#bog butter

[blackdragontavern]

"The Real Feast: Why Your Fantasy Tavern Menu is a Lie"

Every fantasy book thinks a tavern feast consists of massive turkey legs, roasted potatoes, and generic "stew."

It paints a cozy picture, but historically, it's completely fabricated. Potatoes are indigenous to South America. Turkeys are from North America. The ancient Celts—and the vast majority of early medieval Europe—never saw either of them.

So, what was actually on the table during an ancient Celtic feast?

Pork. Lots of it. In Celtic mythology, pork was the sacred meat of kings and gods. The sea god Manannán mac Lir was said to own a magical herd of pigs that could be slaughtered and eaten one day, and be fully alive and whole the next. If you were feasting, you were eating wild boar. You were foraging hazelnuts. You were sweetening your food with wild honey.

And for fat, they had something entirely unique to the landscape: Bog Butter.

They would pack massive wooden barrels or animal skins full of butter and bury them deep in the peat bogs. Peat bogs are highly acidic, cold, and oxygen-free—essentially creating a natural, ancient refrigerator. This process preserved the dairy for years, sometimes centuries, transforming it into something that tasted like an earthy, intensely pungent cheese. And they loved it.

They didn't have global supply chains to bail them out. A feast wasn't just a display of casual wealth; it was a brutal, beautiful celebration of local survival. You ate the forest, you ate the dirt, and you were grateful the winter didn't eat you.

Forget the potatoes. Eat the boar, traveler.

[wikipediapictures]

Bog butter

“Bog butter, made by Benjamin Reade and tasted by participants at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2012” - via Wikimedia Commons

[thesilicontribesman]

Prehistoric Keg and Bog Butter, Kyleakin, National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh

In 1884, a bronze cauldron was found in a peat bog at Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye, along with several wooden kegs containing butter. One of these kegs survives, and the butter within it has been dated to 225 to 401 CE (around 1,600 to 1,800 years ago). The preservation of the wooden container is particularly important as it gives us an insight into the different woodworking techniques being used in the Iron Age.

[medievalistsnet]

Why Did the Medieval Irish Bury Butter?

Why did the medieval Irish bury butter in peat bogs? Discover the surprising reasons behind bog butter, from preservation and protection to ritual offerings and curious modern finds.

Click here to read

[garlic-possum]

Can I make BOG BUTTER from MINOTAUR MILK?

[acertifiedgeek]

Is it possible to make good chocolate chip cookies with bog butter?

If you are fine with a sort of moldy/cheese-like pungence to it, and are not expecting it to be sweet, then yes! I can't guarantee it'll be edible for humans, but anything is possible. This one might be for the faries.

Might want to substitute some of the butter for oil, though, as while the bog butter is there for the whimsy, too much will kill the chocolate taste and won't incorporate well with the sugar. Nor i think with the flour, the more I look into it, the more strange it is. But you can make popcorn with it!

Take this all with a grain of salt, I've never been good at chemistry, and I do not know much about bog butter, but thank you for introducing it to me, such a fun and weird thing bog butter is.

[inspofromancientworld]

Ancient Agriculture: Bog Storage

Source: https://www.theblockhouseschool.org/2012/05/pdc-day-8-humid-cool-to-cold-climates/

In areas where the climate doesn't allow for drying, being either too cold or humid, and has a frost line that goes deeper than easily dug up, other methods of storage were needed. Those that lived in climates that were cold and dry could potentially store food under cairns, as modern Inuit people do with kiviak, which ferments under stones over the winter. In areas that are cold and wet, other storage methods were needed.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/52440-mammoth-discovered-on-michigan-farm.html

Some of the oldest forms of storage are within wet areas such as lakes and bogs that would freeze in the winter, in low oxygen environments that encourage the growth of lactic acid producing bacteria. This would prevent spoilage by killing off the bacteria that would cause spoiling as would the freezing. Researchers found the remains of a mammoth that had been hunted more than 11,000 years ago that had been stored in a pond after it had been killed. This would have kept the meat edible from the autumn, when it was hunted, through to the following summer, based on recent experiments conducted on deer, lamb, and horse meat. This would have allowed for hunting during times when animals had fattened up for the winter and provided meat through times when animals would have been scarce or lean.

By Bazonka - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30007645

Another option is bogs, freshwater wetlands with decaying plant matter known as peat. This created a low oxygen environment that is also highly acidic, making it inhospitable to bacteria that would spoil food, as well as providing fuel for fires. The primary preservative in bogs is tannic acid. Bog stored butters have been found that go back nearly 2,000 years that 'still bore a faint smell of dairy' when they were found. Despite its name, not all bog butters were made of butter, but were made of other types of animal fats, many stored in wooden containers either lined with bladders or plant fibers, making sure the containers were well sealed, often convex in shape to prevent the water from in the bog from remaining on the container or what was inside. Recent research shows that food stored in bogs have comparable freshness to modern freezers over the course of two years. Another hypothesis for storing food in bogs is that it was 'primitive food processing…especially given the absence of salt in bog butters'. Given the various foods around the world that are processed via burial to improve nutrition and taste, researchers tested this and found that bog butters gained 'flavor notes which were described primarily as 'animal' or 'gamey', 'moss', 'funky', 'pungent', and 'salami'…a far cry from the creamy acidity of a freshly made cultured butter….similar in a manner to aged ghee'. Another theory is that it was to protect butter, 'a luxury food', from thieves, invaders, or possibly even tax collectors.

[victusinveritas]

A 2,325-year-old bog butter weighing almost 13.5kgs recovered from Rosberry in County Kildare, dated 360 to 200 BC, alongside the keg it was found in.

Image credit: National Museum of Ireland