SC - Nanna's Smoked Lamb? was Dishes made by the whole family

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Olaf wrote:

>    This brings up a question on when did the Norse start smoking food &
>how?  Also a request for you to share the recipie for Icelandic Smoked
Lamb.


I´d say in Iceland meat has been smoked since the Settlement but I´ll look
into it and see if I can find anything further. It certainly was the main
preservation method for meat during the Middle Ages and up until the 19th
century.

For a proper smoked leg of lamb, you need:

1) an old-style Icelandic kitchen, windowless but with a chimney-hole in the
roof (although these days people build separate sheds for smoking)
2) sheepdung as fuel (o.k. some people who don´t know better use wood, such
as birch, but then the meat doesn´t taste right)
3) at least three weeks (this is cold smoking and the fire should be lit for
a few hours each day). The meat gets better with time and I remember from my
childhood legs that had hung in smoke for months and were almost black, and
the best I´ve ever had. Of course, people from my home region also held
something like the world record for stomach cancer deaths. (Smoked meat was
everyday food then. A bite now and then won´t kill you.) The wood-smoked
meat I mentioned earlier is usually only smoked for a few days, however.

I don´t smoke meat myself, I can buy some very good traditionally smoked
lamb here. If you are serious about this project, I could dig up
instructions for you, though.

Nanna