[Sca-cooks] 'Viking' recipes

[Terry Decker]

I can say that the "Viking Bread" while possible isn't very probable.  The 
bread is enriched with buttermilk, egg and honey.  This level of enrichment 
is rare until the Modern Era and when it occurred before then, the result 
was commonly a festival bread made from wheat rather than mixed grain.  The 
lack of yeast (the Germanic peoples were fully aware of ale barm) with a 
mixed grain bread raises some warning flags in my view.  The recipe appears 
to be a cross between a festival bread and a field expedient bread.

The recipe for Barley Flatbread is more accurate in my view.  It is roughly 
the same bread described in The Hymn to Ninkasi, except the Sumerians added 
honey.

Bear

----- Original Message ----- 

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. A Viking-age 
household might have kept a stockpot, or not, but I can't think offhand of a 
piece of equipment that would readily lend itself to the purpose. In my 
experience, the riveted iron kettles that most Viking reenactors use lend 
themselves better to relatively quick cooking (I get good results heating 
fat, then adding the meat and cereal ingredients, and then water). 
Earthenware pots would lose a lot of the good stuff when used for cooking 
stock, I would rather use them for making soups or porridges with the meat 
directly. Soapstone could work, but I don't think they were that common.


If this is upper-class food, I suspect there should be more butter in it. 
Just an intuition, though, I can't prove it.

Giano