SC - Period Foods

[DUNHAM Patricia R]

Well, here's one (the VIKING) I just sent home, from a while ago... on
Viking foodstuffs-available.  I've only skimmed it; you might want to
write to my husband, Master Gerekr (gerekr at aol.com), to see what he
thought of it....

Let's see if I can find any of the book ref.s I've been stashing...
========================
Food, by Waverly Root, try B&N, Walden, etc., currently remaindered?
1-21-98  -- this gets a LOT of good PR on the list...
=========================
The Food Chronology by James Trager, Henry Holt Publisher, 1995
=========================
(I personally am skeptical of Reay Tannahill's research, but if Food in
History is all you can find...)
=========================
Cindy Renfrow answered a question about a resource for fruit with:

John Parkinson's "A Garden of Pleasant Flowers (Paradisi in Sole
Paradisus
Terrestris)", London, 1629, reprinted by Dover Publ., New York, 1976,
from
your library.  This book goes into detail about many types of garden
fruits
& has descriptions & illustrations of many of them.
==========================
An *extremely* cool book, excellent especially for people doing
redactions
or
trying to understand foreign terminology, is now available in the US
again:

Hering's Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery.
13th English Edition by Walter Bickel.
Fachbuchverlag Dr. Pfannenberg & Co. 35390 Giessen, Germany.

English - 852 pages and no illustrations or photographs. This hard to
find
essential dictionary is the comprehensive gastronomic encyclopedia and
reference work for chefs, culinary students, food and beverage managers,
and
other professionals in the food service industry. This precious small
red
volume with three complete indices contains more than 13,000
curtailed recipes; a comprehensive glossary of kitchen terms in English,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish; information on table service,
wine, dietaries and carving. Available from C.H.I.P.S, 1307 Golden
Bear Lane, Kingwood, TX 77339; Tel. U.S.A. + (281) 359-2270; Fax.
U.S.A. + (281) 359-2277, or by accessing the internet at
http://www.chipsbooks.com
======================================
>      Fast and Feast  (Bridget Ann Henisch)
Very useful stuff. Again, this is more of a book about cooks and
cookery, and about eating habits, rather than a cookbook.
=============================
and again, the illustrations in Fabulous Feasts are great, but the
recipes are not.  The text info on culinary matters, is, I -think-, OK
==============================

Those look like the  most likely ones on general stuff about foodstuffs.
There's been a fair amount about origins of foodstuffs on this list...
hope this is helpful

Chimene

patricia.r.dunham at ci.eugene.or.us
http://members.aol.com/gerekr/medieval.html (home)
 -----------------------------------enclosed
post----------------------------------------------------
From: Charles McCathieNevile
To: sca cooks
Subject: Re: SC - VIKING! not Irish cuisine (fwd)
Date: Monday, January 19, 1998 5:06AM

This is what I got from a friend who does Irish Viking stuff in the
950-1200 period (mostly)

Charles ragnar

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 23:14:21 +1100
From: Andrea Willett <willetta at mail.austasia.net>
To: Charles McCathie - Neville <charlesn at sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>
Subject: Re: SC - Irish cuisine (fwd)

Hello Charles!
(snip)
> Subject: SC - Irish cuisine
(snip)
>
> No, unfortunatley there does not seem to be any existing manuscripts.
> perhaps one will show up. There is some anecdotal evidence, however.
If
> anyone has newer information, please, please share it.
(snip)

To the best of my knowledge this is correct. The post I made in response
to
John Brattan's query about Viking recipes on Living History Net was
based
on plant and animal remains from the digs in Dublin and from what I know
of
Viking cooking utensils. You can post it to SCA cooks in my name if you
think they will find it useful. For what it's worth here it is.

Subject: Recipes from Viking-Age Ireland?

There is hardly any (practically none) WRITTEN evidence for Viking food
that I know
of. The oldest cookbook that I have seen is "An early 13th century
northern-European cookbook" by Rudolph Grewe in Proceedings - Current
Research in Culinary History: Sources, Topics and Methods, 1985. A lot
of
the recipes in this book rely on almond milk however and this is most
likely to have come into common usage in northern kitchens from the
middle-east during or after the Crusades.

