fd-Norse-msg – 3/16/08
Norse and Viking food.
NOTE: See also the files: Norse-msg, fd-Normans-msg, names-Norse-msg, N-drink-ves-msg, Norse-food-art, Norse-crafts-bib, N-drink-trad-art.
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From: Maggie.Mulvaney at fp.co.nz (Maggie Mulvaney)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: Viking Recipes
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 05:11:39 GMT
On 13 Apr 1997 19:18:53 -0400, gunnora at bga.COM (Gunnora Hallakarva) wrote:
>I am trying to locate Viking Age recipes and modern books discussing recipes
>of the Viking Age, the Anglo Saxons, and medieval Scandinavia.
>I would appreciate any information you may discover
Anglo-Saxon books publish Anne Hagen's two books on Anglo-Saxon food
and food production.
I have not seen anything in English on medieval Scandinavia, but a
recently acquired bibliography gives the following two entries on food
in Denmark (o/ denotes the slashed o);
* Ko/kkenfunktioner, ko/kkener og ko/kkento/j i det senmiddelalderlige
Danmark (ca. 1400-1600) / Bi Skaarup. - Ho/jbjerg :
Middelalder-Arkaeologisk Nyhedsbrev, 1989.
* Mad og o/l i Danmarks middelalder / Erik Kjersgaard. - Kbh. :
Nationalmuseet, cop. 1978.
I have not got these two books myself (yet!), so if anyone knows more
I'd appreciate the info too.
/Muireann ingen Eoghain
**********************************************************
* MMY * Maggie.Mulvaney at fp.co.nz *
* Maggie Mulvaney * http://www.nmia.com/~entropy/maggie/ *
**********************************************************
From: allilyn at juno.com (LYN M PARKINSON)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 00:53:28 EDT
Subject: SC - Re: sca-cooks: viking's pies
On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 19:19:14 -0400 "Philip W. Troy" <troy at asan.com>
writes:
>> Depending on where they happened to be, the viking cook could have
produced any or all of the following :
>> >> apple pie/tart
>> cherry pie/tart
>> gooseberry pie/tart
Adamantius answers:
>Taillevent has a recipe for Norse pies. Don't recall at the moment
>what's in them, or how truly Norse they may or may not be. Savory,
>rather than sweet, though. Similar to a bunch of such pies that
>contain things like cooked egg yolks, ground meat and/or chunks of
>bird, bone marrow, cheese, etc.
Norse Pies, from the James Prescott translation
Take cooked meat chopped very small, pine nut paste, currants, harvest
cheese crumbled very small, a bit of sugar and a little salt.
That's the entire recipe. Is it Norse, you Vikings out there?
I usually use farmer's cheese when harvest cheese is called for, but I'm
now wondering if that's the wrong assumption. Cheeses were made in late
Spring, after the calves/kids/lambs/??? were weaned, and you had some
rennet from a calf stomach handy. By Autumn, how much would such a
cheese ripen? Enough to crumble? I've also read somewhere that the
stomach pieces could be dried, and used later, whenever you wanted to
make more cheese. The only cheese I've made was the one in Elinor
Fettisplace's Receipt Book, which is very good, by the way. I don't have
the equiptment for cheese making or recipes for the various sorts.
Would some of you cheese-makers tell us about it?
Allison
From: "Philip W. Troy" <troy at asan.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 23:06:49 -0400
Subject: SC - Period Viking Food = Norse Pies???
Unto the List, greetings from G. Tacitus Adamantius!
Sorry about this: I don't remember the specific title of this thread,
but someone had asked for a recipe for Norse pies, which I had said were
to found in the Viandier de Taillevent. Generally I'm a little leary of
taking up the bandwidth with recipes, especially since I tend to work
straight from the primary source and do the dish just a bit differently
each time. So, just for the benefit of those who may not have a copy of
the books involved, I'll post two recipes for Norse Pies.
The first from Taillevent, Scully translation:
"Norse Pies. Take finely chopped, well-cooked meat, pine-nut paste,
currants, finely crumbled rich cheese, a little sugar and very little
salt."
The recipe immediately following this in Taillevent instructs one on
how to use this same filling to make Lettuces -- small round fried
pasties that appear to be a form of chewets. A likely etymology for the
term "chewets" is that they are shaped like a cabbage, "chou" in French.
