[Sca-cooks] medieval scandinavian sources

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

Bear wrote:


> IIRC, the original owner is believed to have been a gentleman who served
as
> an ambassador and developed a taste for haute cuisine.

Harpestræng was actually not an ambassador, although connected with the
Danish court (he was the King's physician), but he had studied medicine in
the South of France. I did put forward some highly imaginative speculation
on how the collection had ended up in Northern Europe:

"How did the collection travel north? Of course we don't know but it is easy
to imagine a scenario. Let's say that in the 1180s, the young Dane Henrik
Harpestræng is studying medicine in Orleans, or somewhere further south; he
probably studied at the medical school of Salerno in Italy as well and he
may have been at the famed medical school at Montpelier. Other young men
from Northern Europe studied at these schools as well and they probably
enjoyed the climate, the culture and the exotic cooking. Later Harpestræng
goes home to Denmark but he misses the fine French dishes he had become
accustomed to; even when he becomes the King's own physician, the royal
feasts, made up of simple Scandinavian dishes, do not compare. So when he
visits one of his German colleagues who studied with him in France a long
time ago, he is excited to discover that this splendid fellow had been wise
enough to pester the cooks for some of his favorite recipes and translate
them into German. So of course Harpestræng sits down and quickly translates
his friend's collection into Danish . It may have happened like that, or it
may have happened in a completely different way. We have no way of knowing
exactly how these recipes came to Scandinavia, but it is very likely that
the medical profession was involved. As Grewe and Hieatt say:
,, . the only way in which recipes were generally disseminated in the early
Middle Ages was through medical texts.""


> As for Icelandic chicken, Nana pointed out that it couldn't be an
Icelandic
> dish, as there were no chickens in Iceland at the time.

Not quite, although they were rare, but other ingredients might have been
harder to get. This is (more or less) what I said:

"Now there are good reasons why this recipe is so popular, and I even see
that British chef Jamie Oliver has a variation on it in his newest book,
"Happy Days with the Naked Chef". But in Iceland in the Middle Ages, chicken
were rare and fresh sage leaves were unavailable. Besides, there were few if
any ovens to bake the chicken in, as I explained in my paper on Early
Icelandic Cooking."

I did also point out that there were other recipes in the collection that
could definitely not have been cooked in Iceland at the time, notably the
recipe for a pasty of deer marrow (no deer or any large game at all was to
be found there, and no way to obtain the deer bones called for).

Nanna