Viking Pudding Experiment

The book review for this week was Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen and I figured the perfect article to accompany it would be one about Norse cooking. After reading my friend’s cooking blog, A Fools Taste, I decided making something to eat and writing about it would be much more interesting than researching. Tastier, too.

So, I started searching the internet for a recipe the Vikings could have used. And found a tasty one for a hazlenut pudding on House Barra’s page for Norse Foods.

That’s “pudding” in the European sense of a cake-esque kind of baked good (like bread pudding) and not the wiggly, sweet goo we American’s mean we talk about “pudding”.

The Recipe

This is the Wheat and Hazelnut recipe I found on the Norse Foods page of House Barra (an SCA group in North Carolina).

What I Used

I went shopping at Henry’s, a grocery store that carry’s foods not common to big grocery stores and that has a lot of grains, beans, nuts, and candy’s you can buy by the pound.

Ingredients

• 1 cup medium coarse bulgur wheat
• 1 cup of crushed hazelnuts/filberts (took about four cups of whole, shelled filberts to make one cup of crushed nuts)
• 3 large brown eggs
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 2 cups non-fat milk (I’d meant to get regular milk, but grabbed the wrong bottle at the store)
• 1 cup clover honey (I’d use just 1/2 cup next time I make it)

Crushing the Hazelnuts/Filberts

So, first of all, “hazelnut” and “filbert” are the same nut. Sometimes they’ve called one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. The ones I bought were labeled on the by-the-pound barrel as “Whole Hazelnut Filbert Nuts”.

The suggested method of crushing the nuts in the House Bara recipe was to put them in a towel and hit them with a hammer. I didn’t want to loose any hazelnut pieces to the towel, though, so I decided to use my new little fist-sized mortar and pestle to pound the filberts into a crushed state.

I quickly realized I had to hold one hand over the top of the mortar to keep the nut pieces from flying out. This made things very exciting since I couldn’t actually see what I was doing.

Thankfully, only the hazelnuts were hurt.

It took awhile, too, and I realized the virtue of the long, tall mortars I’ve seen pictures of; pieces can’t fly out of a mortar that’s tall like they can with a short one.

As an aside, seeing that the hazelnuts/filberts were pretty much $8.00 a pound I now appreciate what a princely gift it was when an obscure nut-farming relative mailed my family a small cardboard box filled with filberts.

What’s ‘Medium’ Oven?

The Norse recipe I found called for the pudding to be cooked in a ‘medium’ oven. I had to do another internet search for what temperature that means in a modern kitchen. I found that ‘medium’ translates to pretty much 350°.

Toasting

I noticed too late that I was supposed to toast the crushed hazelnuts before adding them to the bulgur wheat. So I ended up toasting BOTH the wheat and the nuts. It made it tasty. It took my oven about half an hour at 350°.

The Honey

With a whole cup of honey, though, it’s almost too sweet (at least, if you eat a large piece of it). I think next time I make it I’ll only use half a cup. That, or use a milder honey than clover. Maybe avocado honey. Mmm, that’s a nice mild honey that wouldn’t be too sweet with a full cup.

The honey pretty much sinks to the bottom of the pan, too, so it might be just as well to pour it into the pan first and spread it around before pouring in the rest of the mixture.

Proof In The Pudding

Bulgar Wheat and Hazelnut Pudding is YUMMY! Definitely a tasty Norse food.

All of the ingredients settle in layers based on how heavy they are, so the end result is layered. The heavy honey and bulgur wheat are on the bottom and the lighter eggs are in the middle and the nuts are on the top.

The course bulgur wheat takes some chewing, but not in a bad way. It just means that you take longer to eat a slice. The pieces of crushed hazelnut are little surprises as you get to them, too. It tastes like nutty honey.

I had slices for re-heated breakfast for about two weeks. But Viking What & Hazelnut Pudding is at its BEST, and softest, hot out of the oven.

What the Viking

In the grand tradition of glorifying criminals, pirates are at a height of popularity in American culture. Though, I imagine they’re less cool to the people on the cruise ships that get attacked by actual machine-gun toting pirates these days in the waters around Africa.

This brings us to everyone’s favorite aquatic raiders, the Vikings.

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Joy & Nostalgia in the Gold Room

Filigree detail on Seven-ringed collar
Source:Historiska Museet

How would you like to spend all day wandering through a room filled with treasures made of gold; rings, coins, cups, brooches, chains, collars, buckles, torques, etc?

Dude, is it ever cool.

Especially if the room in question is the Gold Room exhibit at the Historiska Museet (The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden). I went here in ’96 when I was an impressionable teenager and did it ever make an impression on me. I would go back to Stockholm in a heartbeat just to visit the Historiska Museet and the Gold Room again.

Tiny gold figure plaques
Source:Historiska Museet

I was poking around the internet a few weeks ago, just casually looking for good Viking sites and old Norse recipes and was suddenly reminded of the hours I spent gazing at all that gold so long ago. Don’t ask how my brain made the leap from boiling apple leaves to a golden hoard. Maybe the thought of taking a gander at the Historika’s site was beginning to percolate just then.

What was so nifty about the Gold Room, I mean besides the cases filled with the good stuff, is that the room itself had this great, serene Asian-style setting. The room is round and the center, at that time, was sort of inset and had benches for sitting around a little fountain, while the exhibit itself formed a sort of raised ring around this indoor courtyard. I just really enjoyed the contrast of looking at all these bright treasures from more ancient days while strolling round a dark, modern room. It was so awesome.

My memory says there was a kind of soft Japanesy sort of music quietly playing near the ceiling to the lazy accompaniment of the little fountain.

I was a bit disappointed to see from their website that the Historiska’s changed the architecture of the Gold Room; it’s still round but it’s paved with yellow flagstone and brightly lit with the cases set into the walls instead of being freestanding so each side houses a different display. Just proves once again that you can never go home again.

My favorite case in the ever-so-cool Gold Room housed just one little artifact. It wasn’t an intricately filigreed collar. It wasn’t a reliquary cup. It wasn’t the typical delicately wrought work of goldsmithing mastery that the other cases contained. It was a bent, rectangle-ish loop of scrunched gold. What I loved wasn’t so much the object itself but it’s story. Because the beat up little bit of metal was a prehistoric gold neck ring. A farm family had found it in their field and it was doing service as their gate latch. Some historians came by asking for directions to some nearby site and there was this priceless golden treasure holding the gate closed. I found it hilarious, but then I’m a farmer’s granddaughter. (at least, that’s the version I remember)

Screen shot of the Gold Room video showing roman coins and Norse coinage rings

My second favorite display in the Gold Room was a case with treasures from the Viking Age. It was almost half-filled with old Roman silver and gold coins and little rings and armlets. The placard said, if I’m recalling it correctly, that the Vikings and Norse traders (yes, there IS a difference) liked to get paid in coin by the Romans because coins were easy to carry and sell back home.

They preferred to be paid in silver because it was actually more valuable in Sweden because it wasn’t as common. I found it really amusing that all of these coins were being used as smelting stock, essentially, instead of having any value as Roman money. I’m sure the Romans would have had a conniption if they realized.

You can see a good video about this exhibit and ogle some of it’s treasures here. Statistics about the treasures housed in the Gold Room and little segments highlighting a few of their number one artifacts (one of which turns out to be my favorite exhibit mentioned above).

The video has English subtitles, so no worries if you don’t speak Swedish.