CUISINE AND CULTURE - GREECE

Geography

The geography of Greece strongly influenced its culture and cuisine. Greece is a rocky, mountainous country surrounded by the sea on three sides. Since only fifteen to twenty percent of the land was flat enough or fertile enough to farm, they couldn’t grow enough grain to feed themselves. When a country is faced with this situation, it has three choices: (1) trade, (2) colonize, or (3) conquer. Greece did all three. It traded its staple crops, olive oil and wine. It founded colonies like Sicily to produce grain. But when it tried to conquer other territories, it was defeated and was conquered itself.

Geography affected government in Greece by keeping it small and local, because travel over steep peaks and down deep valleys was difficult and time consuming. Each city was like a small country and ruled itself. It is from the Greek word for these city-states—polis—that we get our word politics. The city-state of Athens was the birthplace of democracy, the form of government in which the citizens rule by voting. The United States and all other democracies are based on this. However, Greece was no political paradise: only free males were allowed to be citizens and to vote. Women had no say in the government and neither did much of the labor force, which was slaves.

The Greeks were a nation of sailors who lived on the abundant variety the sea provided: fish like mullet, turbot, grouper, sea bream; and eels, octopus, and squid. The measure of an ancient Greek cook was what he could do with fish. The first chef we know by name in history was a Greek man named Mithekos, from the city-state of Syracuse, in Sicily. His book of recipes—ingredients and instructions—mostly for fish, has disappeared. We know about it only because mention of it survives in other writings.

Especially popular was the dark-fleshed bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, native to the Mediterranean. These large fish—they can weigh almost a ton—were preserved in salt or olive oil, as they still are today in the Mediterranean. Bonito, the bluefin’s ten-pound relative, was wrapped in fig leaves and slow-cooked in the ashes.

Food, too, was democratic in Greece, at least until the fifth century B.C. Everyone ate the same modest meals based on olives and figs, goats and sheep, barley pounded into a paste, porridge, or unleavened bread. More than any other food, bread represented civilization because it was a completely human product, controlled by humans every step of the way. Vinegar was a favorite ingredient of the Greeks. Black pepper was also used, but was considered a medicine. Cows were not kept because of the shortage of pasture land, so a man who owned oxen was considered rich. However, he didn’t kill them because he needed them to plow his fields and for transportation. Goats and sheep were kept, but the young ones were reserved for ritual blood sacrifices to the gods. It was a matter of economics, too: goats and sheep produced milk to drink and to make into cheese, and mohair and wool, so they were only killed when they were very old and had outlived all their other purposes. The Greek diet was also heavy in sweets. They ate fruit, which the philosopher Aristotle observed caused their teeth to rot: “Why do figs, which are soft and sweet, damage the teeth?”

That was the diet in Athens, in northern Greece. In the southern part of Greece, Sparta was a rigid militaristic society. Infants that were not born healthy and physically perfect were tossed off a cliff. Girls and boys ran and played rigorous sports to toughen them up. When they were seven years old, the boys were sent away for military training. They lived in barracks and slept on hard wooden benches. Spartan food matched the Spartan life. Although cheese, barley, and figs were food fundamentals in Sparta, the staple food was a black broth made from pork stock, vinegar, and salt. It is from their denial of what they considered luxury that we get the word spartan.

Geography also influenced human relationships in Greece. Because the land made travel so difficult, the guest-host relationship was sacred. If a stranger, even a poor man, appeared at your door, it was your duty to be a good host, to take him in and shelter him, share your food and wine with him. “We do not sit at table only to eat, but to eat together,” said the Greek author Plutarch.5 Dining was a sign of the human community and differentiated men from beasts. In return, the guest had obligations to his host. These included not abusing his host’s hospitality by staying too long, usually not more than three days. A violation of this relationship by either side brought justified human and divine wrath. An example is in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. After the Trojan War, which lasted ten years, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wandered for another ten years trying to return to his home. In his absence, his house was filled with men who drank his wine, ate his roasted meat, and pressured his wife to choose one of them as her new husband because they kept assuring her Odysseus was dead. When he finally arrived home disguised as a lowly swineherd, the suitors refused to give him food or shelter. Then Odysseus revealed himself and justifiably killed them all.

