Gastronomy

POLITISMOS 32 MAY 2017

Byzantine diet and cuisine
In between ancient
& modern gastronomy
by Ilias Anagnostakis

(The following are selected excerpts from the book “Flavours and Delights, Tastes & Pleasures of Ancient
and Byzantine Cuisine”)

He who has dined with the emperor does not go straight to the tavern. Like this one, a lot of the
views expressed in the “Life of Theodore of Sykeon” (mid-sixth century - 612) bear witness to a
transitional period between ancient and Byzantine gastronomy. The saint was familiar with both
ends of the spectrum alluded to in the quotation: the tavern in his youth and the palaces of
Constantinople in old age.

Although, of course, in the above quote the meal with the emperor stands for the Eucharist and the tavern
represents any form of worldly pleasure, they are nevertheless also emblematic of the two extremes of
Byzantine gastronomy in social terms: the luxury of the palace, the nobility and the rich versus the popular
but not necessarily poor food of simple folk.

In this article, Ilias Anagnostakis shares a brief overview of the two poles of Byzantine gastronomy, taking
precisely the case of the celebrated ascetic Theodore as his starting point. What the Life tells us of the
regimes of food and medicine (in a period when the two tended to be indistinguishable) is a useful
introduction to (mainly) Byzantine gastronomy in the period from the seventh century onwards…

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Gastronomy
The Life of Theodore is, in fact, an important source of
information about the ultimate imposition of certain
Christian dietary models and culinary behavior on what
had hitherto been enclaves of unchecked residual
paganism in the interior of sixth-century Asia Minor. This
area is particularly interesting as regards the subject in
hand, as it harbored many pagan practices involving food
common to Asia as a whole in the sixth century: festivals
at which cattle were sacrificed, cauldrons of beef, shared
out among the populace, no limitations on highly elaborate
dishes, food prohibited in churches, superstitions relating
to potions, apparitions of the goddess Artemis, and to
certain creatures and unclean spirits that lurked over
cooking pots and fountains with magic water.
The pagan models of diet, feasting and formal banquets
co-existed and conflicted with the Christian versions
which were being imposed, though not always (or
everywhere) successfully, by bishops, saints and monks
according to Christian principles of “gastronomy” or good
eating. Many of these gastronomic usages, often
associated with the advice of pagan physicians, were
condemned and miraculously eradicated by the saint.
The Christian dietary model was always imposed after
some miracle, refuting the pagan beliefs. Thus refusing to
take part in some ancient custom involving food and
condemning the ancient symposium entailed adopting
another feast, the meal celebrated by the faithful, the
Eucharist. It is no coincidence that for the first Christian
martyrs the ultimate trial was being forced to eat the food
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sacrificed to idols (eidolothyta), in other words to take part
in a pagan feast.
Refusal meant martyrdom and created a host of
Christian martyrs who professed, inter alia, another
kind of morality with regard to food. It is as if in
Theodore’s day the battle between Dionysos and Christ,
which had begun centuries earlier, was ending: a fight in
which each was struggling to defend and impose his own
feast. And to whom do the bread and wine belong in the
end? To Him, whom Theodore saw in the flesh in the
bread of the Holy Communion, the living bread which
pulsated like a living organism and sprang up from the
paten. Thus, banishing Dionysos to the taverns, the
Heavenly King leaves no room for doubt: “This is my body,
this is my blood”.
At the end of the very long period starting with Alexander
the Great and continuing up to the time of Justinian I the
politically and culturally unified world of the peoples of the
Mediterranean and the Middle East, that melting pot of
ancient customs, would undergo profound changes as it
gradually became Christianized. It would be an
overstatement to claim that, although there were obvious
examples of continuity, the ancient gastronomic model
was subject to such a profound transformation that it was
all but annihilated, as happened in many other areas. In
particular during the transitional period of the sixth and
seventh centuries, i.e. in the time of Saint Theodore, what,
despite religious differences, had hitherto been a way of
life and diet more or less common to pagans and
Christians, was changing ever more rapidly and the
medieval Christian world was born. From this point of
view the Life in question, which begins its narrative with
the story of how a Christian “restaurant” was born,
constitutes “a landmark in gastronomic history, the first
such record anywhere in the world” (Life of St Theodore
Sykeon; Dalby, Siren Feasts, 195; Anagnostakis 2005, 65-
70)...
The impact of incursions and climate.
Just as way back in the fourth century the Latin West, at
least according to the Byzantines, had succumbed to
“barbarian” raids and adopted “barbarian” ways, the same
thing happened later in the sixth and seventh centuries in
the Greek East, apart from in Constantinople,
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Gastronomy
Thessalonike and some other cities that resisted.
However, before these definitive changes for Byzantium
we have what is considered to be one final Byzantine
gastronomic witness from the early sixth century, the
account of Anthimos (fl. 511-534), a Byzantine physician in
exile at the court of the barbarian ruler of Italy, the
Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great. Anthimos would attempt
to “sweeten up” the barbarians, especially the Franks,
to whom he was sent by the Ostrogoths as an
ambassador, by teaching them “Byzantine” cuisine.
And he wrote, perhaps as a sweetener, a letter about food,
now known as On the Observance of Foods, a valuable
source for Byzantine dietetics. From then on for many
centuries we have no gastronomic accounts, and anything
of that nature that is recorded is above all dietary advice
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from physicians, such as Hierophilos. The gastronomic
preoccupations of men of letters would give way to
therapeutics and medicine, in which the main concern
was to avoid or treat the so-called plague of Justinian I (so
often mentioned in the Life of Theodore) and which was to
last almost two centuries and decimate the population.
This coincided with serious damage to the crops as a
result of incursions by the Persians and the Slavs and
Avars, with cities being razed to the ground and whole
provinces abandoned. Moreover, all of Egypt, Syria and
Palestine were lost to the Arab advance, as later on were
Cilicia, Cyprus and Crete for years to come...
New words and new dining habits.
New names and new meanings for words gradually gained
ground: e.g. for wine (krasin instead of oinos), bread
(ps mion instead of artos) and fish (opsarion instead of
ichthys). Each of these words conceals a different story
about the new dining habits. The corresponding ancient
words were retained in the official, imperial language
but above all in church Greek, especially in the Divine
Liturgy, which in parallel with the imperial cuisine was
in symbolic terms at the opposite end of the
gastronomic spectrum to the dinner tables of the
common people and the tavern. These two opposites
might meet (though never an easy thing to achieve), but
only to be used as parables of imperial condescension or
magnanimity and simplicity: the poor Constantinopolitan
widow, who is visited unexpectedly by the Emperor
Michael III (842-867), does not even have a table, but she
spreads a sheet on the floor in order to o!er what she has,
dry bread made with bran and hard asbestotyros, a new
vulgar name for a white cheese likened to lime, the
opposite of the a(n)thotyros, the “flower of cheeses”,
which was a whey cheese. Thus for products and
preparations but especially for cooking utensils and
tableware a host of words of Late Roman provenance took
over. But most importantly these new words correspond to
profound religious and cultural distinctions...
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Gastronomy

