What did the Vikings eat? (2024)

By studying dig sites, sagas and ancient cookbooks, a culinary archaeologist is recreating dishes the Vikings ate – and rewriting the popular view of these people in the process.

With his long white beard emerging from a thick brown cloak and handmade leather shoes on his feet, Daniel Serra looks the part. The hulking Swede is a culinary archaeologist who has been studying food habits from the Viking age for more than two decades – and when he's recreating recipes, he employs a full-immersion strategy. As well as wearing the kind of clothes worn by Scandinavia's infamous seafarers, he cooks using replica tools inside reconstructed Viking-style buildings.

When I met him, it was a cold morning following a heavy snowstorm, and there was a bitter wind whirling around the wooden log cabin where Serra sat stirring a savoury porridge made with dried fish stock over a crackling fire. His cloak brushed the flames as he got up from a handcrafted stool, but he was completely unfazed. "It's made of wool. It won't burn. Don't worry I'm used to this!" he said, with a smile.

Serra had set up a makeshift kitchen at Gunnes Gård, a reconstructed Viking-age farm just north of Stockholm that's one of a number of locations across Scandinavia where he gives cooking demonstrations to tourists. Surrounded by a snow-frosted pine forest, it's a short walk from a Viking-age burial site and several well-preserved runestones.

While the word "Viking" is often used to describe anyone who lived during the Viking era, Serra explained that it should technically only refer to the pirates and pillagers who travelled across northern Europe between the 8th and 11th Centuries. He said that most people during this period weren't bloodthirsty invaders, but worked as farmers, fishermen, crafters or traders, and he's made it his life's mission to research and recreate the kind of dishes that dominated their everyday diets.

"I like to eat, and I like to eat good food, so I was curious: what did [the Vikings] eat?" said Serra, who initially studied the food of ancient Rome as an archaeology student by recreating dishes from the 1st- to 5th-Century cookbook De Re Coquinaria. He then reconstructed, cooked and tasted his way from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages before focusing on the Viking era during his graduate studies. Today, having established that Vikings were much more farm-to-table locavores than meat-loving hunter gatherers, Serra is now considered one of Scandinavia's leading authorities on the culinary practices of the Vikings.

Serra says that studying what the Vikings ate provides a better understanding of their technical skills and ideologies, as well as how people in that era socialised. "By recreating food, you can get an idea of being there," he said. "That makes it easier to understand the society, the whole world at the time."

Serra began "experimental cooking" Viking cuisine on a larger scale as a part of an assignment for Lofoten Viking Museum in northern Norway in 2010. There was a reconstructed longhouse (a long narrow wooden building) with a typical Viking hearth, and inside, Serra started to create Viking-inspired recipes such as wild leaf herb and cheese pottage, and roasted turnips served with butter for tourists, washed down with whey.

This experience sowed the seeds for a recipe book, and in 2013, he teamed up with fellow archaeologist Hanna Tunberg to write it. In An Early Meal: A Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey, they combine traditional recipe instructions for dozens of meals, with detailed explanations of how and why certain dishes would likely have been cooked in different parts of Scandinavia.

"To me, the most interesting result of our studies so far has been to see the picture of farmers living off the surrounding nature," Tunberg said. "The fact that we never find game amounting to more than 1% of the bone material in excavations – and more often a lot less – gives a clear picture of farmers with no spare time for hunting."

Tunberg explained that this reveals a fascinating truth about who the Vikings were. "By effectively killing off the myth of Vikings gnawing off the meat of the bones of wild animals, we have broadened the picture of Viking societies as farmers."

Anna Toräng, who manages Gunnes Gård, said Serra's work has been vital to understanding that these mythical seafarers were more settled than previously thought.

"Knowing what Vikings ate can teach us more about who they were and what their society was like," she said. "[Serra's work] tells us that Vikings were not only the sort of eating-the-meat-raw-from-the-bone type of people they are sometimes portrayed as. No doubt, Viking-age society could be raw and brutal. But the level of importance they obviously put in the art of cooking shows us a culture of sophistication within the context of a harsh world and age."

Viking imagery often focuses on seasonal banquets of roasted lamb accompanied by mead. While the elite did enjoy this kind of food (and used it as a way of expressing their wealth), Serra's research suggests that everyday cooking was quite different.

He said most people focussed on developing simple, "tasty", "feel-good" dishes that could be easily shared and helped keep them warm in Scandinavia's harsh climate. "The winter would have been cold. So, yes, people working in those conditions would probably need a hot meal. A hot, comforting meal – filling."

But with no written documents available from Viking times (apart from carvings on runestones, which usually focussed on remembering the dead), figuring out what people ate and how they cooked it is akin to solving a "puzzle", said Serra.

That evidence comes from a variety of sources. Serra draws partly from findings by fellow archaeologists at dig sites around Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe where the Vikings travelled. Here, the fossilised remains of animal and fish bones, as well as plants and grain seeds, have been recovered. Discoveries of Viking-age cooking equipment and tools also provide clues, as do ruins, which give an insight into how food was prepared and stored. Serra also consults literature from the medieval period when recipes started to be written down but cooking techniques had not advanced much since the Viking age. Among these is Libellus de Arte Coquinaria, a 13th-Century cookbook that is believed to have been compiled in Denmark.