Analysis of soil samples from Viking/Norman Dublin (which is my main
geographical area of interest) indicate that of the meat that was eaten
90%
was from mature cattle (beef not veal), 7% from young pigs and the
remaining 3% from sheep or goats. Horse was also occasionally eaten as
were
dogs, cats, deer, seals and whales. They have identified the remains of
crushed hens eggs so they must have had chooks. Of the fish bones they
have
identified cod and ling. "In the general urban debris shells of cockle
and
mussel were common, with oyster and scallop more scarcely represented.
Limpet and periwinkle were very rare, but this perhaps reflects the fact
that there was no rocky coast nearby."

Grains and pulses identified include oats, barley, rye, wheat and peas.
Fruits and nuts: hazelnuts, hawthorn, fig, strawberry, walnut, apple,
sour
cherry, plum, sloe, rosehip, blackberry, raspberry, elder, rowan,
frochan/bilberry and grape. Other edible plants include wild celery,
Brassica sp. (turnip, cabbage, etc.), rape (now renamed canola for
political correctness), black mustard, wild carrot, fennel, radish and
nettle.

To the poultry and game one could reasonably add rabbit, hare, turtle,
goose, duck (wild if possible), partridge and quail. Grouse would be
lovely
but it doesn't exist in Australia, I tried to locate some for the
Scottish
lunch at the Conference. Avoid pheasant (It originated in Asia and I
don't
know how early it came west), turkey (American) and Guinea fowl
(African).
Fish and shellfish I don't know well enough to advise about additions to
the original list with the possible exceptions of trout (preferably
brown
trout), salmon and herring.

Regarding grains and pulses: Do not use white bread or flour for your
meals. Sifting the flour would have been too much effort for anyone but
the
household of a king or major chiefton. You can come up with quite tasty
wholemeal pastry recipes if you try. I came up with a very yummy recipe
for
"Haw Tarts" which used a thin pastry of wholemeal flour with the
addition
of ground and chopped hazelnuts to hold a thick strained syrup of
hawthorn
berries and honey. The name got a good laugh too. Pity hawthorn berries
aren't commercially available, I'd like to use it at the Conference.
Keep a
look out in peoples paddocks for some of the rare fruits and greens like
haws, elderberries, rosehips (from wild not garden roses) and stinging
nettle tops as they make interesting additions to meals and help
distance
you from "B-B-Q chook and roast lamb syndrome". The fig and grape
mentioned
above are imports and were found in a 13th century layer so they are
probably not suitable for your group. "Conspiuous absentees" from among
the
Dublin finds were said to be coriander, and hops. Oh, and only use dried
peas never fresh.

The above list is not exhaustive for Dublin or any other Viking site.
Soil
samples actually tested were only a very small proportion of what was
excavated and what was available in the area where your club is set
could
be very different from what I can prove for mine. Are you in the
Scandinavian homelands? Have you emigrated west? East? Are you raiding
along the Italian coast looking to sack Rome? Local ingredients
available
would be different in each case and certain non-local foods may have
been
available in much more limited quantities as imports. As a general rule
of
thumb, the bulkier an import and/or the farther it has to travel the
rarer
and more expensive it would have been and therefore the more frugal you
should be in its use.

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. There was mention
of
oxen being boiled in one of the sagas and boiled pickled pork or
silverside
is VERY yummy. Stews would certainly be very common. Roll the meat in
flour
and brown it and the vegetables in a frypan before you stew them. I
don't
know if this is period (there is not enough evidence to tell one way or
the
other) but it will improve the flavor of your stew immeasurably, so will
leaving the bones in (in a muslin bag if you wish to remove them at the
last minute). If you wish to thicken it use bread or egg. Pies? I don't
know. A self-supporting pie along the lines of a Melton Mowbray pork pie
is
feasible but there is no evidence of anything resembling a pie dish.
There
have been several of those "frying-pan" things found so obviously they
fried things. Whether they were used for meat, omelets or griddle cakes
I
don't know. Pickled, dried and salted meats and fish would also have
been
common, don't miss out on the ham and soused fish.

Apart from that all I can add is that you take ingredients and utensils
you
know/think you know that they had and work forward.  You take the
recipes
and ingredients that are synonomous with their cuisine today and
subtract
modern and late period ingredients and work backwards. Somewhere in the
middle you reach your own interpretation of what you think they might
have
eaten. As I said earlier, there are no extant "Viking" recipies. As long
as
you USE what information is available no-one really has any right to say
that your version is any more valid than theirs. We all do the best we
can.
Just keep in mind that it is an interpretation based on what you know at
the time. If someone comes up with additional EVIDENCE be prepared to
change your mind. It's so very easy to get set in our ways once we've
made
a decision on something.

Andrea Willett
willetta at mail.austasia.net
==================================
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