Sami Diet in the 17th Century
With regard to food, the Mountain Lapps lived almost wholly on their reindeer, which provided them with milk, cheese, and meat.
From: 1600 C.E. To: 1700 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Through Lapland With Skis and Reindeer by Frank Hedges Butler, 1917.
Food
With regard to food, the Mountain Lapps lived almost wholly on their reindeer, which provided them with milk, cheese, and meat. Occasionally they bought cows, goats, and ewes from the neighbouring parts of Norway, which they milked in summer and killed in winter. In winter they ate chiefly boiled reindeer flesh, in summer milk, cheese, and dried flesh. The delicacies in greatest esteem were the tongue and marrow of the reindeer, and such dainties were always forthcoming when priests were to be entertained.
The Forest Lapps lived partly on fish and partly on birds and beasts. They preferred the flesh of bears, a dish that always appeared when they entertained friends. Bread and salt were almost unknown. Instead of the former they used dried fish, reduced to a kind of meal by grinding; and instead of salt, the inner rind of the pine-tree prepared in a peculiar way. All fresh meat was boiled, and the broth greatly esteemed; sometimes fish was cooked in the same vessel.
The milk, which is very thick, was either boiled with water or allowed to stand in the cold to freeze into a kind of cheese. Fish was either eaten fresh as soon as caught or dried in the sun, when it would keep for "several years." For sweet dishes they prepared blackberries, strawberries, wild angelica, all of which they preserved by boiling in their own juice without water over a slow fire till they were very soft; then a little of their salt was sprinkled over them, they were put into a vessel of birch-bark and buried in the ground, and taken out as required.
Their chief drink was water, some of which was always kept hanging over the fire in a kettle to prevent it freezing, "out of which every one with a spoon takes what he pleases, and so drinks it hot, especially in winter-time." Also they often drink the broth made with the meat. Beer was unknown to them, but for pleasure they drank "spirit of wine and brandy, with a little of which you may win their very souls." They were also "very great admirers of tobacco." Sheffer thus describes a Laplander's meal:—
"Their dining-room in the winter-time is that part of the hut where the man and his wife and daughters use to lie, and is on the right hand as you go in at the foregate; but in summer without doors upon the green grass. Sometimes, too, they are wont to sit about the kettle in the middle of the hut. They use not much ceremony about their places, but every one takes it as he comes first. They seat themselves upon a skin spread on the ground cross-legged in a round ring; and the meat is set before them in the middle, upon a log or stump instead of a table; and several have not that, but lay their meat upon the skin which they sit on.
Having taken the flesh out of the kettle, the common sort put it upon a woollen tablecloth, the richer on a linen; as for trenchers and dishes, they are quite unknown to them. But if any liquid thing is to be served up, they put it in a kind of tray made of birch. Sometimes without any other ceremony everyone takes his share out of the kettle and puts it upon his gloves or his cap. Their drink they take up in a wooden ladle, which serves instead of plate. And it is farther observable that they are abominable gluttons when they can get meat enough, and yet hardy too to endure the most pinching hunger when they are forced to it. When their meal is ended they just give God thanks, and then they mutually exhort one another to Faith and Charity, taking each other by the right hand, which is a symbol of their unity and brotherhood."
The last act reminds us of the still prevailing Swedish custom of shaking hands and wishing each other "Smaklig Maltid" at the end of a meal, but otherwise the description points to curiously uncivilized conditions for any European people at the end of the seventeenth century.
Butler, Frank Hedges. Through Lapland with Skis and Reindeer. T. Fisher Unwin LTD., 1917.
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