Not an endless banquet but two simple meals a day: barley porridge and flatbread, soured milk, fish and a jug of beer. Here is what excavations and sources reveal about the Viking kitchen – and how the feasting myth falls apart.
The Viking-Age kitchen was down-to-earth, seasonal and shaped by a single great worry: how to get through the winter. People ate what field, byre, sea and forest gave – fresh in summer, preserved in winter. Of constant feasting there can be no talk. But that hardly made the menu dull.
Everyday life generally knew two meals: the dagverðr in the morning, once the first work was done, and the náttverðr in the evening. People ate by the long-fire, from wooden bowls and with their own knife; spoons of wood or horn completed the cutlery, and forks were unknown. Drink came from wooden cups, pottery beakers and – on more festive occasions – from drinking horns. Much was a one-pot affair: a cauldron over the fire in which grain, vegetables and a little meat or fish simmered for hours. Cooking was done in cauldrons of iron or carved soapstone, hung on a chain over the long-fire. Anyone without a cauldron made do with the cooking pit (Old Norse seyðir): in a pit lined with hot stones the meat cooked slowly through. Roasting was done on a wooden or iron spit over the embers, and bread was baked on flat stones and iron pans. No formal recipe from the Viking Age survives, by the way – we know the ingredients, not the cooking instructions.
Fire he needs / who with frozen knees / Has come from the cold without; / Food and clothes / must the farer have, / The man from the mountains come.Hávamál, stanza 3 – trans. Henry Adams Bellows, 1923 (public domain)
This stanza shows what rank food held in the North: to give a frozen traveller fire, food and clothing might well save a life. Hospitality was not mere courtesy but a rule of survival.
The backbone of the diet was grain, and above all barley. To it, depending on the district, came rye and oats, more rarely wheat. From cracked grain the ever-present porridge was cooked; from coarsely ground flour came the flat, unleavened flatbread – baked on hot stones or iron pans, because ovens were scarce. Charred bread finds show that dough was stretched with peas, flax seed or bark when grain ran short. And a large share of the barley never went into porridge at all, but into the brewing vat. Before every meal, however, came hard labour: the grain had to be ground by hand on the rotary quern – a daily, exhausting task that usually fell to the women. The best quern stones were sought-after trade goods: porous basalt lava from the quarries around Mayen in the Eifel was shipped down the Rhine to the trading places of the North. A piece of the Rhineland thus lay, quite literally, in many a Viking kitchen.
Dairy cattle were worth their weight in gold – not for the milk alone, but because it could be turned into stores. Fresh milk spoiled quickly, so people processed it into keeping products: butter, cheese, whey and above all skyr, a set, curd-like fresh-milk product still made in Iceland today. The separated sour whey (Old Norse sýra) was far more than a by-product: in it people preserved meat, fish and even butter over the winter – the acidity kept rot at bay. Buttermilk and whey were at the same time everyday drinks.
Meat reached the table less often than one might think – to slaughter a beast meant parting with milk, wool or pulling power. When meat did appear, it came from pig, cattle, sheep and goat, along with poultry and eggs. Slaughter happened mainly in autumn, when not every animal could be fed through; the meat was smoked, salted, dried or laid down in whey. Along the coasts and near rivers, fish was at least as important: herring, cod and salmon, plus shellfish and seal. Dried cod – stockfish – kept rock-hard and became a prized trade good long before the Hanse made it famous. Game, seabirds and their eggs rounded out the menu. Meat therefore also had a social side: at the blót, the sacrificial feast, animals were slaughtered, the meat cooked together and shared in the hall. Such a banquet was a rare high point – meat in abundance, with beer or even mead – and precisely for that reason so meaningful. Everyday life looked different: small portions, often only as a garnish in the grain porridge.
The broad lines of the diet are well secured by animal bones, charred plant remains, fish bones and shells from settlements such as Hedeby, Birka and Ribe; to these come cooking cauldrons, hand-querns, storage vessels and – more rarely – preserved food remains. Isotope and dental-calculus analyses on skeletons confirm a mixed diet of grain, dairy, meat and (near the coast) plenty of fish. The rise of dried cod shows early: Lofoten fish can already be traced at Hedeby in the period around 800–1066.
No one lived on animal food alone. In gardens and fields people grew onions, cabbage, peas, beans and field beans, along with herbs such as mugwort, dill, celery and caraway. From the forest came what the season offered: hazelnuts in quantity, bilberries, raspberries and blackberries, crab apples, sloes and wild plants like orache and goosefoot. Sweetness came almost entirely from one source – the honey of wild and kept bees. It was precious, for it was at the same time the raw material for the North’s noblest drink.
Food was indeed seasoned – but with what was native: onion and leek, mustard seed, caraway, dill, horseradish and wild herbs. Salt was the most important seasoning and above all preservative; it was won by boiling seawater or from salty peat. The exotic spices of later cuisine, however – pepper, ginger, cinnamon, clove – are not attested for the Viking Age in the North. They arrived in quantity only with the long-distance trade of the high and late Middle Ages. The Viking kitchen was therefore not bland, but it tasted markedly different from what modern “Viking recipes” often serve.
The main drink was beer brewed from barley – cloudy, nourishing and made in almost every household. It was usually not yet hopped; the brew was flavoured and preserved with herb mixtures, above all bog myrtle (grut). Hops spread widely only later. Mead, fermented from honey, was the prestige drink of the elite and of feasts – expensive, because honey was expensive; it belonged in the chieftain’s hall, not on the everyday table. Wine was pure imported luxury from the South. The true everyday drink, by contrast, was water, buttermilk and the ever-present sour whey. Drinking together carried weight in the North: at the sumbel, the ritual drinking gathering, the horn passed around the circle, people raised toasts to gods and ancestors and swore solemn vows. The cup was thus not only a vessel but a stage for honour, alliance and the spoken word – one reason why the drinking horn and the beaker are still so closely bound up with the image of the Vikings.
The key to the Viking kitchen is preservation. Without refrigeration, people survived the winter only if the summer’s abundance was made to keep: drying (stockfish, dried meat), smoking over the long-fire, salting and curing, laying down in sour whey, and fermenting into skyr and cheese. Thus a short harvest summer became a store that lasted until spring – or did not, for years of hunger did come. Late spring, when the old stores ran low and the new harvest was still far off, could be the hardest time of the year. Those who had managed their household wisely came through; those unlucky with weather, harvest or cattle plague went hungry. Viking food was therefore no programme of indulgence but a shrewd, often laborious answer to a harsh climate – and a full storehouse was a greater wealth than many a piece of silver.
The overflowing feast with mountains of meat and endlessly flowing mead is an image from film and saga. Such banquets did exist – but as the exception, for feast, blót and wedding, not as everyday fare. Normal were two simple meals, plenty of grain porridge, soured milk and, where possible, fish. Mead was an expensive elite drink; the ordinary draught was beer and buttermilk. And the spice racks of modern “Viking kitchens” with pepper, ginger and cinnamon mislead: these spices are not attested for the Viking Age. Seasoning was native – with herbs, onion, mustard and above all salt.
Mead – the drink of gods · Everyday Viking life · The Viking Longhouse · Herbs & healing of the Vikings · Viking clothing & fashion.
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