POLITISMOS 38 MAY 2017

The palace cuisine and cooks.
In relation to the imperial cuisine we have little evidence
as to the sort of dishes produced in the palace kitchens,
though by contrast there is an “ample sufficiency” of
evidence for the types of food supplied to the emperor
and the ceremonial fashion in which his meals were
served. At the palace, because of the frequent presence of
church dignitaries at most formal occasions, they were
inclined to observe the Christian calendar of fasts (not, of
course, the strict monastic version), but always with the
appropriate splendor and luxury. The gold dining tables
and finely wrought gold or silver vessels set with
precious stones went together with complicated and
recherché foods, good wines and sweets, all
contributing to the impression demanded by
Byzantine diplomacy when entertaining kings or
ambassadors from abroad. Liutprand at least tells us
about one composite palace dish, roast kid stu!ed with
garlic, leeks and onions and dressed with garos sauce. We
also know about the serving of sweets and tyrepsetos
zomos,, quite possibly a type of fondue, and the elaborate
banquets held on the occasion of imperial marriages,
when tables were set up outside the great church of Ayia
Sophia laid with a great many kinds of meat and wines
from the Aegean islands for the populace of the city...
Mageireiai… cooked food.
“Cooks’ skills” (mageiron technai), “the sophistry of
cooks” (mageiron sophismata), “the sorcery of cooks”
(mageiron magganeiai) and “the hands of cooks”
(mageiron cheires) are some of the set expressions
frequently found in Byzantine texts describing to what we
owe composite or even some simple culinary preparations
(skeuasia, paraskeuasma). And it is no coincidence that
physicians would refer to one of their pharmaceutical
preparations as a skeuasia or paraskeuasma too. The
wonder-working hands of cooks, just like those of doctors,
contrived preparations for the hungry, for pure carnal
pleasure or for invalids and they could poison as well as
cure. For physicians and cooks the knife was an extension
of the hand that held it, as was the wooden spoon, the
implement with which in various scenes, they are depicted
as stirring the contents of a cauldron containing a medical
preparation or food, what the Byzantines called the
skeuasia.
To sum up therefore, from the sixth/seventh century
up to the twelfth, Byzantine cuisine, but above all
Byzantine gastronomy, were undergoing a process of
formation and stabilization, differentiating them and
distancing them from their ancient counterparts…
I believe that, just as in the Hellenistic and Roman periods
different peoples coexisted in vast empires, preserving
and exchanging their gastronomic customs, while
displaying a relatively uniform but always evolving upper-
class cuisine, the same happened in the Byzantine period
and later under the Ottomans. This gastronomic
syncretism is like the Byzantine composite
monokythron, in other words a complex nostimos
dish, bordering on the mythical, at the cutting edge of
gastronomic inspiration and imagination, which
bubbles away in the pot, i.e. the Mediterranean, that
gastronomic melting pot of great variety and rich in
taste with many flavours ■
To purchase the book, visit:
www.armosbooks.gr
To read full text of the article online, visit:
www.eie.academia.edu/IAnagnostakis
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