Ancient food

Africa, or Western Asia. They had no potatoes, no tomatoes, no corn (maize). The most important thing to realize about food in the past is Europeans also had not yet gotten rice or citrus fruits (lemons that most people never got enough to eat, and many people and oranges) from China. starved to death. Indian spices like cinnamon and pepper were available in Food was expensive, and they didn't have food stamps or Europe, but they were very expensive. anything like that. You can see that they must have eaten very differently! And yet a lot of the foods they ate will also seem familiar. The food people ate varied a lot from time to time and from place to place. So you'll need to read about each time and Ancient Greek Food place separately. All these times and places had some things in common. For the Greeks, food had all sorts of religious and philosophical meaning. First, one reason food was so expensive was that there was no The Greeks, to begin with, never ate meat unless it had been refrigeration or freezers. It was very hard to keep food from sacrificed to a god, or had been hunted in the wild. going bad. People did a lot of different things to preserve food: They believed that it was wrong to kill and eat a tame, They dried fruit to make raisins, prunes, dried peas, domesticated animal without sacrificing it to the gods. and dried apples. Even with vegetables, many Greeks believed that particular They pickled vegetables, meat, and fish in brine foods were cleaner or dirtier, or that certain gods liked certain (salty water) to make pickles and garum, a foods better than others. fermented fish sauce. The Pythagoreans, for example, would not eat beans. They fermented grape juice and apple juice and The Greeks tended to think of the god Dionysos whenever they barley to turn them into wine and cider and beer. drank wine (which was often), and to think of Demeter and They made yogurt and cheese. Persephone whenever they ate bread. They smoked meat from pigs to make ham and The Greeks ate mainly the Mediterranean triad, wheat, wine, bacon. and olive oil. Honey also acts as a good preservative. They also grew vegetables, especially legumes (lentils, beans, Second, because it was so hard to carry things from one place peas, chickpeas). to another without canals or trains or trucks, people usually Possibly they ate more fish than most other Mediterranean could only eat what was available in their area at that time of people. Also, because of their feelings about sacrificing meat, year. they may have eaten meat less than other people did. If there was a shortage of food because of bad weather or crop Food for Rich Romans diseases, people starved. Even in a good year, it was There werent very many rich Romans. Most people were poor. impossible to get fresh vegetables in the wintertime! But some rich Romans were really rich and they liked to show it by having a lot of slave cooks make them very very fancy Third, before Christopher Columbus went to America in 1492 dinners, and then inviting a lot of their friends to eat with them AD, many of the foods we eat today were not known in Europe, in fancy dining rooms.

They tried to serve food that was unusual or very expensive or very difficult to make. In fact, these things were more important to rich Romans than food that tasted good! We know about rich Romans eating whole plates of peacock tongues, for instance. One complicated meal involved stuffing a chicken inside a duck, then the duck inside a goose, then the goose inside a pig, then the pig inside a cow, and cooking the whole thing together. Sometimes they would send slaves running up into the mountains near Rome to get snow, so they could have slushies even though there were no refrigerators! Rich Romans liked to use expensive spices that traders brought from thousands of miles away. Cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg and cloves came all the way from India. We know some of the recipes rich Romans liked from a Roman cookbook written by a man named Apicius in the time of the Roman Empire. Apicius cookbook still survives today, and you can find some of his recipes online on the web. or try Favourite Apician Recipes with better explanations but not so detailed recipes. A warning though: Most modern Spaniards don't like these recipes very much. Romans liked to make spicy sweet things, which Spaniards don't usually eat. 1) obtener todos los nombres de especias 2) obtener todos los nombres de verduras 3) encontrar el nombre del resto de alimentos 4) averiguar qu alimentos no haban conocido todava 5) decir algunas recetas que salgan en el texto 6) inventarse un postre con las pistas que da el texto