* * * * *
DIET OF VARIOUS NATIONS.
(_For the Mirror._)
To the artist, the amateur, the traveller, and man of taste in general,
the following gleanings respecting the diet of various nations, are, in
the spirit of English hospitality, cordially inscribed. The breakfast of
the _Icelanders_ consists of _skyr_, a kind of sour, coagulated milk,
sometimes mixed with fresh milk or cream, and flavoured with the juice
of certain berries; their usual dinner is dried fish, skyr, and rancid
butter; and skyr, cheese, or porridge, made of Iceland moss, forms their
supper; bread is rarely tasted by many of the Icelanders, but appears as
a dainty at their rural feasts with mutton, and milk-porridge. They
commonly drink a kind of whey mixed with water. As the cattle of this
people are frequently, during winter, reduced to the miserable necessity
of subsisting on dried fish, we can scarcely conceive their fresh meat
to be so great a luxury as it is there esteemed. The poor of _Sweden_
live on hard bread, salted or dried fish, water-gruel, and beer. The
_Norwegian_ nobility and merchants fare sumptuously, but the lower
classes chiefly subsist on the following articles:--oatmeal-bread, made
in thin cakes (strongly resembling the havver-bread of Scotland) and
baked only twice a-year. The oatmeal for this bread is, in times of
scarcity, which in Norway frequently occur, mixed with the bark of elm
or fir tree, ground, after boiling and drying, into a sort of flour;
sometimes in the vicinity of fisheries, the roes of cod kneaded with the
meal of oats or barley, are made into a kind of hasty-pudding, and soup,
which is enriched with a pickled herring or mackerel.
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