If fermentation sounds like an exotic way to preserve food, bear in mind that the same process also yields wine, cheese, anchovies, olives, sour cream, yoghurt and buttermilk. Without the blessing of fermentation the Scandinavians would never have been able to turn the greater part of their spring and summer milk supplies into storable dairy products. Nor would they have become the important cheese and butter makers they are today. Denmark has even managed in the [1960s] to present to the world a great new cheese - the rich, soft Crèma Dania.
Some milk had to be kept on hand to drink, and inevitably it soured. A virtue was made of this, and , and in Viking times, as later, it was considered fit food to offer company. One of the sagas tells tells of a man named Bard who served his guests bread and butter and “large bowls filled with curds.” As they were very thirsty, they swallowed the curds in large draughts; “then Bard had buttermilk brought in, and they drank it.”
What those curds may have been is not certain. Perhaps they were nothing more than skyr, or curdled milk, which used to be a common food of Scandinavia. Today skyr is found under that name only in Iceland, and here it is eaten fresh, as a kind of yoghurt. In the old days in Norway and Sweden, milk was kept for months on end to make another product called syr. Syr was sampled by a man at the end of the [19th C]entury who described it as resembling milk “freshly drawn from the cow,” but tasting like “vinegar mixed with something bitterer than aloes.” And indeed it did serve on occasion as a substitute for vinegar.
In Norway, farm wives used to make a drink known as tette milk, so-named because the tette, a meadow plant with a blue flower, was basic to its preparation. A few of the leaves would be put into the bottom of a bowl and boiled milk poured over them. Allowed to sit in a warm place, the milk would thicken; then the leaves would be removed and some of the milk would be spooned as a culture into fresh supplies kept in casks and barrels. Such apparently was the power of the tette leaves as a preservative that spring milk so treated could still be drunk in winter. By then it would have changed considerably in character and taste, and great care had to be taken not to stir it, as the whey would separate. A little would be dipped carefully out of the barrel and poured into bowls, to which sour cream might be added, probably to make it more palatable.
In the kind of storage economy that dominated Scandinavian households until [the 20th C]entury, nothing edible could be wasted, and thus even the whey resulting from the manufacture of cheese and butter was boiled down, a process that took hours to complete, since whey is little more than water.The brown paste so obtained was then put in molds, allowed to set, and eaten as a kind of cheese. The famous goat cheese of Norway is made in this manner. Occasionally leftover whey was drunk, and according to old Norwegian farmers who used to quaff it in the fields, no more thirst-quenching drink could be found in summertime.
The taste for tart dairy products remains strong among the Scandinavians. In any of the [Scandinavian] countries it is not unusual to see a bowl of milk sitting on a window ledge or at the back of a cupboard, like an offering to the household gods. When it has become good and thick, sugar is sprinkled on top (in Denmark, crumbs of sour rye are added), and the whole is spooned up greedily. Although the Danes display this predilection for sour of thick milk - tylmaelk as they call it - they had to wait for the United States Army in Germany to introduce them to sour cream. Having started out by manufacturing it exclusively for GI consumption, they soon woke up to its multiple possibilities in cooking, and are now busily promoting it at home - thus finally catching up with the Norwegians, Swedes and Finn, who for centuries have known what a good thing it is.
