As part of my Dark Ages Recreation Company Group, I recently got into a discussion about food preservation in Iceland during the Viking period. It started out as a debate about what we could eat during our trip to Newfoundland next year, morphed into what we should eat when demonstrating life in Iceland at an upcoming event, and then became a more specific discussion about how the Icelanders got enough salt, and ended with the question “how much salt is enough”.
I did a little digging through some of my food preservation books, and here is what I found:
It depends on what you want to do with it. For preserving meats or fish, there are four basic ways to cure. You can have a dry cure, a brine cure, smoking or drying. Dry curing is best for someone who doesn’t have a refrigerated curing room. This may not have been an issue in late fall in Iceland, when domestic animals were likely to have been slaughtered because they couldn’t be overwintered (it’s probably also when a lot of hunting took place because the animals would be fattening up for winter). For 11 lb of ham or pork shoulder, you would need 8 pounds of pickling salt (1 ounce per pound of ham, 3/4 to 1 ounce per pound of bacon). It takes 7 days for the salt to penetrate 1 inch of meat. If you have a 5 inch slab, it should be cured for 35 days. You can then smoke the meat if you wish.
Brine curing has some flexibility in the amount of salt. A standard formula is 8 pounds salt per 100 lb meat, in 4-6 gallons of water. There should be enough salt in the brine to float an egg. With a salimiter, apparently the range is 60-95 degrees. I have never used a salimeter, so I’m not quite sure what that measurement refers to. The meat would need to be cured for around 11 days per inch of meat thickness (more or less depending on the actual salinity). Again, you can smoke the meat afterwards.
You can simply smoke meat by hanging it near a low fire so that it dries, but doesn’t get cooked. If the meat hasn’t been salt cured and then it is hot smoked (130F or more) it needs to be eaten right away because it is cooked and has a smokey flavour but isn’t preserved. Cooler smoking for a longer period will produce preserved meats that last a long time, even if they have not been salt cured first. I have never bothered to salt my fish or meats before smoking, and I suspect I sometimes get them too hot, but since I dry them until they are harder than shoe leather, they have never gone off (some have been kept around the house for months). They mostly get reconstituted into a soup or stew.
Lean fin fish, and possibly some meats, can be dried. The fish is first washed in a mild brine solution, then pickling salt is rubbed into eah piece of fish (1 lb salt for each 4 lb fish). The fish is then stacked in boxes that have holes in the bottom for rainage, with more salt sprinkled between the layers. Dry the fish indoors for 2-7 days. Then wash off all the salt and stack the fish on clean wooden racks in a shaded drying area out of the reach of animals. Bring the fish in out of dew at night. It will take 2 to 6 days to dry. I have read about Newfoundland cod fishermen putting their fish out to dry in winter. Basically the fish would freeze dry. This is an experiment I plan to try in my back yard one winter.
All this to say, some brine pickling might have been done before smoking, but I suspect that most meat and fish preservation was done using smoke alone. Just hang the meats up reasonably near the cook fire, wait a few days or weeks, and you will have preserved food for the winter. Given the large quantities of salt required for dry curing, this was more likely to have been done later or in places where salt was more readily available. There were ocean salt pans in Brittany 1000 years ago, an industry that survived to the 19th C and may be making a recovery now that regional coloured salts are trendy again (although I can’t imagine why anyone would want the grey salt from there). Salt works further south in Camargue and in Spain date back to the Roman period. Salt mining in Saltzburg goes back to 600 BC. There was also salt mining in the English towns ending in “wich” that we can safely presume dates back to the Viking period. Salt from all of these places would have been expensive in Iceland, and a quick search shows that not much salt was imported even into places like Norway until the 14th C.
Since people shouldn’t eat more than the equivalent of 1 tsp of salt per day from all sources, that amount could probably be gotten relatively easily through other sources already discussed – beach grasses, seaweeds, fish, and even meats and cheeses.
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