Byzantine cuisine

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Byzantine cuisine was marked by a merger of Greek and Roman gastronomy. The development of the Byzantine Empire and trade brought in spices, sugar and new vegetables to Greece. Cooks experimented with new combinations of food, creating two styles in the process. These were the Eastern (Asia Minor and the Eastern Aegean), consisting of Byzantine cuisine supplemented by trade items, and a leaner style primarily based on local Greek tradition.

Contents
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1 Diet 2 Drink 3 See also 4 Sources 5 External links

[edit] Diet
Byzantine food consumption was based around class. The Imperial Palace was a metropolis of spices and exotic recipes; guests were entertained with fruits, honey-cakes and syrupy sweetmeats. Ordinary people ate more conservatively. The core diet consisted of bread, vegetables, pulses, and cereals prepared in varied ways. Salad was very popular; to the amazement of the Florentines, the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos asked for it at most meals on

his visit in 1439. Byzantine people produced various cheeses, including anthotiro or kefalintzin. They also relished shellfish and fish, both fresh and salt-water. They prepared eggs to make famous omelettes called sphoungata, i.e. "spongy" mentioned by Theodoros Prodromos. Every household also kept a supply of poultry. Byzantines obtained other kinds of meat by hunting, a favourite and distinguished occupation of men. They usually hunted with dogs and hawks, though sometimes employed trapping, netting, and bird-liming. Larger animals were a more expensive and rare food. Citizens slaughtered pigs at the beginning of winter and provided their families with sausages, salt pork, and lard for the year. Only upper middle and higher Byzantines could afford lamb. They seldom ate beef, as they used cattle to cultivate the fields. Middle and lower class citizens in cities such as Constantinople and Thessaloniki digested the offerings of the taverna. The most common form of cooking was boiling, a tendency which sparked a derisive Byzantine maximThe lazy cook prepares everything by boiling. Garum sauce in all its varieties was especially favored as a condiment. Thanks to the location of Constantinople between popular trade routes, Byzantine cuisine was augmented by cultural influences from several localessuch as Lombard Italy, the Persian Empire, and an emerging Arabic Empire. The resulting melting pot continued during Ottoman times and therefore both modern Greek cuisine and Turkish cuisine, as well as general food in the Middle East and the Balkans are similar.

[edit] Drink
Macedonia was renowned for its wines, served for upper class Byzantines. During the crusades and after, western Europeans valued costly Greek wines. The best known varieties were Cretan wines from muscat grapes, Romania or Rumney (Romanian) (exported from Methoni in the western Peloponnese), and Malvasia or Malmsey (likely exported from Monemvasia). Orthodox Christianity was closely associated with the consumption of wine. The dogma of metousiosis (or transubstantiation) is based on the belief that during the Divine Liturgy, the wine is transformed into the blood of Jesus Christ.