The second, more involved recipe is from Le Menagier de Paris, Powers
translation:
"Norwegian Pasties be made of cod's liver and sometimes with fish
minced therewith. And you must first parboil them for a little and then
mince them and set them in little pasties the size of a threepenny
piece, with fine powder thereon. And when the pastrycook brings them not
cooked in the oven, they be fried whole in oil and it is on a fish day;
and on a meat day they be made of beef marrow recooked, that is to wit
the marrow is put in a pierced spoon, and the pierced spoon with the
marrow therein is put in the broth of the pot of meat, and left there
for as long as you would leave an unplucked chicken in hot water to warm
it up; then set it in cold water, then cut up the marrow and round it
into big balls or little bullets, then carry them, to the pastrycook,
who puts them by fours or threes in a pasty with fine powder thereon.
And without putting them in the oven they be cooked in fat."
Now, the name of these dishes in late-fourteenth-century French is
something like Pastez Nourrois, and I'm willing to entertain the
possibility that the translation of the name into the expression "Norse
Pies" could be wrong. Also, Norwegian or not, they postdate the time of
Viking activity by at least 150 years or more, if I have my timeline
correct. So, technically, they are not especially Viking, unless they
are really from Norway and survived a couple of centuries virtually
unchanged, to be found alive and well in France. COULD be true, but...
Hot Cha Cha,
Adamantius
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 06:31:28 +0100 (MET)
From: Par Leijonhufvud <pkl at absaroka.obgyn.ks.se>
Subject: Viking are cookery (was: SC - Irish period recipes??)
On Sat, 8 Nov 1997 Tyrca at aol.com wrote:
>> There should have been seed (etc) analyses made at the digs in Dublin and
>> other places.
> So, as you are there, and I am not, are there sources for Viking cookery?
> Any cookbooks?
To the best of my knowledge there are no cookbooks from the Viking period
Scandinavia.
Apart from that there is only three ways we (AFAIK) have any knowledge of
that they ate: (1) pollen, seed and midden analysis, (2) actual finds of
foods (graves, postholes, etc), and (3) chemical analysis of food residues
on cooking and storage containers.
The first is the classical one, and I know there are data from many finds
on this subject. It will tell you what was available (though it can in
some cases be questionable if it was a weed or a cultivated crop), but not
how it was used. Animal fodder? Luxury export? Boiled, fried or baked?
The second category has given us some data, but mainly on things whose
context is rather uncertain in many cases (e.g. was the barley porrige
found in the grave a ritul item, or regular fare? Was the breads found in
Birka graves ritual? Was this lump once a piece of unleavened bread or
porrige?). That apart there are some food items that we do know about, and
that has been reconstructed from archaelogical data.
The third one is interesting, but it still will only indicate that a
certain item was eaten, we are excedingly unlikely to ever be able to
reconstruct a recipie from fatty acid residues in a earthen-ware cookpot.
In addition there are mentions of food in the sagas and the Edda (e.g.
Rigsthula, Lokesenna, Thrymskvida), but as these were written down much
later than the Viking era their value is questionable in many cases.
There is also the excavation of cookery implements that give us some idea
of what they had to play with.
/UlfR
- --
Par Leijonhufvud par.leijonhufvud at labtek.ki.se
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 18:21:37 -0700 (MST)
From: "Joseph M. Lane" <jlane at unm.edu>
Subject: Re: SC - Viking and early Irish foods
On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, Par Leijonhuvud wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, KKimes1066 wrote:
> > -- or that the native food was so unappetizing, that even the natives
> > couldn't stomach it all the time!!
>
> Whats wrong with whale and seal? Finnish style all-rye, sourdough bread
> with whole fishes baked in (not documentable, but nice anyway)? Herring?
> Mutton? Goat? Beef? Pork? Game? Honey? Pike? Perch? Salmon? Apples?
> Wheat, rye, barley, oats? Linseeds? Chickens? Skyr? Cheese?
> Blueberries? Lingonberries? Bunch of different root veggies? Peas?
> Sloe? Elderberries? Hazelnuts? Mustard? Horseradish? Eggs? Plums?
> Several different herbs?
