History
The roots of Icelandic cuisine are to be found in the traditions of Scandinavian cuisine, as Icelandic culture, from its settlement in the 9th century onwards, is a distinctly Nordic culture with its traditional economy based on subsistence farming. Several events in the history of Iceland were of special significance for its cuisine. With Christianisation in 1000 came the tradition of fasting and a ban on horse meat consumption, but the event which probably had the greatest impact on farming, and hence, food, was the onset of the Little Ice Age in the 14th century. This severely limited the options of the farmers who were not able to grow barley anymore and had to rely on imports for any kind of cereal. The cooling of the climate also led to important changes in housing and heating where the longhouse of the early settlers, with its spacious hall, was replaced by the Icelandic turf houses with many smaller rooms, including a proper kitchen, which persisted well into the 20th century.
Usually the Reformation in 1550 marks the transition between the medieval period and the early modern period in Icelandic history. Until the agricultural reforms, brought on by the influence of the Enlightenment, farming in Iceland remained very much the same from the 14th century to the late 18th century. A trade monopoly instituted by the Danish king in 1602 had a certain impact on culinary traditions although the influence of the cuisine of Denmark was most felt in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In the early 20th century an economic boom based on fishing caused a slow transition from traditional dairy and meat-based foods to fish and root vegetables, which was at the same time a transition from the dominance of preserved foods towards greater emphasis on fresh ingredients.
Read more about this topic: Icelandic Cuisine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)