Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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As Italian as fermented fish sauce?
Amazingly, that was the omnipresent
seasoning of both the Romans (garum)
and the ancient Greeks (garos).
The ancient Greeks invented much
of our current political structure,
as well as the origins of our
mathematics and philosophy.
While we can still see parts of their
seminal contributions to literature
and architecture, many works
documenting their cuisine have
been lost or are not well known.
The ancient Greek historian
Herodotus tells us that the ancient
Egyptians “never sow beans, and
even if any happen to grow wild,
they will not eat them, either raw
or boiled.” Yet today, the national
staple dish of Egypt is fuul, or
fool—stewed fava beans.
to Roman cuisine on the order of what would
happen to French cooking if black truffles became
extinct.
Garlic is only rarely called for in Apicius, and
when it is, the quantity is minusculeoften not
enough to taste. Imagine Italian food without
garlic or basil; now imagine it loaded with lovage,
cumin, coriander, and fish sauce. Ancient Roman
cuisine clearly did not have the same flavor profile
as the Italian food of today. The amazing conclusion
is that ancient Roman cuisine was utterly
different from what we think of as Italian cuisine
today.
The fall of the Roman Empire in about 500 a.d.
ushered in the Middle Ages, a 1,000-year period
during which many vestiges of Roman culture,
including recipes, were obliterated. Italian food as
a concept disappeared and was replaced by a
pan-European medieval cuisine that had little to
do with the previous Roman cuisine. Medieval
European cuisine as a whole seems to have had
little regional variabilitythe Italian cookbooks
of the era contain recipes that are virtually indistinguishable
from those of France, England, and
other European countries.
Medieval cuisine was highly flavored with
imported spices, particularly pepper, cinnamon,
ginger, and saffron. The love of imported spices
was shared with ancient Roman cuisine, but the
spices, dishes, and flavor profiles were entirely
different.
An analysis of an early English cookbook found
that fully 40% of the savory dishes contained large
amounts of cinnamon. Ginger was the second
most popular spice in savory dishes. This food
bears little resemblance to European cuisine today.
Only a few rare dishes hint at the highly spiced
past: gingerbread, for example, or the cardamomlaced
breads of Scandinavia. The flavor profile of
European food in the Middle Ages was in many
ways closer to the spice-oriented profile we associate
with Indian or Thai food today. Ultimately, the
medieval cuisine disappeared as various regions
developed their own culinary traditions.
Similarly, contemporary Greek food is mainly
of recent peasant origins, although it reflects some
Turkish influences from the Ottoman Empire,
which ruled Greece for centuries. The cuisine
today bears few similarities with the delicate,
often sophisticated cooking of ancient Greece.
In antiquity, the seafaring Greeks learned from
neighboring civilizations and brought home new
flavors, such as lemons from the Middle East,
especially during the exploits of Alexander the
Great. Greeks took their culinary expertise with
them to Rome, where Greek cooks introduced
composed dishes to the Romans and the rest of
Europe.
Early Greek traders settled in southern France
2,500 years ago, founding Massalia (now Marseilles)
and introducing wine to the region that
would later produce Ctes-du-Rhne vintages,
according to a recent Cambridge University study.
The chief record of early Greek food and drink
remains fragments from lost literature, which have
survived only in quotations recorded in later
works such as the comedies of Aristophanes. What
may be the world’s first gourmet travel book, Life
of Luxury, is a mock epic poem written about
330 b.c. It is preserved in excerpts quoted in
Athenaeus’s Philosophers at Dinner, from 200 a.d.
The poet who wrote it, Archestratos of Gela, Sicily,
toured the cosmopolitan ancient Greek world
from the Black Sea to southern Italy, recording the
cuisine. He favored fish dishes prepared simply
with light seasoning such as fresh thyme and olive
oil, or with cheese sauces and pungent herbs such
as silphium. Garos (fermented fish sauce) or herb
pickles were balanced with honey.