I saw an interesting show on PBS detailing the Viking settlement in
Greenland and it's subsequent demise a few hundred years later. the
The Geologists documented a slowly cooling climate with a shorter growing
season. Slightly moister too (ergot on the rye). Archaeologists documented
an increase in cattle bones in the middens (trash piles) indicating that
they were eating their breeding stock. toward the end of the
Vikings' settlement period, dog bones appeared in the food midden. The
Eskimo settlements on the islands indicated abundant seafood (seals,
whales, fish) for the same time period. The Archaeologists concluded that
the Greenland Vikings were too dietary ethnocentric -- too ingrained in
their own culturally dictated menus to try the native foods. This refusal
to switch to seafoods meant their extinction. A very sad story.
> > Having grown up in north central Iowa, where the Nelsons outnumber
> > the Smith, Browns, and Joneses combined, I am firmly convinced that
> > I know the real reason the Norse went a viking.--- Lutefiske!---
A "Woodwright's Shop" episode narrated by Roy Underhill was devoted to a
visit to a medieval Danish manor -- to study the wood construction and
carving. He made an interesting observation that after a week in this
manor he discovered that the small unheated upper rooms were cramped and
unheated and the main hall was cramped and had no chimney. There smoke
diffused throught the hall and some escaped out a smoke hole in the roof.
He surmised that halfway through the winter many a Dane would take off in
the longboats rather than eat smoke and freeze for another three months.
This is also another interesting story. Hopefully, it will be rerun.
Arian Aurelia
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 22:43:04 +0000 (GMT)
From: Daria Anne Rakowski <dar3 at st-andrews.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: SC - Viking and early Irish foods-long
There has been some considerable discussion since I first composed this
and to save space (and time) I will append more to the bottom of this
response.
On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, Par Leijonhuvud wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:
> > I know of no extant cookbooks from the Viking age or early Irish. BUT....
>
> Neither do I, and I don't think they existed in the case of the Viking
> era: not that kind of literacy. Also: no books!
<snip>
I would disagree with that statement. A professor of mine from times
past once told me that 'one cannot argue from silence' In this he meant
that not only can we not argue that 'silence' is meaningful in source
criticism but also that 'silence' may not have been the case at all!.
Skaldic poetry is generally considered to be the oldest and most reliable
remnants of Norse society and are preserved, it is thought, whole and
relatively uncorrupted in many textual forums that often date to some time
within the twelfth/early thirteenth centuries. Not completely Viking but
certainly not a sign of previous illeteracy surely.
<snip>
> Ditto on the praise for Anne Hagens books. Probably the best source
> available.
On this we are agreed!
<snip>
> There is some food mentioned in period literary sources (e.g. Edda
> Saemundar), but not enough to go on. A couple of years ago I thought I
> had been able to document pit-cooking based on a line in (IIRC)
> Thrymskvida, but it proved to be translational figment (it turned out
> Thor just tossed an oxen on the fire, not into a cooking-pit). Darn.
Again, agreed except that there are sketchy descriptions in some of the
sagas that give small but clever clues to food prep. For example in
Eyrbyggja Saga, chapter 39, there is specific reference to porridge being
consumed regularly as well as how and where and in what it was prepared.
The mention of the specific role of cook I also found interesting. I
haven't the time to hunt them up now but there are more brief, cryptic
comments like that one in many sagas.(Eiriks Saga Rauda, Groenlandinga
Saga, Orkneyinga Saga) As was mentioned, archaeology is an
invaluable resource for putting together a picture of Viking eating
habits. Anna Ritchie, amongst others, has done many excavations in Norse
settlement areas in the Northern and Western Isles. (Orkney, Hebrides
etc.) She has postulated that there were two ranges of fish size that were
consumed in these areas, a 'small' range where the fish were "normal"
sized, ie. 15cm or so. Then a larger range that got into the half-meter or
bigger category with a large hole of evidence in the middle. That says
little other than that in the Orkneys fish of two size ranges were
consumed but there is more to it but could take a mini-thesis to
explore/explain properly. Bones and carbonized remains as well as middens
are invaluable resources. If you have the patience to wade through the
reports! ANother place to look might be the brief report made by G.Biglow
in the 11th Viking Congress on Caithness, Orkney and Shetland. (All NOrse
settlement areas) He has turned up some interesting evidence about
potential butchering techniques and a peculiar and exclusively Norse
methode of marrow extraction. Very interesting.