Another vital source is Viking sagas – prose stories about Viking travels and culture that were written in early medieval times but are believed to have evolved from narratives of real-life events, retold through generations. "Sometimes these sagas contain a description of food that you can almost guess has sort of been passed down, and then can use it as an inspiration," explained Serra. "But it's not just guesswork, it's research."

Serra cross-references all this with information about the climate and landscape of the areas where the Vikings lived, as well as broader historical research about the social, economic, religious and ritual themes of the era.

Finally, he engages in what he calls "experimental archaeology", which involves trying some of the Viking cooking techniques identified by his research. These include boiling stews and sauces over a hearth and baking in fire pits, which Serra replicates using the ingredients he believed would have been available to the Vikings, including fish, root vegetables and grains. He also tests the "possibilities and limitations" of popular Viking-age utensils such as knives, wooden spoons, pottery, soapstone pots, iron cauldrons and hand-driven rotary mills.

Serra's research indicates that fish was among the most common foods eaten during Viking times. This largely consisted of cod, plaice, herring and halibut caught along the long Scandinavian coastline. These catches were dried as well as traded and brought inland. Pigs were kept for their meat, and cattle, sheep and goats were sometimes eaten too, although these animals were more usually kept to produce dairy products like milk and butter.

Readily available vegetables likely included turnips and shallots as well as beans, peas and goosefoot (a leafy plant similar to kale). Cereals were also grown, with evidence of barley found at the majority of excavation sites across Scandinavia. These were used to make bread, porridge and beer.

Serra believes people living in the Viking era "spiced up" meals with locally grown herbs such as dill, parsley and coriander, as well as ramson plants, mustard seeds, malt vinegar and juniper berries. Root vegetables from the allium family (such as wild garlic and leeks) would also have been vital in adding variety and taste and help make mealtimes a more pleasurable experience, rather than one just focussed on survival, said Serra.

As the snow continued to fall at Gunnes Gård, Serra painstakingly stirred a dried fish-flavoured porridge that is a more recent, and until now, unpublished recipe by the culinary archaeologist. Serra explained that he calls the dish Traveller's Fish Porridge, and it combines stock from dried fish, with shallots, barley, dill seeds and malt vinegar. "We find the bones of cod all over Scandinavia," he said, adding that dried fish was likely a frequent ingredient in Viking-age cooking because it could be stored for long periods without spoiling.

Cereal grains such as barley could also be kept for months, and easily transported, which means they were also a likely staple of travelling Vikings, said Serra. His research has found references to porridge in sagas written about seafaring traders, suggesting that communal eating was just as important to the Vikings as it is to many of us today. "They would have invited people over for some porridge" to get to know them, Serra said.

As a finished meal, Traveller's Fish Porridge looks more like a risotto than the oat porridge that adorns modern breakfast tables. Upon taste, it ticks all the boxes Serra lists as important for Viking age meals: it's surprisingly packed with flavour, filling and warm on a frigid day – the epitome of Viking comfort food.

After demand for his workshops and lectures dried up during the pandemic, Serra says he's currently seeing a renewed interest in his work. He's in talks with Gunnes Gård to hold more public cooking demonstrations. In August, he's set to hold cooking demonstrations in English of Viking-age recipes during Medieval Week (one of Scandinavia's largest festivals, on the Swedish island of Gotland), which typically focuses on food and performances inspired by medieval times.

Serra believes there's a growing fascination in everyday foods from the Viking age and other historical eras because people are becoming more interested in knowing and learning how people were living day-to-day, and what this tells us about their lives, traditions and cultures.

"It's not just this interest in the warfare, or the raiding part. People are trying to see the more complex, full picture," he said. "Food means a lot in our connections with people. What the [Viking-age] food tells us is that they are people, just like us – they strive for something that tastes good, they eat together and share food and invite people to eat."

And while Serra remains a huge fan of immersing himself in Viking traditions, he hopes that more people will try cooking dishes from the era, even if that takes place in the comfort of their own homes.

"Viking food is not difficult to make," he said. "You don't have to wear wool and stand by an open fire. You can cook Viking-age food in a modern kitchen. People are often a bit sceptical, but it's tastier than you think!"

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Dried cod was a major export during the Viking era, and the bones of dried cod have been found across Scandinavia. Dried fish heads are an excellent base for making stock. Today they can be sourced from West African food shops in Scandinavia, which import them, or at markets in Iceland and northern Norway, where local cod is still caught and dried. (You can also use supermarket fish stock cubes as a substitute, although the taste will be less powerful.)

Shallots are a close relative to a type of onion found at an excavation of a pre-Viking age settlement on the Swedish island of Öland. In springtime they can be substituted for ramson plants, which have been described in various Viking sagas.

Ingredients

For the stock:

For the porridge:

Method

BBC.com's World's Table "smashes the kitchen ceiling" by changing the way the world thinks about food, through the past, present and future.

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