[Sca-cooks] Butter

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Elizabeth wrote:
>
>      (P.127) "Scarcity of grain meant that in Iceland, unlike in
> continental Europe, bread never became a staple.

Weeell - that depends on what is meant by "a staple". Bread was probably far
more common in Viking times in Iceland than later on; barley was grown here
until the 1500s or so and some of it was used for breadmaking. There are
enough mentions of bread in the Sagas and other old Icelandic sources to
show it wasn't exactly rare.

>It was in fact so rare
> that people dreamt about it and one man received the nickname
> 'Butter-Ring' from his favorite food of bread and butter."

Þórólfr smjörhringr of Reykdæla saga and Víga-Glúms probably got his
nickname because he valued (bread and) butter above all other food but that
doesn't prove anything except that bread was eaten with butter - I mean, I
know of a guy commonly called Gvendur terta (Gvendur cake) because he shows
a marked fondness for cream layer cakes, not because they are excessively
rare here in Iceland. On the contrary, in fact.

>     (P.128) "Hard as a board, dried fish was softened by being beaten and
> was served with butter.

We still do that, quite often. I still spread my dried fish liberally with
butter when I want to treat myself. But dried fish only gradually became a
substitute for bread in the Icelandic diet. Besides, _everything_ used to be
served with butter here.

 ... Heavily salted, butter could be kept for
> decades; large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners.

Heavily salted??? Oh no no. One of the strongest characteristics of pre-19th
century Icelandic cuisine is the almost complete lack of salt. Butter was
"soured" (I'm not sure what the proper English term is here and old sources
say that butter treated in this way could easily keep unspoiled (and it WAS
considered unspoiled, although I doubt modern people would think so) for at
least 20 years, whereas salted butter was said to keep only two years. Most
Icelanders actually preferred this to salted butter, but others usually
found it quite disgusting.

>  By the time of the Reformation, the bishopric in Holar possesed a
> mountain of butter calculated to weigh twenty-five tons."

 Sounds about right. Keep in mind that this wasn't really a case of
landowners hoarding all the butter they could possibly get because it was so
sought after; rather that most farmers paid their rents and taxes in butter,
it being more or less the only thing they had to pay with, so the landowners
were stuck with the butter mountains, wether they really wanted them or not.
But after all, the butter was virtually non-perishable.

Nanna