of certain berries; their usual dinner is dried fish, skyr, and rancid
butter; and skyr, cheese, or porridge, made of Iceland moss, forms their
supper; bread is rarely tasted by many of the Icelanders, but appears as
a dainty at their rural feasts with mutton, and milk-porridge. They
commonly drink a kind of whey mixed with water. As the cattle of this
people are frequently, during winter, reduced to the miserable necessity
of subsisting on dried fish, we can scarcely conceive their fresh meat
to be so great a luxury as it is there esteemed. The poor of _Sweden_
live on hard bread, salted or dried fish, water-gruel, and beer. The
_Norwegian_ nobility and merchants fare sumptuously, but the lower
classes chiefly subsist on the following articles:--oatmeal-bread, made
in thin cakes (strongly resembling the havver-bread of Scotland) and
baked only twice a-year. The oatmeal for this bread is, in times of
scarcity, which in Norway frequently occur, mixed with the bark of elm
or fir tree, ground, after boiling and drying, into a sort of flour;
sometimes in the vicinity of fisheries, the roes of cod kneaded with the
meal of oats or barley, are made into a kind of hasty-pudding, and soup,
which is enriched with a pickled herring or mackerel. The flesh of the
shark, and thin slices of meat salted and dried in the wind, are much
esteemed. Fresh fish are plentiful on the coasts, but for lack of
conveyances, unknown in the interior; the deficiency however, is there
amply supplied by an abundance of game. The flesh of cattle pickled,
smoked, or dry-salted, is laid by for winter store; and after making
cheese, the sour whey is converted into a liquor called _syre_, which,
mixed with water, constitutes the ordinary beverage of the Norwegians;
but for festive occasions they brew strong beer, and with it intoxicate
themselves, as also with brandy, when procurable. The maritime
_Laplanders_ feed on fish of every description, even to that of sea-dog,
fish-livers, and train-oil, and of these obtaining but a scanty
provision; they are even aspiring to the rank of the interior