it more interesting. So they decided to make their own "bog butter" to demonstrate the plausibility of this theory, and they wrote about the process of butter making and burying at length here.

The Nordic Food Lab folks chose to wrap their freshly churned butter with hypnum moss and place the wrapped butter in birchbark containers before burying it about a meter (39 inches) deep.  They did not add salt to the butter before burying it, because no salt is found in the bog butter finds.  Consequently, the Nordic Food Lab people suggest that burial was used for butter preservation when salt was unavailable.  Several different batches were made and buried, in order to permit digging up the butter at different times to see whether the flavor changed as the butter aged.  The first batch was dug up and tasted after three months.  This is what Nordic Food Lab reports about that experience:

In its time underground the butter did not go rancid, as one would expect butter of the same quality to do in a fridge over the same time. The organoleptic qualities of this product were too [sic] many surprising, causing disgust in some and enjoyment in others. The fat absorbs a considerable amount of flavor from its surroundings, gaining flavor notes which were described primarily as ‘animal’ or ‘gamey’, ‘moss’, ‘funky’, ‘pungent’, and ‘salami’. These characteristics are certainly far-flung from the creamy acidity of a freshly made cultured butter, but have been found useful in the kitchen especially with strong and pungent dishes, in a similar manner to aged ghee.

A second batch was dug up after a year-and-a-half, but the post does not go into details about its flavor, saying only, "It is still mossy, green, and earthy – maybe it was the fact that we were also wet, a little smelly, and surrounded by the moss like the thing itself, but the butter, eaten with muddy hands in the clearing in the bog, tasted really good."

What interests me about this experiment is its implications for Viking era cuisine.  We tend to think of butter as the creamy, slightly salty product we purchase from the local market.  The existence of a period-available technique that does not involve salt and gives a strong flavor to butter has implications for Viking food.  If nothing else, it indicates that Viking food may have been more strongly and interestingly flavored than many people have imagined. 



*  Line drawing of a partly destroyed wooden barrel containing bog butter, found in Ireland. From A Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy (1857). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Chemistry First

After the last flatbread experiment, it occurred to me that while tastes and technologies may have changed since the heyday of the Vikings, the relevant food chemistry has not. Thus, it would make sense for me to see what kinds of recipes are used to make modern flatbreads, and then try to adapt those recipes with knowledge of known Viking ingredients and cooking techniques in mind.

It turns out that most of the flatbread recipes I found on line--for naan, ciabatta, pita bread, and the like--all contain an ingredient that causes the dough to rise somewhat either before or during the cooking process. The rising ingredients found in the other flatbreads are either baking soda, baking powder, or yeast.

Baking soda was not, so far as I know, used in food during the Viking age, and baking powder was invented in the 19th century, so that leaves me with yeast as a period rising agent.  Since the Vikings couldn't just visit a supermarket and buy a packet of yeast as the Internet recipes I've seen require, I have but one possibility to consider--sourdough.

I'm surprised I didn't think seriously about the use of sourdough by the Vikings sooner. My mother experimented very successfully with sourdough recipes when she was about my age, and all of her projects (particularly her doughnuts, yum) turned out very well.

Sourdough, as Wikipedia correctly explains, is made by a process that encourages yeasts that are naturally present in flour to ferment your bread dough. Essentially, you make a dough "starter" from flour and water, and in time the natural yeasts present in the flour begin their own fermentation process that results in leavening. Once the starter has reached an appropriate level of yeast activity, you just use a bit of the starter an an ingredient in your bread projects instead of store-bought yeast, periodically adding new flour and water to keep the existing yeast culture in the "starter" going, a process which can continue indefinitely (I think my mother kept our dough starter going for six months before she got tired of making so much bread).

Two sourdough loaves.  Front: 90% white flour, 10% rye sourdough loaf proofed in a coiled-cane brotform. Back: A 3-pound whole-wheat miche.  (Wikimedia Commons)

Use of sourdough would fit with Viking material culture in two other ways as well. First, breads made with sourdough are, as the name implies, slightly sour in taste, and sour tastes were very familiar to the Vikings (such flavors appear in period dairy foods such as skyr, whey, and cheese, to name a few). Second, and perhaps more importantly to a northern farming culture for which food preservation was a major issue, sourdough breads are naturally mold-resistant.  That is a factor that also matters to me personally, because I live in an area where high humidity is prevalent and breads tend to acquire mold quickly.

I cannot recall seeing much discussion of the potential use of sourdough by the Vikings (though A Culinary Journey Through Time includes a sourdough bread recipe).  But this seems like a useful avenue for experimentation.  I think I will read up on the process of making sourdough bread, and try making some pan-fried flatbreads with sourdough instead of simple flour-and-liquid mixtures. 

Another Try at Flatbread

Tonight, I made another attempt at a Viking flatbread.

I forget the source of this recipe, but it's simple enough: one part barley flour to one-half part water. So I started with a cup of barley flour and a half-cup of water. I added a teaspoon or so of honey to give the mixture more flavor, and ultimately about another quarter-cup of water to give the mixture a smooth, if slightly thick, consistency. Then I greased a skillet with a pat of butter, scooped in the batter (it didn't pour, exactly) and fried each puddle of batter for a minute or two on both sides.

The result looked and tasted a lot like pancakes, only thinner than the typical pancake,* greasier, and not as sweet. They tasted best with fruit preserves instead of the stew. I may try making these again, thinning the batter out some more so that the pancakes come out thinner and larger (these came out to about 3 inches by 6 inches in size).

Eric was sufficiently hungry that he had finished his stew before I got the flatbreads done, so he didn't get to sample them. I saved the leftover dough, and may try again tomorrow.

EDIT (9/11/2013) (to add notes about Eric's experience and to add some additional observations to my original text): Eric was curious to try my flatbreads after I told him about this post. I used the rest of the dough to make him a few, which he tried with butter. He said he found them a bit bland that way.  So he ate the rest with maple syrup and pronounced them good.

Some proposed recipes for Viking flatbreads suggest making them with buttermilk; doing so would probably make these flatbreads more like what we think of as pancakes and would make them even more substantial and tasty. More like "buckwheat" pancakes (to which Eric compared them after eating some). All the same, I'd like to manage making a more savory and crunchy flatbread for eating with stew. More experimentation is clearly needed.

EDIT (9/12/2013):  I looked back at my recipe today and I see that I got the proportions wrong:  it actually should have been 1 1/2 cups of barley flour to 1/2 cup of water.  I'm glad of the error; the last recipe I tried that was so flour-heavy produced a lumpen and unappetising product.  

* Wikipedia notes that American recipes for pancakes generally include a raising agent while British ones do not. Since I am accustomed to American pancakes, the pancakes I achieved with this simple recipe seemed thin to me. However, they tasted very similar to the pancakes I'm used to.

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.

The Best Beer to Drink With Viking Food?

My husband recently told me about an article on Popular Mechanics' website, of all things, about another ancient brew the Dogfish Head Brewery is planning to release. That article can be found here.   Dogfish has their own article on their website here (note that you will have to input your birthdate, and that birthdate will need to be consistent with legal drinking age, in order to view the article).

This time, the brewery has made a putative early Scandinavian brew, which will be put on sale this fall. Named Kvasir, after the "first human in Norse mythology", the brew, based on finds in a Danish tomb dating to 3,300 B.C.E., is made from bog myrtle, honey, lingonberries, and bog cranberries. After my sad experience with other Dogfish historical brews, I doubt I'll be taste-testing this one personally, but beer connoisseurs may want to check Kvasir out, either alone or as part of a Viking or early Scandinavian food experiment.