SC - gravlax- late reply

[Angus]

- --- Stefan li Rous <stefan at texas.net>
> wrote:
>Angus MacIomhair said:
>> Making gravlax with honey worked out fine but was a little tricky.  Partly because the honey has a sweeter taste than white granulated sugar, partly because the difficulty in tasting the salt/honey mix.  The honey coats the grains of salt so all you feel is an initially sweet honey taste followed by a sharp salty taste, not the salty-sweet balanced taste you get with ordinary sugar.  I ended up adding roughly 10-15% more salt than honey (by volume) and the finished gravlax came out OK but personally I prefer a slightly saltier taste. I used "liquid" honey with a high water content for easier mixig with the salt.  According to the label the sugar content of the honey was 70%.  
>> Since I made this mundanely I also added a handful of chopped dill and a good sized pinch of crushed white pepper, I have no idea if this was available to Vikings or not.
>
>Thanks for the personal experience with making the gravlax. You question 
>whether the Vikings would have had the dill and white pepper. I would
>question, if not more so, the Norse having the sugar. The amount of
>sugar required would seem to put it out of reach in this time period
>from what I've seen mentioned on this list earlier. When even several
>hundred years later sugar was treated more like a medicine and rationed
>out carefully, it would seem that using it to preserve fish would not
>have been done.
>
>I like your idea of using diluted honey as I doubt that honey was
>cheap either, just more available and cheaper than sugar.

Sorry for the very late reply but ut slipped my mind =(
I don't know anything about bee keeping so I can't say if it was too cold or not to keep bees at Birka during the Viking Age.  From what I've read the southern regions of Sweden kept bees and had (I suppose) a good supply of honey which was traded with the northern communities.  I have a copy of Else Roesdahl's 'The Vikings' at home but I've only browsed it.  I'll take a deep dive into it and see if I can find anything.

Regarding the honey I used I didn't dilute it in any way, it was naturally runny, like the honey you get when freshly squeezed from a honeycomb, as opposed to the 'hard' honey where you can turn a 2.2# jar upside-down and wait until doomsday for anything to run out.  I have never tried it but I guess the 'hard' honey could be stirred with a little water but it might be a very fine line between soft&runny and honey water.

/Angus 

==
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
- -- Voltaire

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