2024-09-30 11:54:33
He certainly didn’t go back like the Vikings.
While they eat a lot of porridge and would have always had soup on the stove, all the evidence suggests that these do not contain salt, sugar and certainly cinnamon or other spices.
“We have no evidence of spices being imported anywhere in Scandinavia at that time. There is no written evidence and no physical evidence. [from archeological digs]” Daniel Serra, food historian, told The Local.
“They looked for herbs. They looked for juniper berries, mustard seeds, definitely. But there was no evidence of great spices.”
Serra is skeptical of suggestions that Swedes who traveled to Constantinople to serve as servants in the Varangian Guard would have brought spices back with them on their return.
“You’re going to need an audience that knows what it is,” he said. “You will use all your savings to bring home these spices that no one will understand, when you bring home silk, gold or silver, people will know what you are about.”
Spices like cinnamon and cumin were, however, certainly present during the Viking Age in the big cities of Germany and northern France, but they seem to have stopped there.
“One of the first evidences for spices is a description of a market in Mainz by an Arab cumin merchant, who was looking for spices, but then he went to Hedeby, which is in the south of Denmark, and only said that the food was terrible . So I think there is no exception.”
Daniel Cerra, a food historian and experimental archeologist, rejects claims that the Vikings used spices. Photo: Richard Orange
Cinnamon comes to Sweden
The first written evidence of cinnamon being used in Sweden appears in a recipe for the Swedish mulled beer Saint Bridget, known as Saint Bridget, served to guests at his father’s funeral in 1328, when half a kilo of expensive incense was used.
“There are two main reasons for adding cinnamon here,” Serra said of using cinnamon in funeral alcohol. “It is to show its status, because it is an expensive import, to show that it is part of the European food culture, and that it also has medicinal properties.”
Bridget of Sweden’s father, Birger Persson, is the governor of Upland and one of the richest people in Sweden. “Next to the king, he was the most powerful, powerful man in Sweden at the time. So when he died, he had to do something important.”
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But incense probably began to become available to the elites in Sweden fifty or a hundred years before this. It is used as an ingredient in various processes A small book about the art of cookingThe Little Book of Culinary Arts, a cookbook attributed to the Danish priest Henrik Harpestræng, Canon of Roskilde Cathedral, who died in 1244.
“What’s in the cookbook is a cameline sauce, which is based on vinegar and cinnamon with some herbs to it. I think there’s mint and parsley,” Serra said. “You would have small dishes of meat and put your food in the sauce. There was also one where you made a bread pudding with saffron and a cinnamon stick sprinkled on top of that, but as such good food.”
The sauce Salsor Dominorum in the book, used for choosing wild game, features a combination of cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom: a mixture similar to the one used today in pepparkakor biscuits. Swedish people serve at Christmas.
Portrait of Bridget of Sweden by Hermann Rode, taken from the Swedish people through the ages. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
From rich businessmen to ordinary people
It was not well into the 13th century, when the Hanseatic League began to increase trade with Sweden, the perfume began to be used more widely, although it was a luxury.
“In the Renaissance, you have a rising middle class that wants to show that they are part of the elite, so you start collecting these cookbooks and you also have fun laws around Europe, which say ‘that whether you are a peasant or not. a merchant, you can’t have these spices,” Serra said.
The use of spices like cinnamon then spread from the very wealthy to become what ordinary people would use to mark great celebrations. “It turns out to be a festive meal, for Christmas or for festive occasions.”
Spices only began to come to Sweden in large quantities with the arrival of the East India trade in the 18th century. The Swedish East India Company, founded in Gothenburg in 1731, brought spices and sugar to Sweden in large quantities for the first time.
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Bread and cinnamon buns
Cinnamon has long been used in savory dishes. It was when sugar began to be produced in plantations in the US and the Caribbean and imported to Europe in large quantities that cinnamon began to be used in breads and desserts, and it was not until the sugarbeet began to be cultivated in Sweden at the end of the 19th. century that sugar became a commodity available to almost everyone.
“The first recipe we have for a cinnamon dish in Sweden is from the middle of the 16th century, and it was written by one of the last Catholic bishops of Sweden,” Serra told us. “It’s for a tart or cake with eggs, sugar, cream, cinnamon and ginger, which he says is made in Sweden for noble women when they are restless.”
The bishop is in exile, and the recipe, Serra said, is part of a book that aims to show the Catholic world why Sweden is important and encourages them to intervene and return to Catholic law.
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It was not until the middle of the 19th century that cafes serving Viennese-style patisserie began to become established in Sweden. Them cinnamonor cinnamon, seems to have arrived or originated in Sweden on the west coast, in and around Gothenburg.
According to the website Holidays and traditionsThe oldest recorded person is not mentioned cinnamon came in 1857, when there was an advertisement for “saffron and cinnamon” in the local newspaper in Åmål, on the west coast of Lake Vänern. In 1868, there was a similar announcement in the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten.
The ubiquitous bun does not seem to have arrived in Dubai until ten years later, with the first mentions in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet not arriving until 1925.
The real explosion, however, came when rationing was lifted at the end of World War II. The first edition of Vår Kokbok, a collection of Swedish home recipes, contains a recipe in cinnamonhelping to turn them into the Swedish staple they are today.
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