Demeter, Goddess of Grain: The “Good Goddess”

A powerful goddess was Demeter, the goddess of all growing things — mother earth. Barley was sprinkled around her temple as an offering to ensure that the earth would be fertile. As time passed, the barley was replaced by wheat, then rice. The custom of scattering rice spread from the temple to the wedding ceremony to guarantee fertility in marriage. This is why we still throw rice at the bride and groom. (Now, however, in an effort to be environmentally sensitive, many people sprinkle birdseed because birds can’t digest rice.) Demeter had a beautiful daughter named Persephone who she kept hidden from the roving eyes of the male gods. One day, the thing Demeter feared the most happened: Persephone let out a scream that shook heaven and earth and vanished. Demeter was devastated. She left Mt. Olympus and wandered the earth disguised as an ordinary human, looking for her daughter. She would not eat or drink the food of the gods, only the little bit of food the reapers ate: barley-water with mint; or water, meal, and pennyroyal. Finally, the Sun told her that Hades, the god of the dark kingdom of the dead, had seen Persephone picking flowers and thought she was so beautiful that he opened the earth and captured her. Demeter grieved when she heard this, and so did the earth. Everything stopped growing. Zeus finally stepped in and negotiated a compromise because all the humans were going to starve. Persephone could be with her mother, but only part of the time. She had eaten a pomegranate seed that Hades had given her, which meant that she had to return to the underworld to be with him. That is how Persephone came to be both the goddess of springtime and of the dead. During Persephone’s eight months aboveground, joyous Demeter lets things grow and flourish. But when Persephone is in the world of the dead for four months every year, Demeter mourns and nothing grows.

And that is where winter comes from.

Dionysus: God of the Grape

Each winter in Greece, grape vines seemed to die, only to be miraculously reborn in the springtime. Just as the Nile represented resurrection to the Egyptians, Dionysus, the god of the vine, was the sacred symbol of resurrection and immortality to the Greeks. Grapes were plentiful; wine production began by 1500 B.C. The Greeks drank it sweetened with honey, because the amphoras—the ceramic vessels they used to store wine — were waterproofed with resin, a sticky secretion from trees that tasted like turpentine, also a resin. The taste persists today in the Greek alcohol retsina.

Like the wine he represented, Dionysus had many sides: he could lift men out of their ordinary state of mind and inspire them, but men also sometimes committed terrible acts under his influence. Women were rarely allowed to have wine. For instance, public banquets were usually restricted to men. On the rare occasions when women were invited, they didn’t get the good, strong, aged wine the men got. They were served “sweet wine or barely fermented grape juice.” Drinking wine was regarded as sacred because it altered human consciousness and brought men closer to god. At one of the most sacred Greek ceremonies, it was not consumed with dinner as a beverage, but after, at what the Greeks called a symposium.

The Symposium

The symposium was an elaborate ceremony that usually took place in a ruler’s dining hall or public building, often a temple. By the seventh century B.C. it was an accustomed practice. The best sources from ancient Greece are paintings on vases; the best current source is Massimo Vetta’s essay, “The Culture of the Symposium.” As Vetta states, the symposium was “a meeting of men that only took place following a meal” to consecrate a special public or private event like a wedding or to thank the gods for a victory in games or to make a political decision. It began with a blood sacrifice—a religious offering to the gods of an animal, usually a young lamb or goat, that had been ritually killed. “The slaughter of animals in sacrifice and the butchering of the meat was the task of the mageiros (the Greek word for chef, butcher, and sacrificer of animals): he divided the meat between the worshippers.” After the gods got the best portion— thigh meat and fat—the humans ate. Slaves served the guests, who took their sandals off and reclined on couches propped up on one arm. When the eating was over, tables were cleared, hands were washed, floors cleansed of the scraps thrown on them during dinner. The men were given garlands to put on their heads and chests. Then poetry was recited, flutes played, decisions made. The sense of community was further reinforced because all the men drank from the same cup. Except for a few drops of sacred wine at the beginning of the ceremony, the wine was diluted, often at the ratio of one part wine to two or three parts water. The Greeks regarded diluted wine as a symbol of civilization. It also helped to avoid drunkenness.

Athena: Goddess of the Olive

There was gold in Greece—olive oil. Olives, the fruit of the Olea europaea tree, had been cultivated and pressed for their oil in the eastern Mediterranean by Palestinians and Syrians since about 5000 B.C. The dusty graygreen trees are slow growing but live to be hundreds of years old. Prized for cooking, as medicine, and as fuel, olive oil was one of the basics of trade in the ancient Mediterranean. It was also used as a body lotion sometimes scented with perfume. For example, in the Olympics, which began in 776 B.C., naked men greased with olive oil competed in the earliest sports: running, the long jump, the discus and javelin throws, wrestling, boxing, and a combination of five events called the pentathlon—all still part of the modern Olympics, which began in 1896. (The winner wasn’t totally naked: he was crowned with a wreath of laurel leaves from the god Apollo’s sacred tree.) When it was discovered that olive trees, which are very sensitive to cold, grew well in Greece’s mild climate, they became a staple crop. However, their deep roots let the topsoil wash away, finishing off the erosion that had begun centuries earlier when the Greeks started chopping down trees to build houses and ships.

