Eating in Antiquity

Man always needed to eat in order to live. It is known that every civilization had its own customs and traditions in the way of eating, the way of cooking, the mixing of vegetables, the meat of the slaughtered animal, and so on. Only, not much was left to us in writing from the Sumerians, the Egyptians or any other civilization apart from ancient Greece and Rome. Writers such as Aristophanes or Athenaeus left us enough material to know Greek cooking. In the first place, Greek cooking is very simple. Even at social gatherings where people reclined on one elbow on couches, the cooking was based on simplicity.

According to the writer Polyaenus, Alexander the Great mocked the richness of the food he found in Persia. Another writer, Pausanias, says: 'The Persians, having so rich a cuisine, came to steal the poor food of the Greeks.' Another important aspect of Greek cooking was that its base came from the Mediterranean, with the olive, wheat and the grape for wine. Meat was for the very rich. Slaughtering an animal to eat was very rare, because the edible animals served for other, more useful work — like the goat, which was never eaten so that its milk could be used. Calories came either from wheat or from barley, in the form of bread, pita or sweets.

Breakfast was barley bread dipped in wine, sometimes with a few figs or olives. The midday meal was taken at noon, again with bread dipped in wine, figs, salted fish (I don't know whether it was garato, çiroz or liparida), olives and cheese. The most important meal of the day was at nightfall. Then they ate eggs, fish, olives, cheese, all kinds of vegetables such as cabbage, carrot, cucumber and more... Fish was cooked in cheese; to the wine they added much water and garlic. Dessert was always a natural sweet such as honey or fig. Butter was used mostly in Thrace, the western part of Asia Minor.

Vegetables being very expensive in the big cities, the poor ate sun-dried vegetables and drank lentil soup. Men and women could not eat together. If the house was large, the slaves served first the men, then the women, and finally they themselves could eat. If the house was small, the women could eat after serving the men. Food was eaten from a bowl of dough or of clay (terracotta). As they did not know the fork, they carried the food to the mouth with a piece of bread. They already knew what spoon and knife were. In the Roman period, breakfast, called 'ientaculum', consisted of a little bread, honey and cheese.

The midday meal, the 'cena', was the richest because it had three courses. The first course was the starter, 'gustatio', with little things to make you laugh. The second was the substantial course, 'primae mensae', and the dessert was 'secundae mensae', made up of fruit. The poor, who were the majority, ate a barley gruel and, as they had no money for lamp oil, ate the 'cena' later and went to bed at dark. Bread was eaten with honey, with olives, cheese or egg. And they dipped the bread in wine. In Pompeii 30 ovens were found. This tells us the Romans ate a lot of bread, always accompanied by salt.

Butter they did not use. The aubergine became known with the attacks of the Arabs. Tomatoes and potatoes came from America. Vegetables such as celery, cabbage, radish, carrot, kuchunugurya, peas and cucumber were much consumed. The orange was unknown. The lemon came to the Roman table after the 5th century. The Romans preferred chicken to pork and beef. According to the writings, the Romans liked food with a sweet and sour taste, so they used much honey and vinegar. The rich ate quite a lot of fish, which was not the case for the middle class, but everyone drank a lot of alcohol, because they considered that water could contain many bacteria and had an insipid taste.

The wine contained much alcohol, so they added much water. Sometimes they put honey in the wine and drank it hot. Apart from wine, the Romans also drank beer, which they called 'cerevisia', which today in Spanish is 'cerveza'. Coffee, so famous today in Italy, was known as the 'Muslim drink' because it began to be drunk in Yemen, and the European countries got to know it through the Ottomans. Tea came after the 17th century with the Dutch. The Romans used the knife, a large fork to hold the meat, a long-handled pan as today, a jug for measuring, a mould for shaping, a grater for grating, tongs both for the fire and for the meat, a tripod for draining.

These things were hung on hooks or on chains on the kitchen wall. Private kitchens could be seen only in the houses of the very rich. The middle class had a common kitchen that many families used. One more thing left to us from the Roman rulers was the 'taster', the slave who tasted the food and drink of the rulers, because poison, just as today, was much used to get rid of a ruler. The taster of the emperor Claudius, Halotus, became very famous in history because, having sworn to be faithful and to die for the emperor from any poison that might be in the food or drink, he himself poisoned Claudius.

It seems that even today this custom has not disappeared, because it is said that the presidents of the United States keep the tradition of having tasters. Some foods such as bread have not changed at all from the Stone Age until today. Another ancient food is rice, which we call 'pilav' in Turkish. The word pilaf comes from the Persian 'polof', and reached there from India, where they called it 'pulaow', spreading throughout Central Asia. When Alexander the Great conquered Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, he liked pilaf so much that he ordered this dish to be cooked throughout Macedonia. That is how Europe came to know rice, something already known in China more than 13,000 years ago.

With the arrival of the Mongols in India, pilaf was mixed with meat and called 'biryani', and this mixture gave rise to the famous 'paella' of Spain. SOURCE: Anya Leonard, Ben Potter, Victor Labate, Wu Mingren