SC - Re: Sensible Cook, bison meat

[Diana Haven]

Ras wrote:
>Although Aleut tribes eat the blubber from seals the meat itself is rather
>obnoxious being very stringy, tough and not a little fishy in flavor.
SFAIK,
>no mention of seal is made in any of the currently available corpora of
>period recipes. Whale and dolphin were the sea mammals of choice during the
>middle ages.


I don´t recall any actual recipe but seals were certainly eaten in Iceland
and Greenland in period and probably in Norway as well. There are references
in 13th century Icelandic law texts (actually, this particular law is still
in force in Iceland and is printed in our current law collections) to
catching seals in nets (which seems to have been the preferred method here)
and to harpooning them. There are some references in the sagas also. But the
meat was never as popular as whale meat.

The meat can be quite good, I´m told by those who have a taste for it (I´ve
never liked it myself), if soaked in seawater or water mixed with salt or
vinegar overnight, to remove blood, and the fishy taste. Milk will also work
(it does with whale meat, at least, and I think the same goes for seal; most
recipes are interchangeable). The heads and flippers are eaten too (seared
in fire and boiled), and were considered a delicacy. I´m not sure how the
blubber was treated earlier but in later years, it was usually heavily
salted, then boiled.

Nanna

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