It’s July. What’s for supper at a Viking homestead?

Let’s think about this a bit. Although winter can be hard for hunter-gatherer societies, Norse culture had learned to store and preserve foods. But I’ll contend that late summer might have been a time when food supplies got a little thin. Why might that be? Because harvest season is in a couple of months, so meat supplies from last year might be running low, as lots of things ripened. So one might guess that summer food then might be much like summer food now: lighter on the meats, more on the veggie side.

I’m looking out across the fields where I live, and the field behind me this year is planted in corn. It’s tall—it seems to be well over ten feet! It’s tasseled out, which means that on a summer evening, if you walk or bike or drive with the car windows open, you can smell it, the unmistakable sweet corn-floral fragrance of summer.

But those ears of corn are just baby right now. Likewise, the soybean fields. However, the wheat fields, planted last autumn with winter wheat, have already turned gold and been cut down to stubble.

If you’re a farm family in the Viking era, you’re probably engaged in the hard work of threshing: removing the hard kernels of wheat from the wheathead, and separating the grain from its protective covering, called chaff.

You might also be engaged in breaking flax. I’ll write another post about the fascinating process by which the flax plant becomes the soft, wonderful fabric called linen.

But the smoked meats from last autumn’s butchering—cattle, pigs, sheep, and even horses—might be starting to run a bit low.  Mama’s keeping an eye on things so that it’ll all last until the weather gets cold enough to butcher again. 

In the meantime, there will be plenty of greens from root crops, including turnips, carrots, onions and beets, and there will be fresh berries to eat with skyr, and there will be eggs from chickens, ducks and geese. 

All in all, plenty to sustain you through the long bright days of summer. The fall equinox (equal nights and days) is still far away.  There is much to do. Life is good. Be well.

originally published July 30, 2020