Sicily was also home to the ancient Greek
colony of Sybaris, known for its elaborate food and
entertainmentsource of the word “sybaritic”
today. The colony held cooking contests and
crowned the winning mageiros (cook). Sybaris
even had a law protecting culinary inventions:
“And if any caterer or cook invented any peculiar
and excellent dish, no other artist was allowed to
make this for a year; but he alone who invented it
was entitled to all the profit to be derived from the
manufacture of it for that time.”
In contrast, the mainland Greek city-state of
Sparta had a strict military culture marked by
frugality and the avoidance of luxury—source of
the word spartan. The most prevalent dish, for
example, was black broth, a thin soup of pork, pig’s
blood, and vinegar. A Sybarite writer noted,
“Naturally the Spartans are the bravest men in the
world. Anyone in his senses would rather die 10,000
times than take his share of such a sorry diet.”
In general, the ancient Greeks valued their
chefs. Consider this passage about Demetrius of
Phalerum, a diplomat who governed Athens in the
early 4th century b.c.: “He bought Moschion, the
most skillful of all the cooks and confectioners of
that age. And he had such vast quantities of food
prepared for him every day, that, as he gave
Moschion what was left each day, he (Moschion)
in two years purchased three detached houses in
the city.” That’s the kind of success any chef
today would like to have. It’s made all the more
poignant by the word “bought”; Moschion, like
many cooks of his era, was a slave. Unfortunately,
the recipes of Moschion, the legally protected
dishes of Sybaris, and even the bad black broth of
Sparta have all vanished.
That is a sad fact of culinary history. One of the
great losses to human culture is that the food of
many empires did not survive. Homer records
many feasts in the Iliad and Odyssey, but frustratingly
without recipes. Egyptian cooks in the
pharaohs’ courts did not record their recipes. Yet
Egypt invented foie gras! What other delicacies
did it have? We may never know. When civilizations
die or disperse, their cooking often dies with
them. Some peasant dishes may survive, but the
refined dishes of the upper classes usually don’t.
Among the most significant losses in the history
of gastronomy is the disappearance of ancient
North and South American recipes, including
those of the Aztec, Incan, Mayan, and Mound
Builder civilizations.
Mayan cuisine relied heavily on chocolate,
domesticated 3,000 years ago in what is now
Honduras. Au Cacao, or Lord Chocolate, a king
who ruled the Mayan city-state of Tikal, was
named after the prized ingredient. The Mayan
word for cacao, kakawa, means “god food,” and
the cacao tree was considered sacred (as was the
maize plant).
The Mayans also had a rich culture that
produced an elaborate society centered on great
stone cities. They made many major discoveries
in mathematics and astronomy. It seems likely
that a group of people who worshipped chocolate
and named their kings after it probably cared
enough about food to have a distinctive cuisine
with some pretty good recipes.
But we’ll never know. The Mayan civilization
began to decline in 900 a.d., some 600 years
before the Spanish conquistadors arrived. A large
number of Mayan books, which might have
included a Mayan equivalent of Apicius, were
confiscated and burned by Bishop Diego de
Landa in 1562. Today, only three survive, none
of which mentions cooking. The peasant cuisine
in the area that has survived seems unlikely to
represent the full range of aristocratic Mayan
cuisine.
The story of Aztec cuisine is similar. In this
case, we have one eyewitness report from Bernal
Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador who accompanied
Hernando Cortés. Díaz was present at a
dinner served to Motecuhzoma, the Aztec
emperor:
For his meals his cooks had more than 30
styles of dishes made according to their
fashion and usage; and they put them on
small low clay braziers so they would not get
cold. They cooked more than 300 dishes of
the food that Motecuhzoma was going to
eat, and more than a thousand more for the
men of the guard.
No one knows what delicacies would have been
served in this 30-course tasting menu.
Other civilizations, such as the Inca of Peru and
the Mound Builder culture of Cahokia, in the
central United States, likely had many great
recipes as well, but the efforts of their professional
chefs are lost to history.
Tikal, one of the great cities of the Mayan
world, was once ruled by Au Cacao, whose
name translates as “Lord Chocolate.”
An early Spanish drawing from 16thcentury
Mexico shows chocolate being
poured from a great height into a bowl.
12 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 13