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I menu greci - The Greek menus.

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

THE MENU
As we have seen not all the participants to a banquet could lay on the tricliniar couches, but the menus offered were so rich and so enticing that also the persons who had to sit on a stool were happy to be there. Starting from the V cent. B.C. the Greek alimentation had changed and had became very rich and varied. The monotonous diet that in the preceding centuries had limited the meals to beef and bread was abandoned. Now all kind of appetizers, fishes, crustaceans, oysters, vegetables, salads, fruits, and desserts, unknown in the Homeric dinners, were served and not only they were parts of the Greek gastronomy, but they reigned on it. For instance fishes, once considered humble food, were now rated a luxury and were much sought after.
Certainly in the V cent B.C. Greeks ate lots of things and of all kinds, but we must confess that some of their much extolled delicacies would not be lightheartedly accepted on our tables. Thus we are startled to find that, speaking of food and citing some appetizers, Aristophanes, after praising the pickled olives described by him “firm as the virgins’s bodies”, includes among his favourites hors-doeuvres ingredients as grasshoppers and cicadas usually consumed transfixed by a thin reed and deep fried in oil, snacks that would certainly raise quite a shock if offered at one of our cocktail parties.
Luckily the food usually served was more normal and the dishes described by writers and poets can certainly be everywhere appreciated. In one comedy soups are cited and among them we find a “tisane” - a barley soup - and also a lentils one, a dish that the comedy writer must have very much liked because he describes it as “ the most delicious of all the soups”. Of course very popular was also the pulse made with spelt or barley’s flour and served quite liquid as a cream or a porridge.
Then there were all the fishes: in their list we find the superb spiny lobster, the small scuttle fishes, the big prawns, the octopuses, the squilla (a mackerel shark), the squids, the ray fish and the eel, not to mention the humble salted one. Fishes and crustaceans that not only triumphed on the tables, but were often present in the decorative arts and many are the cups, the urns and the craters embellished by the reproductions of those sea creatures.
Besides all those fishes there was a great variety of shellfish, a noble part of the Greek menus, Aeschylus cites the mussels, the oysters and other quite large bivalves, and Aristophanes describe clams put on an embers bed to open them, but they were also eaten raw. Epicarmus in his “Marriage of Hebe” lists a surprising variety of shellfish and writes
“They brought a tray with all kinds of shellfishes: limpets, lobsters; Crabizi (unknown seafood), chichiballi (another unknown seafood), sea anemones, sea acorns, murices, well closed oysters – that are not easy to open but are very easy to eat – mussels, sea snails, cockle shells, long and cylindrical sea razors, melenides – black shellfish from which profit the children who collect them – and, at last, razor-clams.”
Of course also a large quantity of meat was served during the Greek dinners’s; big chunks of it that had been boiled for a very long time because, at those times, when there were no farms for raising special kinds of beef, the meat was quite hard and stringy.
As we have seen, the menu for a V cent B.C. Greek dinner included such a number of dishes that it became a gigantic affair and requested superhuman appetites plus a lot of time at one’s disposition. We can get an idea of what one of those dinners could be by reading piece of a poem entitled “ The Banquet” by Philoxenus of Cythera.
“ two well groomed slaves brought a table, others servants brought another one, and again others carried a third and so on until the room was filled up. To the ray of light from the lamps hanging to the ceiling, the tables, charged of trays, of sauce-boats full of ……………….(lacking in the text) and of all those inventions that make life pleasant and charm the spirit, glittered. Some slaves set near us baskets full of barley bread white as pure snow and of loaves of wheat meal. Then to break our fast they passed to us not a pan but a splendid tray, a shining receptacle full of pieces of eels to awake a god’s appetite Then another tray of this kind was served and in it there was a round ray fish. There were also two smaller baking pans, one containing some mackerel shark and the other another rayfish. Then a very tasty dish made of cuttlefishes and squids was served, and, with it, just taken out of he fire and still steaming came a roasted grey mullet as large as the table. It was followed by cuttlefishes dredged with flour and fried and by curved and well cooked shrimps. Then we had bread rolls shaped as flowers and other sweet rolls and flat cakes larger than a pan and covered by a sweet and sour sauce. This. by me, is called the banquet’s navel. Soon afterwards there arrived an enormous chunk of fresh tuna fish which, cut in the largest part of its undercut, had been immediately roasted………..”
Now we can try to reconstruct the banquets scene by what is reproduced in the ceramics of the times. In front of the tricliniar couches we always see the same rectangular low table. The only thing that change in them are their feet. For the rest they are always monotonously the same.
Then Philoxenus of Cythera goes on with his description of all the things served at this banquet. Such a number of dishes - he says - that he is unable to count them, but he registers them one after the other in an interminable list: offals, tripes, loin and leg of a pork, kid cut in two, chops, pig’s feet, ribs, a pig’s head, and a tenderloin seasoned with sylphium. But Philoxenus doesn’t stop here. He goes on telling that when all those trays had been emptied, others containing kids and lambs either boiled or roasted were brought up. Then hares, young cocks, partridges and ring doves. Of course the guests were also offered plenty of bread and, with the bread, honey, curdled milk and fresh and tender cheese.
Then the dinner was finished and, after that all the guests had eaten and drank at will, slaves washed their hands, a necessary thing to do at the end of a banquet because in ancient times people took the foods with their fingers. Plenty of dishes, as we have seen and lot of pleasure The party had been greatly enjoyed, it had been merry and lively, game had been played and there had been lots of laughter. Guests had sung choirs and convivial songs, some of which can be found in Greek literature and vary from the serious and religious, to the merry ones that did enliven the party.
Night was falling and everybody went happily home.
The banquet had been a success.

Bibliography
Scientific Popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'alimentazione nel mondo greco in Archeo, nº 44, October 1988, pp.48-91

Book
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, – L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.