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Despite coming from such a different country, Viking food was not that different to that eaten by the Anglo-Saxons. In their homeland they may well have eaten seals and polar bears but they wouldn't have found these in England. For an ordinary Viking family the first meal of the day might be bread, oatcakes and butter. These would have been prepared by the women of the family. At lunch the men would be out working so they could take some cheese, wrapped in a linen cloth to keep it clean, some bread and maybe berries. The women and children would eat the same but in the house. Their night meal, at the end of the day, would be fish, meat and again sometimes cheese. Cheese was easy to make as long as you had a good supply of milk. It seems that in these times milk was not used as a drink. They also ate porridge and stews and all meals would be cooked in a pot, hung over the open fire in the middle of the house. They also ate the usual vegetables, their favourites being carrots (which in those days were white or purple), onions and cabbage. To eat they would use knives and fingers. They didn't seem to use forks and the food would be eaten in a wooden bowl. They would also sometimes cook in a hole in the ground packed with hot stones. The food would be placed on the stones and left to cook. Thirteen thousand miles away, on the islands in the Pacific Ocean, people cooked like that too. Like the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings would also drink from animal horns.
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