SC - Endless Hills Investiture menu

[L Herr-Gelatt and J R Gelatt]

Charles ragnar forwarded a post from Andrea Willett on Irish/Viking food.

>... On cooking methods what can one say? Roast meat on a spit or bake it in an
>oven? I don't know if that was quite as common a cooking method as people
>seem to think except among the upper classes. Meat in a stew can be made to
>stretch a lot farther that roast. What social class do you portray? Bread
>might have been baked on a bakestone beside the fire or in a dedicated
>baker's oven, I don't know. Boiled meat we can prove...

C. Anne Wilson (_Food and Drink in Britain_, 1974, ISBN-06-497747-I)
describes an experiment in potboiler/pit roasting cooking by archaeologists
at a site in Ireland; the site is well BC, but similar sites through the
British Isles "range in date from perhaps 2000 BC down to the Viking
period, and some Irish examples may be as late as the sixteenth century
AD."  They found a trough sunk into a boggy part of the peat (so the water
wouldn't drain away) lined with timber and stones with an arc-shaped hearth
at each end, pot-boiler stones, and "a second pit, stone lined and thought
to have been employed as an oven".  They used the hearths to heat stones,
used a dampened wooden shovel to dump them in the water, brought the water
to a boil, and simmered a 10-lb leg of mutton for 3 hours 40 minutes by
adding stones every few minutes.  The oven they preheated with burning
brushwood, removed it, and "another ten-pound leg of mutton was placed
inside and surrounded by a rough dome of red-hot stones...the covering of
stones was changed seven times in the course of three hours and forty
minutes".  They then ate the results: "excellently cooked and most tasty."
Wilson gives her source as M. J. O'Kelly, "Excavations and experiments in
early Irish cooking-places", J. R. Soc. Antiq. Ireland (1954), 84, pp.
105-55.  Wilson's book is a wonderful source for this sort of stuff.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook


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