Unripe green olives and even ripe black ones are bitter. Before they can be eaten they must be cured in brine, in oil, in water, or dried in salt. If they are going to be crushed to extract the oil, it must be done very carefully with just the right amount of pressure to force the oil out of the olive, but not smash the pit into it. In ancient times:

The olives were first crushed in basins. The resulting mash was then transferred to straw baskets for the actual pressing to be done. Several baskets were stacked in a press. Various methods of producing a graduated pressure were developed over the early centuries, chiefly a long, extremely heavy beam counterpoised with weights. The crushed fruit yielded a liquid comprised of water and oil. It had to be allowed to settle before oil could be skimmed off at successive intervals.

Ancient people didn’t have the levels of labeling that came into existence at the end of the twentieth century, but “virgin” means first press ing; “extra virgin” means less than one percent acidity; “cold-pressed” means that heat, which would alter the chemical composition and taste of the oil, was not used.

The olive tree is highly symbolic in Western culture. Jews and Christians know it from the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark and the flood. When the dove that Noah sent out to see if the world was still flooded flew back to the ark with an olive branch in its mouth, everyone knew that the floodwaters had receded and that there was peace again. The dove and the olive branch have symbolized peace ever since. To the Greeks, the olive was the symbol of the goddess Athena, who created it. She was the warrior goddess, helmeted and carrying a shield, who also represented peace and wisdom. She protected Athens—the city named after her—and  helped the Greeks win the Trojan War in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.

Nectar and Ambrosia: Food of the Gods

To the Greeks, the stories about the gods were their religion. Christian writers who came later called them myths. There were twelve major Greek gods, called the Olympians because they lived on Mt. Olympus. They were immortal and ate mysterious food that was forbidden to humans—the sweet drink, nectar, and heavenly food, ambrosia (not to be confused with the twentieth-century fruit salad made with orange sections, sliced bananas, and shredded coconut in an orange juice and confectioners’ sugar sauce).

Even though the gods did not eat human food, they were very human in their behavior. They fought among themselves, lied, cheated on their spouses, got angry, and were not above disguising themselves to get what they wanted, frequently a beautiful young girl. The husbandand-wife team of Zeus and Hera headed up the gods. Both a goddess and a god were connected to fire. Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the only sister of Zeus, and a virgin, was worshiped in public and in private every day because every city had a sacred fire that was kept burning constantly. In this case, the goddess paralleled what the humans did, since the daughter of the household was responsible for keeping the fire going. Hestia also received offerings at the beginning and end of every meal. One of the rituals of founding a new colony was to take fire from the old city to the new one to guarantee continuity. It survives today in the ceremony of the Olympic torch, which has to be carried by hand from Athens to the site of the Olympic games every four years.

The god connected with fire was Hephaestus. Like many Greek gods, he had both a positive and a negative side. On the positive side, he was a blacksmith, which showed the power of fire to create and be useful to mankind. The negative was that he also represented the power of fire to destroy, because he lived in a volcano (his Latin name is Vulcan). In another typically Greek contrast, Hephaestus, the only god who was ugly and deformed, was married to beautiful Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She gave her name to foods and other substances that are thought to stimulate the senses or improve performance sexually—aphrodisiacs. Some foods that are considered aphrodisiacs now are oysters, caviar, Champagne, chocolate, and snails.

Food played a large part in Greek mythology, too. Hunger was used as a punishment for the crime of cannibalism. Tantalus, the only mortal who had ever dined with the gods on nectar and ambrosia, invited the gods to a banquet at which he served a peculiar dish. He had killed his son, boiled him, and now was feeding him to the gods. They figured it out before they started eating (except for one bite of his shoulder) and gave Tantalus a punishment to fit his crime—eternal agonizing hunger and thirst. He was forced to stand in a pool of water, but every time he bent down to take a drink, it disappeared. He reached up to pluck the ripe apples, pomegranates, pears, and figs dangling just over his head, but the wind blew the branches out of his reach. It is from Tantalus that we get our word tantalize—to drive somebody crazy with desire.

The Golden Age of Greece and the Professional Chef

In the fifth century B.C., Athens and Sparta allied and defeated the Persian Empire in a series of wars. The peacetime that followed was the Golden Age of Greece. Athens grew to between 300,000 and 500,000 people and created the buildings, paintings, and sculptures that are the hallmarks of Greece and Western civilization, like the Parthenon, a hilltop temple with a forty-foot statue of Athena. The Golden Age was the great age of theater in Greece, the comedies of Aristophanes and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that are still performed today.

