[Sca-cooks] Salt in Iceland (was Honey butter)

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 9:50 AM, edoard at medievalcookery.com wrote:

>
>
>> -------- Original Message --------
>> From: Stefan li Rous
>>
>> Of course salt wasn't very available in Iceland, so they didn't salt
>> their butter and it soured/fermented to the Icelandic version. See
>> the fd-Iceland-msg file in the Florilegium for more details, much of
>> it from Nanna, our previous list member who was an author on historic
>> Icelandic cooking.
>
> Salt not available in Iceland?  This seems a bit odd to me,  
> considering
> it's an island surrounded by salt water, and that most (all?) of the
> settlements are on the coast.  They didn't use sea water as brine?   
> (I'm
> not saying they did - I know pretty much squat about Iceland)

I _think_ the places where salt tends to be harvested from salt water  
are places where there are shallow bays and a lot of sunshine; places  
like Southern Spain and India. I also believe Northern Europe tends to  
see more mined salt, and I'm not sure Iceland is one of the centers  
for that.

Add to that the number of Icelandic traditional preserved foods that  
you might think ought to be salted, but aren't, or not aggressively  
so, such as hakarl and klippfisk/stockfisk and its various close  
relatives. And then there's the whole pickling-stuff-in-whey thing.  
Milk, we know they've got.

It doesn't sound to me, although I wouldn't in the least mind being  
proven wrong on this, that this is a culture with a lot of salt lying  
around asking for uses to be invented.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter