Food and Farming in Prehistoric Britain

by Paul Elliott

  Cream

  A number of food types can be made from raw milk and the easiest of these to produce is cream. Left alone to stand, milk naturally separates into cream and the low-fat milk that it has left behind. Since the fat in cream is less dense it rises to the top from where it can be skimmed off. Clotted or scalded cream is a favourite of West Country tea rooms today and since it has a slightly longer shelf-life, may have also been popular with prehistoric communities. Another benefit of heating up the milk to near boiling temperatures is the possibility of killing off some of the harmful bacteria that make raw milk their home.

  Clotted Cream

  While the milk is still warm from the cow, pour it into the widest cooking pot you have and leave this to stand overnight. In the morning the cream will have separated and risen to the top of the pot. Do not stir or otherwise disturb the pot of milk and cream as you carry it to the fire. Now warm it very slowly and very gently in the embers of the hearth. The milk should remain over the heat until it is very hot, but do not let it boil or you will end up with a skin instead of cream. You may need to stir the cream gently in order to stop it scorching or sticking to the sides of the pan. An hour or so should suffice—this will vary depending on the amount of milk, the size of the pot, and the heat given off by the coal bed—the slower the scalding is done the better. Thick undulations should appear on the surface when it is ready and once this stage is reached remove the pot from the heat and let it stand overnight once again. In the morning simply scoop the clotted or scalded cream from the top of the pot. Do not waste the low-fat milk left behind, the roundhouse cook would never have wasted food and it can be put to use in other recipes.

  Sour Cream

  When it is allowed to stand at room temperature, cream will naturally ferment and thicken; it becomes more acidic, which passes a mild sour taste on to the cream. How long this takes depends on the weather. During the summer it is possible to pour the cream out into a deep pan in the early evening and then wake up to find sour cream the following morning. During the colder, winter months, however, you will have to ripen your cream next to the hearth, remembering to turn the pot occasionally to ensure that the heat reaches the cream evenly.

  Of course, sour cream produced in this way will last a little longer than raw milk. Since cream will have been collected from several days’ worth of milking, the prehistoric cook will have discovered that it had begun to naturally ferment. This fermented sour cream acts as the basic ingredient for making butter. Today we call butter made from sour milk ‘cultured butter’ and the butter derived from pasteurised milk, ‘sweet cream butter’. It is the latter form of butter that is popular in Britain and the USA.

  Sweet Cream Pudding

  While most cooks in the West employ sour cream as an accompaniment, using it to flavour other foods, the Norwegians have incorporated it into a traditional porridge recipe called Rømmegrøt. The sweet cream pudding described below is inspired by the Norwegian Christmas dish:

  •1 litre sour cream

  •Around 200 g flour (to thicken)

  •One cup of warm milk

  •50 g honey

  •25 g butter

  Simmer the sour cream for about fifteen minutes. Next, sprinkle in some of the flour and stir. Keep adding flour in this way until the mixture reaches the consistency of good porridge. Continue to simmer, stirring occasionally to prevent the pudding from sticking to the pot. Skim off any butter fat that rises to the surface.

  While the milk is warmed in a second pot over the fire, increase the heat beneath the pudding and bring it to the boil. At this point begin adding in the hot milk to thin out the sweet cream pudding. Whisk until smooth and then simmer gently for a further ten minutes. Finally, add the honey and melted butter and serve. This is a sweet, rich dish and the Norwegians traditionally eat it with cured meats.

  Butter

  In ancient Greece and Rome, the barbarians of Europe were renowned for their eccentric habits, such as wearing trousers and eating butter. In one of his plays, the Greek poet Anaxandrides (quoted by Athenaeus) calls the Thracians of Eastern Europe ‘boutyphagoi’, or ‘butter-eaters’. Pliny tells us that among the northern tribes, butter was made mostly from cow’s milk, although the richest came from sheep and goat. Milk and milk products had been a staple food of northern Europe since the domestication of cattle. This emphasis on dairy foods rather than olive oil clearly distinguished the Celtic from the Roman diet. For the Romans, butter was simply a base for ointments and salves, not something in which you cooked your food.

  Pliny’s comment from the start of the chapter, that butter distinguished the rich from the poor, does suggest that the process to make it was difficult and time consuming. However, butter can be made quite easily without recourse to elaborate equipment or ingredients. He goes on to describe a method that he has heard about:

  In winter the milk is warmed, while in summer the butter is extracted merely by shaking it rapidly in a tall vessel. This has a small hole to admit the air, made just under the mouth, which is otherwise completely stopped. There is added a little water to make the milk turn sour. The part that curdles most, floating on the top, is skimmed off … what comes to the surface is butter, a fatty substance. The stronger the taste, the more highly is butter esteemed.

  Pliny 28.35

  The fats in milk or cream are normally prevented from coming together to form a single mass by membranes of emulsifiers around the fatty globules. Butter-making is the process of agitating the milk (or more usefully the cream) to break these membranes, allowing the fats to join up into a single mass. Shaking, beating, or churning are all ways in which this is achieved.

  To make butter, put about 500 g of cream that has been ripened (or soured) into a bowl and whisk. Continue whisking until the cream begins to resemble scrambled eggs. Further thrashing of the cream will result in the solid butter separating out from the white buttermilk. It is an easy task to strain the buttermilk and remove the butter for washing. All traces of buttermilk have to be washed out of the butter, or else it will turn rancid over the next few days. Stir the butter in a bowl with a little fresh water, drain and repeat until the water runs clear. After adding a little salt, the butter should be ready for storage in a dark and relatively cool location.

  A number of wooden casks, the earliest dated to the fifth century AD, have been found within Irish and Scottish peat bogs. Although now rancid and inedible, most of the barrels seem to have contained butter that was deposited in the anaerobic environment of the bogs where it would remain cool and fresh for great lengths of time. The largest casks of butter weighed as much as 18 kg. Other finds suggest that the practice of ‘bog butter’, however, was a much older one going back at least to the Iron Age. The Roman writer Tacitus reported:

  [The German tribes] are wont also to dig out subterranean caves, and pile on them great heaps of dung, as a shelter from winter and as a receptacle for the year’s produce, for by such places they mitigate the rigour of the cold. And should an enemy approach, he lays waste the open country, while what is hidden and buried is either not known to exist, or else escapes him from the very fact that it has to be searched for.

  Tacitus, Germania, 16

  In Britain, a type of mysterious subterranean rock-built structure called a fogou or souterrain has been discovered. These long and narrow hollows are typically associated either with the storage of food or as a place of defence. The words of Tacitus, above, suggest that in fact both uses can be ascribed to these manmade caves. Butter and cheese must have formed a large part of any such cold-store, but many other foods, from dried vegetables to salted meat, smoked fish and other supplies, must also have been kept there. The fact that not all Iron Age settlements had their own fogou could perhaps be explained by a statement made by the writer Strabo: ‘some of [the British], though well supplied with milk, make no cheese’ (Strabo 4.5).

  Fresh
Cheese

  Cheese is yet another way in which milk can be turned into solid food. While butter-making liberates the fat content of the milk, cheese-making focusses instead on caseins that make up the bulk of its protein. By adding some form of acid to the milk, the caseins are forced to lump together to create white, chunky solids called curds, the prime constituent of cheese. The watery fluid left behind is still full of nutrients, but it is no longer milk, instead this by-product is known as whey. Whey, like most by-products was always put to use; it makes a nutritious drink on its own, or, as Cato recommended in his book De Agricultura [150.2], should be fed to pigs in order to help fatten them up.

  It seems that the Germans ate cheese. Indeed, Tacitus remarks that their diet was simple, consisting of wild fruit, fresh game, and curdled milk. The Latin term used is lac concretum, a simple fresh cheese that is formed when milk is left to go sour of its own accord—the milk’s own lactic acids doing the curdling. This type of fresh cheese has formed a part of European diet for centuries and survives today as the English cottage cheese, the northern European quark, and the Italian ricotta.