The Golden Age was also the beginning of a wealthy class and a split in the culture between rich and poor, which was reflected in Greek cuisine. The poor continued to subsist on barley heated up to remove the chaff and ground into cakes called maza, wheat pastes or unleavened bread, some sheep or goat cheese, and olive oil. The wealthy had more elaborate meals, with more variety in diet. They consumed legumes like chickpeas, lentils, and vetch, and seeds from flax, sesame, and poppies. They also ate the meat of domesticated animals, including dogs, after observing sacrificial rituals. The forests provided large and small game: boar, deer, hare, and fox. The vegetables commonly eaten were turnips, leeks, watercress, onions, garlic, and purslane. The new profession of bee-keeping made honey more available.

The rise in urbanization, wealth, and trade produced a need for more than the free guest-host hospitality of earlier times. City-run inns provided professional hospitality for traveling merchants and businessmen throughout the Greek world, often in waterfront areas. All of these people needed food; cooking became a profession in Greece. In addition to being able to afford chefs, the wealthy could afford to buy imported wines. They also drank much more wine than the poor. Cuisine was not as elaborate as it later became in Rome, but some of the chefs became known. One, Archestratus, from Sicily—either Syracuse or Gela—wrote much about food but it wasn’t a cookbook. He wrote food poetry, parodies that made fun of the epic poems like The Iliad or The Odyssey, that were recited—sung to a lyre, a kind of harp—as entertainment at a symposium. Guests expecting a song about heroic deeds must have been surprised when instead they got verses about fish. Only fragments survive, partly because Greek philosophers like Plato didn’t think cooking was an art, or food writing was worth preserving in libraries.

Greece’s Golden Age ended when it went to war with Sparta. Starting in 431 B.C., Athens and Sparta waged a twenty-seven year war for control of the Greek peninsula. Much of Sparta’s strategy was to cut Athens off from its food supply. Knowing this, Athens tried to invade Sicily in 415 B.C. to turn it into a grain-producing colony. Two disastrous years later, the Sicilians emerged victorious after destroying Athens’s navy and onethird of its total military force. The war finally ended in 404 B.C. when Sparta blocked Athens’s sea route to its grain supply. Without food, Athens was forced to surrender. The Golden Age of Greek civilization was over.

Alexander the Great and the Magic Golden Apples

A new conqueror appeared, from Macedonia, just north of Greece. Alexander was not Greek but he loved Greek culture. His tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, who had been the student of Plato, who had been the student of Socrates. Alexander’s goal was to conquer the known world, and he did. His empire stretched east from Greece through Persia (modern-day Iran) and Iraq to the Indus River on the western border of India, north through what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan, and south into Africa. His conquering created a new culture, Hellenistic, that was a combination of four cultures: Greek, Persian, Indian, and Egyptian.

This had an impact on the cuisine of Greece, because new methods of food preparation and new foods were introduced. One writer bemoaned all the changes that were occurring with food: “Do you see what things have come to? Bread, garlic, cheese, maza—those are healthy foods, but not these salted fish, these lamb chops sprinkled with spices, these sweet confections, and these corrupting pot roasts. And by Zeus, if they aren’t simmering cabbage in olive oil and eating it with pureed peas!”

Alexander established cities everywhere he conquered and named at least fifteen after himself. The center of learning in the world shifted from Athens to Alexandria, Egypt. It had a library with 700,000 volumes of Greek writing, a zoo, a botanical garden, an observatory, and a great lighthouse more than 400 feet high to keep the ships safe, many of them carrying wheat from the Nile River valley to feed the Mediterranean world.

Alexander was on a quest for immortality—the legendary Water of Life or the magic Golden Apples. He didn’t find either one, but he did find other apples that were supposed to let him live to be 400 years old. He didn’t live to be forty. He died of a fever, maybe malaria, one month short of his thirty-third birthday. Still seeking immortality, he arranged to have himself preserved in honey and placed in a glass coffin in Alexandria, Egypt. After his death in 323 B.C., as usual after the death of a powerful leader, there were wars of succession and his empire was split up into smaller areas ruled by several generals. But Alexander’s vast empire would soon appear small. Power in the Mediterranean was shifting to a fast-rising country located west of Greece on a peninsula
shaped like a boot—Italy.

By Linda Civitello in "Cuisine and Culture" second edition, John Willey & Sons Inc. USA, 2008 excerpts pp. 26-34. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.