[edit] See also The Byzantine Menu

By Dimitrios Krallis

Any exploration of Byzantine food has to be based on a myriad of different pieces of information buried in a multitude of sources. Like ciphers from a mosaic little titbits from history, hagiography, imperial ceremonial manuals, monastic charters, comic poetry and even laws allow us to reconstitute the tastes that excited the Byzantine palate. To learn about Byzantine cuisine we need to discuss its roots in history and geography. Byzantine cuisine was a mix of local Greek practices and Roman traditions. We need to emphasize the Roman aspect of the cuisine, for our tendency is to assume that Byzantine food is automatically Greek. That was only the case in the realm of materials and even there the imprint of Rome was significant. Byzantine culinary tastes, originating in the regions where Hellenism flourished, were, in terms of its ingredients, indeed Greek. Cheeses, figs, eggs, olive oil, walnuts, almonds, chestnuts, apples, of the sweet and bitter variety, as well as pears, all constituted staples, which were indigenous to the lands of the empire and appreciated by emperor and aristocracy as well as the common people. The Byzantines also loved honey and used it in cooking as a sweetener, especially given that sugar was not available. Honey was even one of the causes of a war with Bulgaria in late ninth century when the desire of a Byzantine official to control trade with Bulgaria, honey being a significant part of it, led to Bulgarian mobilization and to hostilities. Yet, while Byzantium was using Greek ingredients in its plates, its cuisine was at the same time much more than Greek. Byzantium was the legitimate heir to the Roman Empire and as such it traded with the world in what was an earlier version of globalization. The Byzantine emperors placed the spice sellers with their cinnamon, nutmeg and other aromas just under the windows of the imperial palace so they could get a whiff of scented breeze every time the wind blew in their direction. Constantinople, as the medieval Gotham that it was, imported everything that was to excite the discerning palate. Caviar was to be sampled next the famous garum sauce of the Romans. This latter product was made of fermented fish entrails, gills and blood. The average Byzantine table had a special container for garum soup or sauce and it seems that garum was poured on all sorts of foods. When Liudprand of Cremona, an ambassador for the German king Otto II visited Constantinople he produced what was a critical report on the meals offered to him by the emperor. Overall Luidprand, probably used to the more northern butter based cuisine, felt that Byzantine dishes were swimming in olive oil. Oil one occasion, however, Liudprand noted: [The emperor sent] to me from among his most delicate dishes a fat goat, of which he himself had partaken, deliciously stuffed with garlic, onions and leeks; steeped in fish sauce: a dish which I could have wished just then to

be upon your table, so that you who do not believe the delicacies of the sacred emperor to be desirable, should at length become believers, at this sight! For those used to contemporary Greek cuisine the use of fish sauce on meat may appear odd. Yet it is a central part of Chinese cuisine and was not shunned by the Romans. As for the centerpiece in Liudprand's meal, it was goat. Goat, lamb, fish of all sorts were delicacies to be sampled by the upper strata of society. The poorer people would be content with boiled food. Onions and basic herbs turned into a broth and served in bowls filled with bread. Beef on the other hand was in general rare in Byzantium, yet if you were a rancher in Picture of Byzatine fish grill the Anatolian plateau you would taste a proper T-bone steak. Bread was an essential staple of the Byzantine table and a guarantee of stability for the government in Constantinople. Bread in the early Byzantine era was a global enterprise. For the bakeries of Constantinople to produce the 80,000 loafs distributed daily to the people of the city, the farmers of Egypt had to produce a surplus, which they shipped on large fleets to the capital. Even in later days when Egypt was no longer part of the empire, feeding the capital was a major enterprise. The Constantinopolitans could count on a steady diet of bread, fish, much of it cured and preserved in salt, and olive oil. However, just like in contemporary Greece or Turkey, this diet was supplemented by vegetables that were produced in small gardens kept in the capital, in the smaller cities and in every village. The city of Constantinople had such a large space enclosed by its walls that most of its vegetables were produced locally. The great delicacies of the capital were then, as they are today, its fish. Surviving Byzantine laws explain in detail the rights and obliga tions of Byzantine fishermen. On the literary level, the satirical poems of Theodore Prodrdmos in the 12th century castigate the not so abstemious monks for gorging themselves with fat Bosporus catch cooked in sumptuous sauces, called Sabourai (from the Latin Sapor). Our evidence does not allow us to reconstruct Byzantine dishes. What we may, however, note is that parts of the Byzantine cooking tradition survivesinm today's Turkish and Greek cuisine. A sixth century pre-Islamic Arab source refers to stuffed zucchini and grape leaves as a quintessentially Greek dish. Today we associate these dishes with the cooking traditions brought back to the meat-eating Greeks of the Greek mainland by the refugees from Asia Minor. It seems they were Greek. On the other hand, it seems that the heavy, walnut, almond and philo-pastry deserts we eat in. both Greece and Turkey have a Persian origin. This, however, does not mean that they were not appreciated in the Byzantine court. An imperial court was open to many

tastes after all. Our reconstruction of Byzantine cuisine is like the restoration of a damaged mosaic. A lot of ciphers are missing and-a lot needs to be left to imagination. Yet, the lands of Greece and Turkey, the aromas of the ingredients they produce and the living traditions of their food ultimately connect us with the realities of Byzantine food. Dimitris Krallis is Assistant Professor of Byzantine history at SFU. He has been sampling Byzantine texts history sources for the past 14 years, good food for a lifetime.

