Historical Recipes

The ancient Mediterranean was a large and diverse place, and its culinary traditions evolved greatly across time. Despite this, there are notable continuities underneath the variety, much as Hungarian, French, and Norwegian cooking are distinct and yet recognizably part of a broader European tradition. As in the modern Mediterranean, olive oil, wine, and bread were staples, eaten alongside legumes such as lentils, peas, and chickpeas; vegetables like lettuce and cabbage; chicken, pork, and lamb, roasted, stewed, or ground in sausages and meatballs; and fish and seafood of all varieties. But New World foods like tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkin, chili, and corn were entirely absent, as were later medieval imports like lemons, spinach, eggplant, and sugar. Modern foods like pizza, pasta, and risotto were, of course, entirely unknown.

Ancient Mediterranean cooking also used a much greater diversity of herbs and spices than modern European cooking. A great variety of herbs and seeds from both the carrot family—cumin, coriander, caraway, celery, parsley, and lovage (which tastes similar to celery)—and the mint family—thyme, oregano, mint, basil, and savory—were used, often in elaborate combinations. These are mostly natives or naturalized within the Mediterranean, which belies the notion that ancient cooking relied heavily on exotic spices. Pepper, however, was ubiquitous in Roman cuisine, and asafoetida was common too; but other eastern spices like ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg were either used rarely or unknown until late antiquity.

Roman cooking is also marked by the near-ubiquitous use of fish sauce, known as liquamen or garum. Like modern Southeast Asian fish sauce, this was made by heavily salting fish along with their guts until they autolyze, producing a clear sauce that is intensely salty and umami but not really fishy at all. It functions in much the same way as soy sauce (in fact, soy sauce itself descends from earlier East Asian fish sauce traditions). I’ve cooked with it for people who dislike seafood, and they’ve never complained. It could form the basis for a soup or stew much as bouillon would be used today, and when combined with wine and spices could be used to create a variety of sauces. Honey, dates, and grape syrup were popular sweeteners, used in both sweet and savory dishes, while vinegar provided sourness.

The result is at once familiar and unusual. The base is clearly Mediterranean, but the heavier use of seeds recalls an Indian curry, the fish sauce lends a Southeast Asian edge, and the taste for sweet-and-sour sauces is a little reminiscent of Chinese cooking. While some recipes are elaborate, most are not hard to make, especially with modern conveniences like a spice grinder. The ancient recipes rarely give exact quantities for any ingredient, and while in these recipes I’ve given quantities that I have found to work, the best approach, as with any form of cooking, is to taste and adjust. The ideal Roman sauce, in particular, is characterized by a careful balance between the sweet, sour, salty, and aromatic notes provided by the different ingredients.

Our knowledge of ancient cooking is unfortunately highly fragmentary. The earliest known Greek cookbook, by the Sicilian Mithaikos, dates to the late fifth century BC but is entirely lost except for a single fragment:

Tainia: gut, discard the head, rinse, slice; add cheese and oil.

Another dozen or so such works are attested from the fourth through first centuries BC, all now lost except for a handful of similarly fragmentary citations found within Deipnosophistae, or “The Dining Philosophers”, by Athenaeus of Naucratis.

Athenaeus’s work is by far the most important surviving source for ancient Greek culinary traditions. While composed in the early third century AD, at the height of the Roman Empire, and thus more than 500 years after the Classical period, the work preserves thousands of citations and short quotations from earlier, now almost entirely lost, works. The most extensively cited is Archestratus’s Life of Luxury, a poem written c. 350 BC that serves as a traveler’s guide to the delicacies of the Mediterranean and how best to eat them. Athenaeus also quotes extensively from now-lost Athenian plays, with the boasts of cooks providing another dozen or so recipes. Together with a small number of citations to lost medical or encyclopedic works, also preserved in Athenaeus, these form the totality of surviving pre-Roman Greek recipes.

By contrast, for Roman cooking we are extremely fortunate. A full-length cookbook survives: Apicius, probably compiled in the fourth century AD but containing recipes that in some cases date back as early as the first. Its 450-odd recipes cover essentially every aspect of Roman cooking except baking. Another thirty recipes survive in Vinidarius’s “Excerpts from Apicius”, dating to around 500 AD, which, despite the title, are unique recipes not found in the Apicius that survives.

Two further cookbooks survive only in fragments. The Heidelberg papyrus, discovered in Egypt, contains recipes in Greek dating from between the third and fifth centuries AD. And On Bread-making by Chrysippus of Tyana is preserved in two citations in Athenaeus, and probably dates to the second century AD.

Alongside these explicitly culinary works, medical texts provide extensive information on the Roman diet. Galen, writing around 180 AD, documents at length the various plants and animals and their supposed medicinal effects, together with numerous, generally very simple, suggestions for how to eat them; the elaborate preparations of Apicius he regards with skepticism and disdain. Anthimus, a Byzantine physician who around 520 AD—after much misadventure—composed a culinary treatise for Theuderic, king of the Franks, likewise gives an extensive overview of the foods, along with about a dozen specific recipes, including some that are surprisingly elaborate given the soberly medical nature of the text.

Roman agricultural writers contribute a number of recipes too. Most notably, Cato the Elder’s De agricultura includes recipes for cheesecakes and other household preserves. Later writers like Columella and Palladius add to this collection of agriculturally focused recipes, which have parallels in the first book of Apicius itself.

Poems and satires by Martial and Horace, and menus such as the one in a letter of Pliny the Younger, round out our picture of Roman banqueting and luxury culture. They rarely describe a dish in enough detail to reconstruct as a recipe, but they accord with what the cookbooks show.

With Vinidarius and Anthimus in the early sixth century—and, plausibly, the Greek calendrical work of Hierophilus the Sophist—the trail goes cold. The earliest surviving Arabic cookbook, the Kitab al-Tabikh, was written in tenth-century Iraq and shows few direct Greek or Roman influences. In Europe the earliest medieval cookbooks are later still, with the first small collection dating to the late twelfth century, followed by more extensive works in the late thirteenth; they show no awareness of early culinary traditions.

Recently I started cooking recipes from medieval India, starting with the Mānasollāsa, the twelfth-century Sanskrit encyclopedia of kingship. I’ll add more detail as I cook more recipes from this and other early Indian sources.