Читать книгу A History of Food in 100 Recipes - William Sitwell - Страница 15

8

Honeyed cheesecakes

circa AD 200

AUTHOR: Athenaeus (quoting Hebe’s Wedding by Epicharmus)

FROM: Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banquet)

Wheaten flour is wetted, and then put into a frying-pan; after that honey is sprinkled over it, and sesame and cheese.

One cannot leave the shores of ancient Greece and Rome – for forays around the wider ancient world – without enjoying the taste of honey and various recipes associated with it, courtesy of the Greek scholar Athenaeus. Born in the Egyptian tr ading port of Naucratis, he was writing in around AD 200. Some of his publications are lost but we are indebted to him because of his fifteen-volume work entitled the Deipnosophistae.

Translatable as ‘The Learned Banquest’ or ‘Philosophers at Dinner’, the work purports to be recorded conversations that take place during an epic banquet between a variety of learned people, some of whom may or may not be fictitious. Now you might quite understandably feel that a collection of dinner party discussions in fifteen volumes sounds like proper torture, but what is discussed is so detailed, so many writers and thinkers are quoted, and such a number of customs and ideas are recorded, that it makes the work hugely important. For we are left with a great array of precise detail about life in ancient Rome – where the work was written – not just in AD 200 but going back in history.

The conversation veers from food to music, dance, women and much more. As would happen naturally, topics go off at extraordinary tangents. Poetry, philosophy, myths and legends are quoted at length by various individuals, and there is one of the longest discussions in history on cheesecake. Of the many cheesecakes discussed – and from absorbing myself in the literature, I can assure you that the ancient Greeks and Romans consumed a large number of them, going by different names and all cooked in different ways – the one attributed to Epicharmus, a dramatist and philosopher from around 500 bc, seems the tastiest. Included at the top of this chapter, the recipe is quite straightforward and it uses honey, which, as you’ll see, was a pretty much a key ingredient.

Reclining on couches, adorned in flowing togas, the guests ate and chatted away while servants fluttered about bringing food and drink as the conversation ebbed and flowed. It was perhaps during the serving of cheesecakes as a second or final sweet course that the epic cheesecake digression took place. ‘The cheesecakes of Samos are extraordinarily good,’ we hear one diner say, while another talks of how he has eaten them ‘set in a mould and made up of egg, honey and very fine wheatflour’.

Mention is made of cheesecakes served at a wedding to the bride and bridegroom, drenched in honey – the cheesecake that is, not the happy couple. Others are mixed with honey, then deep-fried and served with honey. Another, a recipe ‘by that clever writer on confectionery, Chrysippus’, is made by first roasting nuts and the seedhead of a poppy. This is pounded in a mortar and added to fruit juice mixed with boiled honey and some black pepper. Added to a cheesy dough, the soft mass that results is flattened and made into squares, then sprinkled with crushed sesame softened with more boiled honey. No doubt it’s then cooked, not that the clever Chrysippus is helpful enough to mention this. Still, it’s one of a cast of thousands, virtually all of which include honey.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a pretty high regard for honey, which because of its preservative and antiseptic qualities they associated with longevity and hence immortality. It was both the food of the gods – ambrosia – and a gift from them. The mythical figure of Aristeaus was an apiculture – beekeeping – expert. The son of Apollo and a nymph, he had nectar and honey dropped on his lips as a baby and thus gained immortality. As he grew up, various nymphs taught him how to cultivate vines and olive trees and to keep bees. He then went about sharing his bee know-how with common mortals.

Early excavations on Crete show bee-related motifs on pottery and jewellery; Hippocrates recommended it to everyone, sick or otherwise; Aristotle made an intense study of bees; and Democritus, who spent a lot of time thinking about atoms, had a favourite recipe for a long and healthy life: ‘One must nourish the external part of his body with oil and the internal with honey.’

Honey was mass-produced by the Greeks and used as a traded commodity. A record of 1300 BC shows 110 pots having the equivalent value of an ass or ox. Above all, it was nutritious and tasted good and, as we now know, it was very popular in cheesecake.

Wade through the dinner party monologues of Athenaeus, perhaps imagining him declaim it as a piece of theatre, and you learn a thing or two about other foodie subjects. His dinner party guests appear to abhor drunkenness – even during the penultimate volume, when the party was drawing to a close (it must have been a dry night). ‘We’re not of the class who drink to excess, nor of the numbers of those who are in the habit of being intoxicated by midday,’ declares one. ‘Those who drink too much unmixed wine are become violent,’ says another, while a fellow guest opines sagely (quoting Herodotus): ‘When wine has penetrated down into the body, bad and furious language is apt to rise to the surface.’

They recommend songs to calm people at the start of feasts and stop them eating too fast: ‘Music softens the moroseness of character, for it dissipates sadness and produces affability and a sort of gentlemanlike joy.’ Not that they were without experience of overdoing it. There is considerable discussion on the subject of hangovers. A comic poet, Clearchus, is quoted as saying: ‘As we get all the pleasure first … we lose the whole delight in the sharp pain that follows.’

But if you want another measure of the spirit of these discussions it comes when referencing one Aristoxenus: ‘The theatres have become completely barbarised and … music has become entirely ruined and vulgar.’ No doubt he also felt that young people had no respect.

Still, on food, especially cheesecake, these are precious volumes. And while Atheneaus discourses endlessly on pomegranates, pheasants, sucking pigs and salted crab – to mention just a few of the foodstuffs covered in this work – he’s at his best when he waxes lyrical on ‘tartlets and cheesecakes steeped most thoroughly in the rich honey of the golden bee’.