SC - A new project....

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Stefan asked:
>
>But what are these "dulse strips"? Perhaps you have mentioned them
>before, but I'm afraid I don't remember. Is this the lichen?


No. Dulse, as Seumas says, is edible seaweed, Palmaria palmata or Rhodymenia
palmata (this botanical name most Icelanders would recognize because it is
also the name of a famous poem by our Nobel Prize-winning author Halldór
Laxness). The Icelandic name is söl; the Irish name is dillisk, I think.
Dulse is frequently mentioned in the sagas and other medieval writings and
seems to have been eaten widely, up until the late 19th century; now they
are mostly used as a snack. There was a famous incident a few years ago,
when a member of the Althing was taken to task by the Speaker for bringing
food into the meeting hall and eating it at his desk; he maintained that he
had not brought any food, just dulse, which wasn´t food anyway - citing
Egill Skallagrímsson, who had chewed dulse when he was trying to starve
himself to death.

Dulse can be eaten raw but it can be rubbery (someone compared it to chewing
on a salted rubber band). Now it is usually dried (partially at least), cut
into strips or shreds and added to skyr or porridge, soups, stews, bread
and - well, just about anything. Or they were simply eaten with butter or
some kind of dipping liquid. In some regions, they were eaten fresh; then
they were boiled for some time, chopped and added to bread or soups. They
were so common in Southern and Western Iceland that August was often called
"dulse month" because that was the usual dulse harvesting time.

The Irish make dillisk sandwiches - a layer of dulse between two slices of
buttered bread.

>Were cattle raised in Iceland? Nanna? It just seems the terrain favors
>sheep over cattle, but maybe some were kept for milk and then became
>roast beef. But in that case, I would think that being old and probably
>stringy it would be boiled or stewed rather than roasted.

Sources seem to indicate that there were more cattle raised here in the
10th-14th centuries or so than later on, and that may have been the only
period (until late 20th century) when cattle was actually raised for meat.
Sources often mention bulls and oxen grazing in the wilderness; they
probably were semi-wild (the climate was milder then and the vegetation was
much different from what it became later). But even though the beef wasn´t
that tough and stringy, it may well have been boiled anyway - in the 12th
century at least, boiling seems to have been the preferred cooking method
and sources mention meat being roasted only when there was no kettle or
cauldron available to boil the meat.

Nanna