> One potential source that I haven't seen anything on is what was
> recorded regarding the customs of the Scandinavians while traveling and
> living in the east. Anyone know if this has been explored at all? It
> should be easier nowadays, when the "slavs and only slavs" doctrine is
> less prevalent over there.
I haven't heard of any but then it is a relatively under-developped field.
Again, I would think that archaeological reports (often only in
Russian/slavic language) are the best bet. Those are finally making their
way into the scholarly communities of the 'west' now. Would be a very
interesting line to approach.
Now, recently there was a mention of a lack of adaptation on the part of
the Norse inhabitants of Greeland. I am sorry to burst this particular
balloon but my dissertation is on the Greenland and Vinland settlements
and there is quite specific and detailed information on whaling and
sealing practices in both sagas (see above) THere is further
archaeological evidence that most assuredly puts paid to that nefarious
belief that the Greenlanders died horribly and crippled. The early reoprts
on some of the graves in the Eastern settlement were most definatly
skewed and the much of the scholarly community has now accepted that the
most likely result of the Greenlandish settlement was of slow
assimilation/quick death. Sorry about that rant but it is so near to my
heart that it bugs me when it is so horribly misrepresented.
I agree that we know very little about preparation methods but we do know
some. We have saga and verse refernces, we have archaeological evidence
and we have common cooking sense. We are looking at an a-ceramic culture
in many areas very dependant upon steatite use, which of course alters the
way they cooked. There is plenty more to be said but this is already
pretty darn long...
Coll
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 8:12:17 +1000
From: Robyn.Hodgkin at mailhost.dpie.gov.au
Subject: SC - Viking tucker
I did a bit of asking in the right places and have the following information
for anyone interested in Viking food:
The best general reference - with a section on food and drink (see p252ff)
is The Vikings, by Brondsted (with a slash through the o), published by
Penguin - may be out of print, but I'm sure amazon.com could find one.
Brondsted lists barley, wheat, herrings, hazelnuts, apples, elder- and
strawberries, hops, herrings, cabbage, onions, honey, wholemeal rye bread,
herrings, porridge, herrings, pork, veal, herrings, mutton, whale, herrings,
seal and bear (polar) meat - boiled for preference - beer and mead. And more
herrings.
The Vikings used milk, too, both fresh and in yoghurt. Their extensive
trading and other networks through the Mediterranean and especially into
Russia meant they came in contact with a wide variety of foods (King Harald,
for example, was commander of the Emperor's troops in Constantinople), but
homegrown stuff was pretty boring.
The sagas contain some references to food and drink: there's a description
of a feast in BEOWULF, but also try NJAL'S SAGA, KING HARALD'S SAGA,
LAXDAELA'S SAGA, The ELDERREDA (not sure of the spelling - my appetite for
sagas is very limited) and there would be references in the Icelandic sagas.
Kiriel
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 08:33:03 -0400
From: renfrow at skylands.net (Cindy Renfrow)
Subject: Re: SC - FWD - Viking recipes
FWD from rec.org.sca:
Thorfinn (dreamland1 at airnet.net) wrote:
> Anyone out there with knowlege of Norse(viking) food,
I have just added "Archaeological Finds of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Viking
Foods" to my website. It's a compilation of finds of foodstuffs categorized
by site; within site, by food type. It ain't much, but it's a start. Would
somebody let the cooks list know about this, please?
The URL is:
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/vikfood.html
****************************************************************
Carolyn Priest-Dorman Thora Sharptooth
capriest at cs.vassar.edu Frostahlid, Austrrik
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/vikresource.html
****************************************************************
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:36:23 -0700 (MST)
From: Mary Morman <memorman at oldcolo.com>
Subject: SC - food and hospitality
This talk of eating well and being heavy started me on another related
theme. I've been reading Egil's Saga looking for food references and have
noted the typical Norse hospitality theme.
Boat sails into harbor. Men get off the boat and go meet the local
householder. Either (a) they all try to kill each other, or (b)
householder and boat captain talk, and householder invites captain to
bring as many men as he "thinks good" up to the house and they all eat and
drink for a week.
Alternate scenario has the householder inviting the captain and "as many
men as he thinks good" to spend the winter with him.
The "thinks good" part seems to be literally meant - the captain ussually
takes some but not all of his men, leaving some to guard the boat, sleep