Spring nettle pottage (modern reconstruction)

What is nettle pottage?

Nettle pottage is a thick soup of young stinging nettle shoots cooked with roots, onion and a little fat. The version here comes from Ribe VikingeCenter, an open-air museum in southwest Jutland that rebuilds a Viking Age town and cooks over open fires. The recipe serves four.

The pot holds diced bacon, onion, garlic, parsnip, carrot and half a celeriac, with thyme, a handful of wild garlic and a full litre of chopped nettle shoots. Water or stock goes in after the vegetables have sweated under a lid. Three quarters of an hour later the roots are soft and the nettles have collapsed into dark green threads through the broth.

It is a museum recipe, not an excavated one. Ribe writes all its recipes so they can be made on a stove as well as a fire, and this one works in any kitchen with a heavy pot.

Names and identity

The Danish name is brændenældesuppe, burning-nettle soup. The plant is common stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, a perennial native to Britain and Ireland as well as Scandinavia.

The RHS describes it as a plant that thrives in nitrogen-rich, moist soil and self-seeds freely. Anyone with a neglected corner of garden, or a compost heap, has probably grown it without trying.

Where the recipe sits in the Viking evidence

No recipe for nettle soup survives from the Viking Age. What survives is a picture of how ordinary households ate. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, drawing on archaeological finds and written accounts, describes everyday food as porridge of barley or oats, bread with butter or cheese, and hot meals that were mostly soups and stews of meat, fish and vegetables.

The same museum lists the plants known in Viking times. From the garden came peas, beans, cabbage, onions, garlic and leeks. From the forest came the roots, stems and leaves of angelica. Thyme, yarrow, bog myrtle and juniper are named among wild herbs. Nettles do not appear on the list.

That gap matters. A nettle soup fits the period's ingredients and its cooking, and museums cook it for that reason. It does not show that Viking Age households ate nettles in spring. Readers should take the dish as a careful modern guess.

Soup at the bottom of the table

Soup also turns up in the poetry. The Viking Ship Museum quotes Rígsþula, Rig's journey, a poem that probably dates from around the 10th century. The god Heimdal, travelling as Rig, visits a thrall's house, a farmer's and a chieftain's. At the thrall's table, Edda brings out food rich in chaff and a bowl of soup.

At the chieftain's house the table is laid with bleached linen, white wheat bread, pork, roast fowl and wine. The poem uses food to rank people. A pot of roots and greens belongs at the lower end of that scale, which is where most people ate.

Winter stores and the first green food

The museum describes a year built around saving food. Much of the summer harvest from field and garden was kept for winter. Grain, vegetables, fruit and berries were dried in summer and autumn, in the sun when it shone and otherwise by the heat of indoor hearths.

Later in autumn, when livestock were slaughtered, the meat was dried, smoked or salted. Salt was hard to come by, since Viking lands had no natural deposits; it was made by boiling down seawater or imported from the Baltic. Dried fish was widely eaten.

After a winter of stored food, anything fresh and green would have been welcome. That is the reasoning behind the museum soups. It is a reasonable inference from how the year worked, not a recorded custom.

The plant itself

The Woodland Trust describes nettle as a perennial that grows upright to 2 m tall. Its soft, serrated leaves sit in opposite pairs on the stem, and tiny greenish-white flowers cluster towards the top.

It lists leaves, stems, shoots, flowers and seeds as edible, and names tea, beer and soup among the uses. For this soup, only the young leafy tops matter.

Picking nettles

The museum's advice is short. Pick with a cloth or a glove, go for new small shoots because they taste best, wash the leaves thoroughly and chop them finely.

The Woodland Trust adds detail. The whole plant is covered in stinging and non-stinging hairs. The tender tips give the best flavour, which it compares to spinach. It also gives the rule that covers every wild plant in this pot: never eat anything you are not completely sure of, and never pick from ground that has been sprayed.

Late in the season the stems turn fibrous and the leaves coarse. A soup made from them is stringy and bitter, and longer cooking does not save it. Spring shoots, or the fresh regrowth on plants cut back in summer, are the useful harvest.

Why the sting goes

The museum puts it simply: the nettles burn, but only until they are cooked. The RHS lists the living plant as a skin irritant and advises gloves when handling it. Raw chopped nettles on the board still sting, so keep the gloves on until they are in the pot.

Heat also shrinks the leaves. A full litre of chopped shoots cooks down to a small mass of soft greens spread through the broth. Long simmering turns them from bright green to a darker, duller colour. That change affects looks, not safety.

Pots, fires and hot stones

Finds of kitchen equipment show what a Viking household cooked with. The museum lists roasting spits, boiling vessels of wood, leather and clay, pans of soapstone and iron plate, sieves, ladles, bowls and knives. Food was boiled or roasted over an open fire or in an oven.

