Russell Scott takes a look at the culinary delights to be had during a typical Viking day on the farm.
The day begins
Imagine a scene in North Yorkshire a thousand years ago. The autumn sun crawls lazily across the horizon, flooding a small coastal valley with the early morning light. Svensholm is a small Viking homestead, comprising a large hall and a few outbuildings. The longhouse has thick walls which keep it cool in summer and stop it freezing in winter. The family sleep in the main hall around the fire pit along with some of the farm stock. On the top of an outbuilding a cockerel crows rousing the farm to life. With little thought to the daily chores ahead the immediate care is to breakfast! No breakfast cereals, bagels or scrambled eggs for these farmers though.
The stew itself ... looks rather scary ...
Whilst Ingrid, the farmer's wife, coaxes the embers of yesterday's fire back to life, Sven the farmer helps himself to some of yesterday's left-over stew. It has been left in an iron cauldron, rather like something you'd imagine Halloween witches to sit around. The stew itself also looks rather scary; a thin crust of fat has formed over a brown liquid which is made up of boiled lamb bones, beans, peas, carrots and turnips. Sven breaks off a hunk of bread to dip into the stew. A rather stale crusty flat loaf, this bread was baked last week.
The children of the household will spend the day helping their parents. Fortified with a breakfast of bread and buttermilk (similar to skimmed milk), Tostig will help his father in the fields. The remainder of the harvest has to be gathered in and a lamb needs to be slaughtered. Sven uses an iron sickle to cut the corn, whilst Tostig uses a wooden rake to gather the cut corn into sheaths. Later these will be threshed to release the grains of wheat, rye and barley.
A typical day
A simple midday meal © Thora will help her mother grind the corn into flour. The grains are dropped onto the millstones whilst the women take it in turns to tirelessly grind the mill first one way then the other. The flour is gathered and mixed with water to make bread. The dough is kneaded in small wooden trugs then placed in a large clay oven to bake or placed on a flat iron in the embers to make a flat cake of bread. A few wild chickens and some geese roam the farmyard, Thora will collect their eggs for the evening meal.
If they are very lucky there may be some fruit ...
For a midday break Sven and Tostig share some cottage cheese, unwrapped from a soggy piece of linen. If they are very lucky there may be some fruit, wild plums or a crab apple. A little butter and stale bread completes the meal. To drink they may find a fresh water stream, have the buttermilk left over from breakfast, or even some weak ale.
That afternoon, Ingrid's brother Rigsson and his family call at the farm. He is a fisherman and has brought fish for his sister's family. Herring and cod fresh from the nets are handed over along with some shellfish. Ingrid repays Riggson's generosity with some salted bacon (home cured), and some venison - the remainder of last month's hunt. Whilst Ingrid cuts and guts the fish, the children go into the woods to collect nuts and berries, which are just coming into season. They find raspberries, elderberries and some cherries, and nuts such as walnuts and hazelnuts. These will be left in their shells, cracked open only at mealtimes for greater freshness.
Feast night
Mead, a drink made from honey © With no fridges or freezers our Viking family has to take special measures to stop their food going bad. Meat and fish can be smoked or rubbed with salt. Fruit can be dried; grains are made into bread or ale. Dairy produce such as milk is made into cheese. Cooking the meat will make it last a little longer, making sausages will make it last longer still.
At sunset the family gather together in the long house. The usual evening meal will be enlarged tonight because it is one of the three Viking feast nights. In their homelands a horse would have been sacrificed to the old Gods. Horsemeat was spitted and roasted rather like a kebab. Sven and his family nominally follow the Christian faith, however, so although they celebrate the traditional feast, tonight they will dine on roast lamb. There will also be salted fish and pork, goat and plenty of fresh bread. For dessert the Vikings will eat fresh fruit and a little honey on buttered bread. Beer will be drunk as well as mead, a beverage made from honey.
Horsemeat was spitted and roasted rather like a kebab.
The Vikings had bowls and plates very similar to our own, but made more often from wood rather than pottery. They ate with a sharp pointed knife, which served as both a knife and a fork (the latter would not be invented for another century). Spoons were made from wood, horn or animal bone. They were often carved with delicate patterns of interlaced knotwork and the heads of fabulous beasts. Drink was taken in horns, similarly decorated and sometimes with metal tips and rims.
The end of the day
A Viking feast © As the day ends on our Viking homestead, the children have gone to bed, wrapped in furs on cots built into the side of the house. They have listened to their uncle's stories of heroism and legend. Rigsson has told how the God Thor once went fishing to catch the mighty Midguard Serpent. He fished from the back of a giant's boat with a rod and line and used an ox head for bait. Thor caught the serpent but the giant, fearing for the end of the world, cut the line. Sven remarks on how fishermen's tales of today have not changed much. Night draws in on a house full of well fed Vikings, seemingly oblivious to the smoky atmosphere from the fire and the acrid smell of burning fat from the oil lamps. The everyday smells, a mixture of unwashed clothes, animal dung and curdled milk pass unnoticed.
Bad weather may have meant they had to rely more on stored food ...
So ends a typical culinary day in the Viking Age. Many variants would have been encountered of course, depending on the season, the geographical location and of course how well off the farm was. Bad weather may have meant they had to rely more on stored food, whilst prime locations would have given access to 'exotic' food such as elk, bear, puffin, salmon and trout.
Finally, you may be wondering just how we know what the Viking diet contained. There are no Fanny Craddock's cookbooks surviving from those times. Instead we have to rely on the archaeologist whose painstaking work has revealed the remains of the Dark Age menu. Fish bones, seeds from berries, and the husks from grain are all present in Viking latrines (toilets) and middens (rubbish dumps). Surprisingly these food remains aren't necessarily the same as modern ones. Domesticated animal bones such as cows and pigs are two-thirds the size of modern ones. Similarly wheat grains are smaller and less nutritious.
In conclusion, many changes have occurred in the last millennium that has affected our diet. Modern food is far more accessible, bought from the supermarket, prepacked so we don't have to butcher it ourselves, and full of added vitamins. However did our Viking ancestors have to worry about BSE epidemics, genetically modified foods, and whether food is organic or not? Perhaps the Vikings got it right after all, especially as all their food was organic and free range!
Find out more
Books
Viking Life by John Guy and Richard Hall (Ticktock, 1998)
Encyclopaedia of the Viking Age by John Haywood (Thames &Hudson, 2000)
Cultural Atlas of the Viking Age edited by Graham-Campbell et al (Andromeda, 1994)
Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood (Penguin, 1996). Detailed maps of Viking settlements in Scotland, Ireland, England, Iceland and Normandy.
