[Sca-cooks] Earliest Viking area post-Viking cookbooks

[UlfR]

Sharon Gordon <gordonse at one.net> [2003.10.27] wrote:
> I am trying to compile a list of the earliest 2-3 cookbooks for the various
> Viking areas.  Since there are no actual Viking cookbooks, the earliest ones
> seem to be at around 50-100+ years later or more.  Lists of archeological
> findings would be helpful as well.

Going away from the viking era in the other direction, isn't there a
byzantine manuscript from just before the viking age?

But, unless you are looking for recipies of food that "vikings may have
eaten" rather than what they ate "at home" I think that there is only
some litterary mentions of food (primarilly the Edda Sæmundar?) and
archaeology. Based on archaeology you get data of two kinds:

        a. "This was available". 
        b. "This was -- sometimes with the qualifier: almost certainly -- 
           eaten".

Cathegory a is data we have from seed and pollen analysis, middens, etc.
In the second group we have a bit more data of interest, since we here
are talking of analysis of food remains, both "macroscopic" stuff like
the remains of bread, and "lab data" like fatty acid contents of clay
pots, isotope ratios in teeth, etc.

An example of the best we can do from this is "a piece of bread
containing these things was found in a grave",  "the pot had been used
for cooking salmon, mutton and seal", or "the person got his protein
almost exclusively from marine sources".

Have a look at some of the Ph.D. theses from the Archaeological 
Research Laboratory at Stockholm University
(http://www.archaeology.su.se/arklab/avh.htm): 

Hansson, Ann-Marie (1997) 
On Plant Food in the Scandinavian Peninsula in Early Medieval Times. 
(Theses and Papers in Archaeology B:5)

Isaksson, Sven (2000) 
Food and Rank in Early Medieval Time. (Theses and Papers in Scientific 
Archaeology 3)

UlfR

-- 
UlfR Ketilson                               ulfr at hunter-gatherer.org
Four wheel drive allows you to get stuck in places even more inaccessible