The Scandinavians of the Viking Age did not eat in courses of starter-main-dessert but took two main meals: the *dagmál* ('day-measure'), taken mid-morning after the first chores, and the *náttmál* ('night-measure'), in the evening. Around these two meals revolved the travel provisions (*nesti*) carried on the *knörr*, and the chieftain's feasts (*veizla*) where drinking took place in the great hall (*skáli*). In Erik's Greenland, all of this was reorganized around what a land without grain provides: fish, seal, game, and dairy.

Two pillars of Erik's table: *skyr*, a tangy fermented dairy product made on the Icelandic farm and brought to Greenland with the cows and sheep; and fish dried in the cold wind without salt, hung on racks, which keeps for months and feeds men at sea and on land.