The Kitchen and the storerooms

Posted on March 18, 2009 by cinzia

Along the corridor of the Glaumbær farm there’s the kitchen, built on 1750 and only recently used as laundry. In the kitchen, the inhabitants of the house used to smoke food using peat or excrements. This because there’s no tree on the island, therefore wood was rare and taken only from trunks that sea currents would leave on the beach of Iceland.

In front of the kitchen there used to be a small room where they used to work milk: after milk yield, the liquid was poured into different pots and left there to ferment for a day and a half, until it formed a thick layer of cream. The cream was then taken out and put in the churn to make butter, while a prt of the screamed milk was transformed into “skyr”. The pots were cleaned using brushes made of horsehair.

When the skyr was ready, it was stored in the room nearby, the long farm, along with the blood pudding, because that room was particularly suitable for food conservation.

In front of the long farm there was the main storage room of the farm, where the housewife put the food produced in the other rooms. The walls of these areas are only made of peat, that spreads a strong smell of moss, and keeps the interior humid.