Wooden and leather vessels could not go on the fire. Cooks heated stones in the hearth and dropped them into the liquid instead. The museum calls these potboilers and warns modern cooks never to use flint, which can shatter when heated.

For boiling, the museum advises a blazing fire. For roasting or baking, it advises good embers. A large fire can do both: boil at one end and rake embers to the other for the turnips. Its pot should be iron, steel or aluminium, without plastic or Bakelite handles, hung from a tripod or set on three stones.

Cooking the Ribe soup

Fry a good handful of diced bacon in a heavy-based pot. When it starts to colour, add one or two finely chopped onions and one or two cloves of garlic, and cook until the onions turn clear.

Add the diced roots, the chopped thyme and wild garlic, and the nettles, and stir well. Put the lid on and let everything sweat for about 10 minutes, stirring now and then. Pour in 1.5 litres of water or stock and bring it to the boil.

Simmer under a lid for about 45 minutes, until the roots are tender. Taste, salt, and serve the soup very hot.

A meat-free pot

The museum notes that the soup works without bacon. Soften the onion and vegetables in a little butter or oil instead and carry on as before.

Wild garlic is only around for a few months in spring. The museum says it can be left out or replaced with dried wild garlic. Leaving it out is also the right choice for anyone unsure of their identification.

The Viking Ship Museum variation with meat

The Viking Ship Museum publishes a heavier soup for about four people. It uses 1–1½ litres of water, half a kilo of meat, three parsnips, two large onions, about three cups of nettle top shoots, herbs and optional salt. The meat can be pork, beef, lamb or mutton, chicken or fish.

The meat goes into cold water, comes to the boil and simmers for about an hour, with the scum skimmed off. After about half an hour of that time, the onions, parsnips and coarsely chopped nettles go in with the herbs. When the meat is tender it comes out, is cut into cubes and goes back into the pot before seasoning.

This is a different dish from the Ribe soup. Here the nettles season a meat broth. In the Ribe pot they are the main ingredient.

Ember-baked turnips on the side

Ribe VikingeCenter pairs its green dishes with roots baked in the fire. The museum notes that turnips were grown in Viking kitchen gardens, and that turnips, cabbage, beans, peas and grain made up a large part of the everyday diet.

Bury four medium turnips in the embers, not the flames, and turn them often so they bake on all sides. The skins blacken, and only the inside is eaten. Depending on size they take 45–90 minutes; push in a knife to check. Split them, season with salt and herbs such as thyme, and serve with butter.

The museum suggests celeriac and other hard vegetables cooked the same way. Ember-baking cooks a root. It does not preserve it for winter.

Other pots from the same museum sheet

The Viking Ship Museum prints its nettle soup beside a barley porridge and a bean stew. The porridge is coarse barley flour scattered into a litre of boiling water, simmered for 5 minutes with two apples and a few hazelnuts, then left by the fire for half an hour to an hour.

The bean stew uses 400 ml of horse beans, soaked overnight in three times their volume of water and boiled for 1–1½ hours, then finished with onions and cooking apples fried in butter, soured cream, thyme and crushed mustard seed. The museum warns that the beans must never be eaten raw. Together the three dishes show the range the museum builds from the same short list of plants.

In a modern kitchen

Everything in the Ribe pot except the nettles and wild garlic is sold in any supermarket. Bacon lardons, onions, garlic, parsnips, carrots, celeriac and fresh thyme are standard stock.

For anyone without nettles, young spinach gives a similar flavour, which is how the Woodland Trust describes nettle leaves. That makes a different soup and should be called one. Dried wild garlic, which the museum allows, stands in when the fresh leaves are out of season.

Serving

The museum says only to serve the soup steaming hot. Barley flatbread, porridge or plain bread all suit it. The museum gives no garnish.

Troubleshooting

If the cooked leaves still sting, they went in too late or were too coarse to soften. Simmer for longer.

If the soup is stringy or bitter, the nettles were old. Next time pick only the top few leaves of young shoots.

If the roots are still hard at 45 minutes, keep simmering. Size and variety set the time.

If the colour has gone olive, the soup has simply cooked a long time. Colour is not a safety signal.

Safety and storage

Cook bacon and meat through. The UK Food Standards Agency's check is 70 °C at the centre of the food for 2 minutes.

For soup made on a stove, cool leftovers and put them in the fridge within two hours, then eat them within 48 hours or freeze them. The Viking Ship Museum is stricter about fire cooking: it advises never keeping campfire food until the next day, even in a refrigerator.

Salt and herbs do not make the soup keep. If a pot left out starts to bubble, sour or grow mould, throw it away.