[Sca-cooks] Spices and Cooking (oop)

[Cathy Harding]

The Inuit and Inupiat (eskimos in Alaska) have several "fermented" dishes,
which are considered to be delicacies.  All of the ones I have tried, have
been to my tastes, icky.  I have tried Stinky heads (fish heads which are
buried for some time in the cool ground in a not airtight vessel) and a
whale blubber/meat that has been similarly treated.  When this was tried
with airtight tupperware, there were several deaths and cases of toxic food
poisoning if I recall correctly.

Maeve
-----Original Message-----
From:	sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org [mailto:sca-cooks-admin at ansteorra.org]
On Behalf Of Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir
Sent:	Wednesday, July 25, 2001 4:40 PM
To:	sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
Subject:	Re: [Sca-cooks] Spices and Cooking (oop)

Bear wrote:



>Leaving the fermenting skate aside, from the description, I would say the
>meat may be "aged" rather than "bad."  Icelanders may be a little extreme
in
>the aging process, but I seriously doubt they let the meat get truly toxic,
>since that represents a self-correcting error, evolution in action.


True, but what is rather well-aged meat to one person may be totally spoilt
to another. In Icelandic, and some other languages, there is a special word
(kæsa, related to cheese) to describe food that has been intentionally let
go "bad"; I've used fermented, and occasionally putrefied, to translate this
but it isn't really correct. "Kæsing" is not really the same as "aging" and
in some cases, fairly warm weather is preferred or the meat or fish will not
be properly "kæst".

For instance, I was reading yesterday about Faroese "ræst kjøt" (they are
even more extreme than us Icelanders); the meat is usually left to hang in
an airy outdoor shed from October until maybe February and the weather
mustn't be too cold, or the meat will not be properly cured, but not too
warm either, or there will be too many maggots. I've heard the Faroese
describe this as the delicacy that is "ready exactly half an hour before the
wife and children move out of the house". My ex-husband once made some kæst
herring that smelled exactly like that (much like Swedish surströmming, I
suppose). I said "either that herring goes or I go". In retrospect, I wish
he had kept the herring. Oh well.

>
>The considerations on aging are a layer of fat to help keep bacteria from
>the meat, cool temperatures, a clean, dry place to hang, and an air flow to
>evaporate moisture escaping from the carcass.  A farm shed in Iceland in
>late autumn just might fill the bill, the same way farm sheds were used for
>hanging the deer carcasses in the US in October and November before the
>advent of the professional processing plants.

Yeah, but the "hraun" I was describing didn't have a fat layer (quite a lot
of fat but also quite a lot of exposed meat), the cow sheds weren't always
cool (although that depended more or less on the number of cows), they were
very far from being clean, they weren't dry (a mud hut never is clean or
dry) and as for air flow, I can personally attest that an old Icelandic cow
shed in winter has about the stuffiest, stalest air you can find anywhere on
earth. I never tasted "hraun" made in this manner - my mother simply hung
the meaty bones to smoke for a couple of weeks - but it must have been
pretty potent. And definitely "kæst", not "aged".

Icelandic rock ptarmigan, on the other hand, can safely be left to hang
outdoors in an airy place for up to eight late autumn/winter weeks and will
develope a strong, gamy taste, but it is not considered "kæst".

But I realize that yes, us Icelanders are probably a bit extreme here. I was
merely trying to make the point that even though there was an "off" taste,
even something people nowadays might consider "rotten", others may not
neccessarily have seen it that way, or thought there was any need to mask
the flavor.

Nanna


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