She gave a wave to Finn and continued on to the kitchen, where the heat hit her with welcome warmth. Obviously, the fires had been going for some time. A number of workers were already baking the circles of manchet bread, which had to be baked every day because they had no leavening and therefore went stone-hard stale rapidly. The flat bread circles had holes in the center, and as the bread cooled, they were stored on upright poles.
Girda wasn’t about. One of the helpers said she was in the storage room. While she waited for Girda to return, Andrea checked out the huge cauldrons on swinging cranes in the two hearths. One held the porridge or gruel that would be served this morning. She tasted it with a long spoon, and it wasn’t too bad. A bit of salt and honey had been added to make it more palatable, but it was still bland. If nothing else, it would be filling. The other kettle was a different case all together. It held the pottage, a stew that was added to over days with whatever vegetables or grains were available so the pot was always full. It might have originally had meat in it, but by now was just about ten gallons of grayish green sludge. God only knew how old it was. Andrea wouldn’t even taste it for fear of food poisoning or stomach issues.
She decided to seek out Girda and perhaps come up with a plan where she could help her during the hopefully short time she was here. She walked through the scullery, where a half dozen women were busy doing laundry. Every peg on the wall and a length of rope across the room held wet apparel. Still more boiled in lye water or was being rinsed in another kettle of cold water. This was work far better done outside, but there was no choice in the winter, she supposed. All of the dirty pots and dishes had been washed and put in a special kitchen closet the day before under the cook’s command.
“Look at this,” Girda said when she saw Andrea enter the storage room. The woman reached into a barrel and brought out a handful of flour. It was dotted with little black specks. Weevils. “I’m trying to decide what ta do with this. With people starving down the village, we can’t afford ta waste it.”
“The insects probably won’t hurt anyone, but isn’t there any way to remove them? I don’t suppose you have a sieve.”
“A sieve?”
“Strainer.”
“Not that I can think of. We use loose woven cloth ta strain the honey, but that wouldn’t work with flour.”
“How about we put a white cloth on one of the tables and spread the flour over it, several cups full at a time. Let some of the children with small hands pick out the insects. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but we might get it fairly clean.”
Girda shrugged. “Ye can try, gods willing.”
“There’s something I want to say, and please don’t take offense. That pottage in the kitchen is probably rancid.”
Girda bristled, but then she nodded. “The kettle probably hasn’t been emptied since I went ta see my sister. And it was already cooking fer at least three days before that. We’ll put it in the slop bucket fer the dogs. They won’t mind.”
“Can I make another suggestion?”
Girda frowned. Andrea was obviously pushing it. “Can I stop you? Could a herd of Valkyries stop you?”
“Of course. You’re in charge here. I’m just a pastry chef, and I don’t see much chance for making sweet desserts here at this time.” She blinked her eyes with innocence, trying her best to be self-deprecating. “Will you let me try to make one of my favorite soups for the evening meal? Beef turnip soup with rivels.”
“What are rivels?”
“Little dough balls. They’re similar to noodles.”
“Noo . . . what?” Girda asked. Then waved a hand dismissively as if it didn’t matter what they were. “If you can make turnips appeal ta these Viking clods, give it a try.”
“Good. And I won’t even need any of the good parts of that cow over there. Just the long bones of the flank. They make good marrow bones. Even the deer bones would do.”
Without hesitation, Girda took an axe off a long table and hacked off the cow’s leg up to its rump, and it did the same thing with one of the deer, handing the two bloody stumps at her.
Andrea almost dropped the two limbs, they were so heavy. “I didn’t mean right now,” Andrea tried to say, but Girda was already off, giving orders to two young men to bring one of the barrels of weevily flour up to the kitchen and told a woman wearing a yellow apron to find a clean, white bed linen. The yellow apron was a bright spot in an otherwise dreary setting.
Andrea stared at the two limbs in her arms then and placed them on the aged, much-cleaved butcher block where Girda had stuck the axe. There was nothing else Andrea could do but lift the axe high and chop the bones into sizes that would fit into the cauldron. It wasn’t easy, and it took several tries each to sever the bones so the marrow would be exposed, but finally she had six sizable chunks, which she carried back to the kitchen.