  To accelerate the curdling process, heat can be applied and an acid added to the milk; in prehistoric Britain, beer will have served this purpose well.

  Beer Cheese

  •1 litre full fat milk

  •250 ml brown ale

  •Sprinkle of salt

  Skimmed or low fat milk (that has perhaps had its cream skimmed off for some other use) can still be used for making fresh or soft cheese, but a whole milk will produce more solids during the curdling process. Heat the milk up in the pot until it is about to rise, at which point you should take it out of the hearth and pour in the beer. As you stir, the milk curds should appear almost immediately. I have found that warmed beer has an even speedier effect, although it is doubtful if it produces any more curds in the long run. Within just a few minutes the curds will have completely separated from the whey.

  Place a linen cloth (I have a piece that I use solely for my cheese making) into a wide wooden bowl and then empty out the curds and whey into it. Next, carefully tie up the cloth and suspend it over the bowl from a beam in the roundhouse. It can be left overnight to drain and should be occasionally squeezed to force out any remaining whey. The resultant cheese will have retained a gentle flavour of beer and be crumbly and delicious. For those wanting a traditional curds-and-whey-style cottage cheese, do not squeeze the cheesecloth and let it hang for only an hour or so, before emptying the contents into a bowl. Soft cheese is best served with fresh bread.

  Sour Cream Cheese

  In this recipe, the sour cream acts as the acid, and takes the place of the brown ale. Use about 250 ml of sour cream, and follow the instructions given above for beer cheese.

  Sweet Cheese

  Tasty though both sour cream cheese and beer cheese are, they can be made into a sweet treat with the addition of honey, crushed hazelnuts, autumn berries, chopped mint, myrtle, or chive leaves. Again, follow the recipe for beer cheese, but as a final step, chop up the additional ingredients and gently fold them into the cheese. Leave suspended for an hour or so before serving.

  Smoked Cheese

  The inevitable result of hanging up the cheese-cloth from roundhouse rafters is the development of a faint smoky flavour. This effect can be accentuated by purposefully suspending the cheese cloth over a smoky hearth that is burning a sweet-smelling wood, perhaps oak chips or applewood, a fuel that the Roman agriculturalist, Columella, specifically recommended. Pliny suggested that smoking was a good way to improve the flavour of goat’s cheese.

  Hard Cheese

  A hard cheese has been pressed and ripened over a period of time in a cool, dark place. French Roquefort cheese, for example, is still matured in the Combalou caves near Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, and as we have already seen, this type of subterranean storage was certainly employed by historic communities in northern Europe. Since ripening can take many months, milk can be transformed into cheese during a time of plenty and be eaten later in the year once it has ripened. Cheese ripening is a far more complex process than making fresh cheese, requiring rennet (an enzyme extracted from the stomach of a calf) as well as cheese presses. Often these types of cheeses are coated in wax or fat in order to properly seal them.

  9

  Baking Bread

  At a small fishing village in Tanzania, on the shores of Lake Victoria, I was interested to see maize kernels (sweetcorn) drying in the sun both on blankets and on plastic sheets. I assumed this was a prelude to grinding in order to bake American-style cornbread. I was even more convinced when I was shown a communal petrol-powered corn mill, but I was wrong. My guide from the local Sukuma tribe, explained that the cornmeal produced at the little milling machine (protected by a tiny mud-brick building) would actually be used to make ugali, a thick porridge that is boiled until it reaches a heavy dough-like consistency. Ugali is the food of the poor who live around East Africa’s great lakes, and it is most often broken into lumps and then dipped into sauce or stew, or it is wrapped around pieces of meat or vegetable to pluck them from the bowl. It is perfect finger food that is quick to make and unsophisticated, requiring neither yeast nor bread oven.

