The owners felt that their mix of Neo-Nordic cooking had reached peak saturation and it was "unsustainable" to continue.
The past two decades have seen the emergence of "New Nordic cuisine," which former Silvio Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi famously mocked back in 2005, gaining worldwide popularity.
Part of this popularity was the promotion of local, natural, and sustainable ingredients, something which the Vikings knew a thing or two about, especially when it came to baking a type of bread using the blood of reindeer.
A time before UberEats
The early medieval period is not renowned for its culinary creations. The huge cornucopia of the modern food industry was in its very infancy, with extremely basic places to eat, no supermarkets, no UberEats (however, did the Vikings eat on a Sunday?!), and you can forget about a Viking ever trying to use a Theromix!
This, however, doesn't mean that the Vikings have nothing to teach us about food and cuisine.
In fact, part of the recent popularity of "New Nordic Cuisine," with all its emphasis on the locality and sustainability of ingredients, was the way in which people in Viking societies had to procure and produce their food.
Sustainable Eating
People in Viking societies had to be creative when it came to food. With little arable land throughout the Scandinavian peninsula (the small exception being parts of southern Sweden), there was a need to both utilize and preserve foodstuffs.
Hunting animals was one of the quickest and most lucrative ways that a person in early medieval Scandinavia could procure food. Whilst we may associate herds of reindeer with jolly Christmas carols, there was no cutesy association for people in Viking societies.
Reindeer were not only plentiful, inhabiting much of the Scandinavian peninsula, but were also a great source of primary ingredients to both eat and use for a variety of uses, from warm clothing to bone.
Rather than discarding what we moderns may assume was the inedible part of an animal – for example, its blood – people in Viking societies were a little more resourceful. Quite literally, the first thing you can procure from a dead animal is its blood and offal.
Maybe not the tastiest ingredient, you may say, but the Vikings would disagree. These ingredients expired rapidly and needed to be preserved immediately.
They would also suit peoples who spent hours of their doing back-breaking farm labor, housework, or, you know, all those "traditional" Viking activities of raiding, pillaging, and plundering, as these ingredients were nutrient dense.
A combination of bread and blood
The idea of using reindeer blood as a culinary ingredient may, at first, seem rather odd to us. Yet blood and offal are used in a variety of sausage-like creations from a range of cultural and civilizational cuisines.
Everyone from the British (Black Pudding), Spanish (Morcilla) to the Germans (Bratwurst) love a bit of cooking with blood. Further north, in the Nordic region, "blood pancakes" (whipped reindeer blood with flour then fried) are popular in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
People in Viking societies were no different when it came to using blood for culinary treats. Bread made with blood is one of the original recipes that the Vikings passed down to their Scandinavian ancestors that are still being made today.
Essentially the recipe calls for the bread to be mixed with blood (traditionally reindeer blood). The nutrients in the blood made this bread have a longer shelf life than most traditional loaves, meaning that it could be preserved and stored for winter.
Modern Scandinavian cooking has seen a resurgence in the creation of blood bread as it can be dehydrated and stored for an even longer shelf life.
Whilst blood bread may not be everyone's favorite recipe, it illustrates how inventive and practical people in Viking societies were before the invention of refrigeration as well as how sustainable their cooking was, a millennium before it became a culinary buzzword.
Iceland Magazine has published an article on the food of the Vikings, available to read here, whilst blood bread is one of the recipes available in Magnus Nilsson's The Nordic Cookbook, available to buy on Amazon here.
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