THE TASTE OF BYZANTIUM by Charles Perry Reviewed in Cornucopia 31 We know a lot about ancient Roman food, thanks to the second-century cookbook of Apicius. We have long had a pretty good picture of how the Greeks ate from Athenaeuss fascinating hodgepodge of dinner-table chat, the Deipnosophists. A few years ago Andrew Dalby added much to our knowledge about ancient Greek cuisine in Siren Feasts (Routledge, 1996) and was even able to present persuasive modern renderings of some ancient recipes in The Classical Cookbook (with Sally Grainger, Getty Museum, 1996). The great gaping hole in the picture has been Byzantine cuisine, and Dalby fills it, about as well as it can be filled, in Flavours of Byzantium. Unfortunately, as he notes, the Byzantines had no Apicius or Athenaeus. We have to glean what we can from market regulations, travellers writings, historical asides, monastic rules and a few short texts on diet, all of which are by nature something less than recipes. He does have a chapter on Recipes and Instructions, in which he manfully gathers everything that might show specific Byzantine foods in their concreteness. These include one recipe from Apicius

(lucanica, a sausage that has living descendants), four from a dietary manual that a homesick Byzantine doctor wrote for the Frankish king he served, two for laxative preparations of fenugreek, detailed instructions on making the ancient fish sauce garos, a modern recipe for dried meat that continues Byzantine tradition, some advice on making bread, a supposed ancestor of tarhana (which looks to me more like instructions for removing the husk of emmer wheat by alternately soaking it in water and drying it), five recipes for curing olives and a dozen for spiced wine. The recipes seem all too simple (except for the wines!). But then theres a detailed description of an extravagant dish called monokythron (one-pot), and it truly deserves to be called Byzantine - cabbage, five kinds of fish, fourteen eggs, three kinds of cheese, olive oil, pepper, garlic and sweet wine. It comes from the Prodromic Poems, which Dalby declares present a genuine, if highly coloured, picture of Byzantine life. So it must be said that this is not much of a cookbook. But it is a fascinating read, with its descriptions of the glittering centre of an empire. Along with his portrait of Byzantines feasting on spiced wine and sugary sweets (spoonfuls of jam served to guests with a glass of iced water and/or a cup of coffee, allowed even on the innumerable fast

days), Dalby includes many colourful observations. For instance, Constantinoples perfumers and spice merchants were instructed to set up shop where their aromas might waft upwards to the icon of Christ above the Bronze Arcade and at the same time fill the vestibule of the Royal Palace. Some anecdotes have clearly been included not because they cast much light on food but because Dalby couldnt resist them. For instance, during the savage winter of 763 the Black Sea froze 30 cubits deep for 100 miles out from the north shore, and icebergs floated down the Bosphorus, one crashing into the city walls and shaking them. There is even a picture. Byzantine cuisine, with its lavish use of spices and honey, was clearly unlike modern Turkish cuisine, though it contributed to it, most notably in the case of fish. In central Asia, the nomadic Turks had rarely eaten fish - or rarely admitted it if they did. A herdsmans wealth is his flocks, and to be reduced to eating fish showed extreme poverty; balk (fisherman) was a stinging taunt. But the Byzantines, living on the fish-rich Bosphorus, were proverbial piscivores. In a satirical squib entitled Timarion, a newcomer to Hades is accosted by a resident who wants news of how it goes among the living: How many mackerel do you get for an

obol? Bonitos? Tunnies? Picarels? Whats the price of oil? Wheat and all the rest of it? And I forgot the most important thing: hows the whitebait catch? And of course this is still true. Turkish is full of Greek-derived names for fishes, and your real Istanbullu is still a fisheater at heart. Years ago I used to take a young Turkish woman with me when I reviewed restaurants in Los Angeles. Dutifully she would study every menu; with the best will in the world she would weigh the options before her then, inevitably, shed order the bouillabaisse. She was a true daughter of Byzantium.