  This one example goes to show that a simple farming or fishing community can exploit a source of carbohydrates (in this instance maize, but also wheat, rice, oats, barley, and so on) without relying on the need for a large bread oven. After the Roman invasion, domed-shaped ovens built of clay were common and they were used primarily for the baking of bread. Such ovens continued in use through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although a number of prehistoric ovens have been excavated over the years, they are typically rare finds. Small clay ovens were found next to Neolithic hearths in Orkney at Rinyo, for example, and also at the Links of Notland. Within one Iron Age house at the hill fort site of Maiden Castle, three clay ovens were found together and would have presumably been used by the community as a whole—if indeed their intended use was the baking of bread. The relative scarcity of ovens during the prehistoric period suggests that they might have had a very different use. Malt drying is certainly one plausible suggestion that has been put forward. Malt was an important addition to the diet and required the slow toasting of soaked and swollen cereal grains, either for later baking and cooking, or for the brewing of beer. Without some kind of dedicated drying oven, one is forced to toast the grains in a clay pot beside the fire that has to be constantly rotated.

  This Iron Age roundhouse at Maiden Castle hill fort in Dorset is remarkable for the number of ovens found within it. Were they used for baking bread, for drying corn, or for preparing malt ready for the process of brewing beer? (J. Renfrew)

  Grinding

  Before the dough comes anywhere near the fire, the flour has to be liberated from the grains. Ancient strains of wheat like emmer and spelt taste very similar to modern bread types, although their grains are much larger. This might seem counter intuitive in an industry that strives to cultivate ever larger fruits and vegetables, but the reasons are sound. Modern, smaller grains ripen more quickly in the fields, which reduces the time (and cost) of drying in granaries. Additionally, they shed their husks easily and uniformly, allowing for fast and efficient processing. Ancient emmer grains, however, are not only much larger, but must be heated to separate the husks from their grains. This means that any delay in harvesting a modern wheat can be catastrophic, since the farmer faces the prospect of the grains ripening in the fields. In prehistory these bigger and more stubborn wheat strains did not over-ripen if left to stand in the field.

  Once threshed and winnowed and with the grains completely separated from their husks, the grains were put into sacks, storage jars, or grain pits. Wheat grains have their own tough outer jackets that protect the flour within; only on the day the flour was needed was it liberated from the grain through grinding. This was the ‘daily grind’, probably carried
out by the women of the roundhouse family. Throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age the type of grindstone used was called the saddle quern, made up of a lightly dished, roughly oval lower stone and a smaller hand stone. Grains are scattered onto the lower stone and then ground using the upper hand stone by pushing backwards and forwards. The most comfortable way to do this is while kneeling over the quern, and many female Neolithic skeletons display osteoarthritis in the toes, knees or lower back as a result of this daily drudge.

  During the Iron Age the rotary quern was introduced into Britain. This new design consisted of a stationary lower stone and a circular upper stone. The upper stone was pierced by a central hole and was rotated around a spindle that passed through it. Grain was dropped into the hole to be caught between the two rotating stones. To move the upper stone, a single hole was cut into its side and a wooden handle inserted. It is likely that the handle was used to rotate the grindstone through 90 degrees or less, rather than in a complete circle. Certainly our own work with rotary querns suggests that this to and fro motion is the more ergonomically efficient method of grinding.

  There were various regional variations of the Iron Age rotary quern, among them the beehive quern, which was popular throughout northern England. These quern stones featured conical, or bun-shaped, upper stones. Querns of the later Iron Age and Roman period were more saucer shaped in design. It is essential when using a quern to place a woven mat or sheet of leather beneath it in order to catch the flour that spills out from between the stones. Some of this will be mixed with unground cereal grains and will require regrinding. It must have been common practice to scoop enough wheat grains from a storage bin to provide wheat for the whole family for one day. With the grains in a basket by the quern, the family member tasked with grinding the day’s bread would know exactly how much had to be ground and she would stop when the basket was empty.