[Sca-cooks] 'Viking' recipes

[Volker Bach]

>Was dairy - available from any cow - upper class? Even honey could be  
>gathered in the forest.

Not per se, but not everyone would have enough to use it in things like bread or porridge. Playing around with milk yields per cow or goat and average fat content is a guessing game with too many variables, but given how distribution looked in early modern Scandinavia, I doubt every household in the Viking world could afford to bake bread with honey and butter regularly. The same with honey - it's not the thing per se, but the commonplace way we put it into our reconstructed dishes today. A beehive would yield a few pounds of honey certainly, but reckon that over the year, in a household, and even a tablespoonful becomes a luxury. 


>The bouillon is more ambivalent. I've never seen  any mention of it being 
>explicitly used in early French cooking - adding it in  separately seems to 
>be a late medieval innovation - but as a practical matter  boiling a chicken 
>for instance would give you bouillon as part of the dish. So  adding it in 
>separately may be superfluous, but not too anachronistic (unless  you're 
>using commercial bouillon in which case there's all that sodium).
  
It's the technique of adding it separately that I don't see. If you boil any kind of meat with other things, you get something like cooking in stock. That's not the issue. But when looking over the Viking batterie de cuisine, I can't find anything that would say "stockpot" to me. Would they have kept broth around? It's not impossible in richer households - a kettle with boiled meat would produce cooking liquid for other dishes you'd simply ladle out as required. But I don't think this would be practical for smaller households, and AFAIK there were no commercial kitchens in Viking settlements. 

Giano

Newly translated from Pierre Jean-Baptiste  Le Grand d'Aussy:
Eggs, Cheese and Butter in Old Regime France  


In a message dated 2/10/2013 2:15:25 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
carlton_bach at yahoo.de writes:

A lot of  it looks distinctly upper-class, what with using lots of honey, 
imported  spices, and dairy products, but not inherently implausible. I 
wonder about the  habit of using bouillon/stock for making  soup.

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