Flavours & Delights
Tastes & pleasures of Ancient and Byzantine Cuisune
Publisher : Εκδόσεις Αρμός
ISBN13: 978-960-527-747-5
Pages: 232
HardPaper Cover
Size : 15x21cm The flavours of Classical Greece
Makedonisi(on). Parsley, the Macedonian herb.
Byzantine diet and cuisine. In between ancient and modern gastronomy. All in the cooking pot. Advances in the study of Byzantine diet.
Eating flowers
Byzantine aphrodisiacs & delicacies.
Liutprand of Cremona. A critical guest at the Byzantine emperor's table.
Timarion
Hens, cockerels and other choice fowl. Everyday food and gastronomic pretensions in Byzantium
Pallikaria of lentils. The "brave boys" of beans.
Everyday food in the Middle Byzantine period
Dining with foreigners
Food for Saints
The emperor's salad
"The Raw and the Cooked" way of cooking and serving food in Byzantium

The authors who have contributed to this volume take their information from Greek, Latin, Arabic and Ottoman textual sources, from visual material in manuscripts, frescoes and mosaics and, most importantly, archaeological remains such as pottery or floral and faunal assemblages including human and animal skeletal remains. In the near future the results of the excavations in the Theodosian Harbour (Yenikapi) in Istanbul (with over 15,ooo animal bones, taken from more than 30 Byzantine ships) will significantly expand this material. This multi-disciplinary approach allows new, more precise, and sometimes even exciting insights into the reality of the material cultures of times long past but still influential today.
The papers collected here demonstrate where we may find continuities from Greek Antiquity and Byzantium to the cuisine of today, and where we should see developments, which may be explained by changes of climate, especially of precipitation, but also by anthropogenic changes, whether the diet became poorer due to the disappearance of basic ingredients and changes in cooking (or eating) habits, or -more often- richer thanks to the influence of non-Mediterranean immigrants, such as Slavs, Southern Arabs, nomads from Central Asia, Turks, Crusaders and others, who brought not only new agricultural products, vegetables and fruits, but also new methods of preparing of refining food. An important aspect of differentiation in alimentary habits is also the geographical extent of the Byzantine Empire, which in the age of Justinian I encompassed nearly the entire coastline of the Mediterranean with extended hinterlands and by the end of the first millennium had again reached almost 1.3 million km2.
Finally, I would like to emphasize the successful combination of articles which range from presentations of the luxurious dining habits and possibilities open to the imperial court and the upper classes in Byzantium on the one hand to discussions of the modest and often difficult nutritional "normality" of staple foods for the masses, including soldiers and those who embraced the monastic life (at times up to 15 % of the overall population). The papers also demonstrate -as might be expected- that the highest levels of nutrition, i.e. upper-class food, always influenced, at least as an ideal, the demands and desires of the proletariat. In conclusion, I think that the present volume provides the reader with up-to-date information about Ancient and Byzantine gastronomy, which is both comprehensive and lively. (Johannes Koder, from preface)