Recipes from the past

One of the best things to get yourself emerged into the past is trough food. When using ingredients, spices and herbs you get a good feeling of how people from ancient past ate their meals. For me it can be a surreal experience, because you eat what they ate. Almost like you could have sat there with them on the dinner table. Earlier I talked about how trough looking into grave finds we can get a good feel into what people most likely ate. It is in no way the blend peasant food you sometimes see in medieval movies. They had treasure troves of herbs and spices, from the far south or the nearby woods. In this post I'll give you a small insight of food of the Viking age.

A millet porridge with a modern twist. (Meaning green raisins.)

Ingredients from that time were a bit different then ours. They used a lot of plants we would now consider weeds, like stinging nettle and dandelions. They also had no potatoes or tomatoes for example. Ribe VikingeCenter has a whole list of ingredients they could have used. I will sum up some of them per section: cereals, vegetables, fruit, fish, herbs and meat.

Cereals: rye, barley, millet and oats.

Vegetables: yellow onions, leeks, kale, carrots, parsnip and dandelions,

Fruit: apples, plums, cranberries, rose hip berries and raspberries.

Fish: Flatfish like dabs, salmon, sturgeon, cod and mackerel.

Herbs: thyme. dill, garlic, mint, and hop.

Meat: beef, horse, pork, lamb, goat, chicken and wild meats like deer, hare and wild boar.

They also made dairy products, like cream, butter, buttermilk, cheese, and skyr. Recipes from this time have much flavor: like a full onion soup with crispy bread cubes, clay bake roasts from pork neck, carrots and parsnip glazed with honey and cod with mustard sauce. Looking trough all these I think I need to do another day full of Viking meals.

I've tried to make a whole days worth of Viking age meals a while back. It was really fun, and nothing like I made before. With a bit of help from the lovely website of Ribe VikingeCenter. For breakfast I made a millet porridge with milk, honey and dried apple. I also put in some raisins. Although these were not used in that time. They more likely used dried cranberries instead of raisins.

Millet porridge.

For lunch we made some veggie patties with flat bread. My little sister helped me with this meal and we had a lot of fun kneading the dough and finding out that I have the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. After we put everything together of course, so there was no way back. I did try the patties when they were done, but the soap taste really made me gag. So luckily I could give the rest to my sister.

The patties were made with freshly cut herbs, for which I used cilantro, spring onion and garlic. But the greens can be anything you like, from dandelion leaves to nettle. Then we mixed it all with a little milk and flour and kneaded them into patties. For the flat bread we eyeballed a mix of barley and whole grain flour. Then we mixed this together with some yogurt and kneaded it into a ball. We did let it rest a little but it did nothing spectacular. Probably because we were not patient enough. The end result did look really pretty!

Vegie patties with flatbread.

Then for dinner I made an omelette with smoked mackerel. This meal was a delight! It was made with eggs, kveller, onion, leek, a dash of milk and of course the mackerel. The kveller, (a type of seaweed) was something new for me, and I never thought I would be able to buy it. Luckily one of my local supermarkets had it in stock! It was a bit much for this one meal but I let nothing go to waste. By that I mean I gave it to my stepmother who apparently loves it. A win in my book. The seaweed was quite salty, to no surprise, so the dish did not need the extra salt. I also had some flat bread left from lunch so I served it together. Thinking about this recipe really makes me want to make it again.

Omelette with smoked mackerel.

So, if anyone still thinks they only ate bland porridges and stews back then, maybe you should read this post again... All jokes aside I hope you learned something from this. And give the website of Ribe Vikingecenter a visit as well. They have so much more info. Now I'm going to plan out my next meal ideas for the coming Viking events.

Site used: Home - Ribe VikingeCenter