Ancient Greek Diet, the Guide

Ancient Greeks tasted very different foods than the Greeks of today. Unlike the inhabitants of the small cities, the ancient Athenians had all the time to deal -among other things- with a healthy diet and physical exercise, since at least in the homes of the bourgeois, there were slaves for the daily tasks, among which was cooking.

One of the most complete sources of information on ancient Greek cuisine is the written texts of ‘Athenaeus’, author of the ‘Dipnosophytes’. But Athenaeus is not the only witness to the eating habits of our ancestors. Plato, Hesiod, Plutarch and other writers have passed on a wealth of culinary knowledge to us! So by watching scenes of everyday life in dramas, Aristophanic dialogues, phrases of rhetoricians and everything else, we can understand the way of gastronomic thinking of that time.The texts that have survived are one of the oldest gastronomic archives.
Let’s get to the point. Most of the food of the ancients was light and followed the rules of modern healthy eating.

Ancient Greek cuisine included most of the healthy eating habits that have been adopted by modern civilization in most parts of the world. It was rich in grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy products and oil. Specifically, the ancient Greeks included in their diet honey which was often eaten with cereals as boiled porridge, vegetables and fruit and vegetables, olive oil, watered wine, fruits such as figs, meat, loaves, legumes such as lentils and chickpeas, barley buns, sweets such as pan desserts, and gingerbread. Many dishes were eaten roasted or boiled, and they also used condiments in their food. Some of the dishes of ancient Greek cuisine were:

• Pork with plums
• Stuffed pigs
• ‘Creokakkavos’, i.e. pork pancetta with a sweet and sour sauce of honey, thyme and vinegar accompanied by chickpea paste.
• ‘Ornis en pied krithi’, i.e. chicken with coarsely ground barley
• ‘Swordfish en trimmati sycamini’, i.e. swordfish with berry sauce, etc.

In various regions of ancient Greece there were variations in eating habits. In ancient Sparta, for example, the diet was simple. People ate little and poor quality food, as well as the notorious black broth. This was done to get them used to hardship so that they would have endurance in war. The diet in Crete was also frugal.

THE MEALS

From the book of Homer we learn that in his time, the meals of the day were three, the “Ariston”, the “Dipnon” and the “Dorpon”, with bread and plenty of wine being the first. In historical times, and specifically in Athens in the classical period, before the day was well underway, the Greeks had a simple meal, the akratism.

Akratismas was barley or wheat bread dipped in wine. In some homes where there was greater comfort, the akratism was accompanied by olives, figs or some other fruit.

Towards noon or towards the afternoon they would have a very simple meal, quickly that is to say, the “ariston”, because it was followed by the “esperis”, i.e. their evening meal. Dinner was the most luxurious meal at the end of the day.

Olive oil, fruits and vegetables were on their tables daily, while they ignored such items as, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, pasta, sugar, coffee, coffee, peppers, bananas, corn, oranges, cocoa and chocolate. They ate legumes and cereals, made bread every day from barley and wheat, putting in many seasonings such as mint, sesame, fennel, honey, cheese, etc. In everyday life, a staple of the diet was lentils. They also ate a lot of fresh and salted fish, with a particular preference for eels, sardines and anchovies. Cheaper and more widespread was pork, roasted on a spit or boiled, and they ate a lot of dairy products, especially goat’s milk, from which they made yoghurt and cheese.

Also two important raw materials for the ancients were “garros”, a sauce that, to make it, they salted fish with a lot of salt and then left it with the salt for three months to ferment. Then they would take the liquid that the fish had left, strain it and that’s how they had the gharos, a sauce that could be preserved for a long time. They used it instead of salt in most dishes.

Also, “sylfios”, was a widely used spice in ancient Greece and later in the Roman Empire.

They drank wine every day but watered down and accompanied it with nuts.

The Greeks did not use forks. Spoons were available, called kohliaria, but they preferred to replace them with a crust of bread. Their food was picked up with their hands. The portions were served chopped so that they were easy to grasp. Tablecloths and napkins were things unknown. They wiped their hands with bread crumbs and made them into pellets, throwing them at the dogs that prowled the place. Galettes made of “mass” (galettes of barley flour and wine) or cheese also took the place of a plate, but they also used wooden, clay or metal plates to eat mashed or stewed food. They used spoons that looked a lot like today’s spoons, and whose handles were often richly decorated. For meat, knives were essential.

The poor citizens, who could not afford it, obtained most of their food from the free provision of nature. The staple food of the poor was barley: barley broth, barley flour pies and barley breads. Hesiod in his ‘Works and Days’ refers to some of the foods of the poor, namely artichoke, honey, acorns, mallow, dried figs, thyme and snails. They liked thick broths of peas or lentils, and bought cheap sausages. Aristophanes accuses the sausage makers of using dog or donkey meat, but hopefully the poet was exaggerating. Meat and white bread rarely appeared on the table of the poor. Instead, the poor ate a lot of salted fish (salted fish) from the Black Sea. They drank cheap watered wine, but usually they were happy with water.

Sparta was completely different from Athens and the rest of Greece. The Spartans fed on more primitive and coarser foods. “You can eat black broth,” a character in a lost comedy by Aristophanes ironically tells a Spartan. It is said that a ‘Savarite’, who happened upon a Spartan meal, said: “Truly the Spartans are the bravest people. Anyone else would rather die a thousand times than live like them. The Spartans’ rations consisted of black broth. It was a not pleasant tasting food of pork boiled in blood and vinegar. The rest of the Greeks mocked the Spartans for these eating habits, but the Spartans themselves made fun of it and found it delicious after a bath in the Evrotas. Indeed, the joke they told about the Persian campaign and the wars against them was that the Asiatics had started from so far away and undergone so much trouble to get the black broth from them. And they burst out laughing.

But besides the Spartans there were some others who kept a program in their diet, the athletes. For athletes, the diet included nuts and dairy products, especially fresh cheese before it was well drained. They were also fed barley or wheat bread, along with bran and without sourdough. Of the meats they preferred beef, bull and venison.