SC - gravlax

[Stefan li Rous]

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.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
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