Ancient Greek Food & the Symposion (Supper Party)

A few readers have remarked on my descriptions of meals, and asked how can we know so much about what they ate? Well, in part, because we have recipes! We also have a lot of stray food mentions in ancient texts, plus imagery in various mediums from pottery to mosaics. Andrew Dalby and Sally Granger have done superb work on Greek (and Roman) food, including The Classical Cookbook and Siren Feasts. I recommend both.

Some of the food you’d order today in a Greek restaurant might have graced an ancient table. Souvlaki has been around forever; we’ve even found grills with indentions for spits to set over hot coals. (At left, with an oven above.) Olives existed in great variety then as now, wheat and barley bread, feta & various sheep and goat cheeses, little pancakes for breakfast (tiganites), grilled fish, eel, and shellfish of all types, cucumber-and-soured-milk (e.g., tzatziki)…the list goes on.

Yet some key modern ingredients in Greek cooking were missing. The lemon, for instance. Citrus had yet to find its way to the Mediterranean. In fact, thank Alexander for the lemon in modern Greek cuisine, as his interactions with Persia would bring the citron west, and from the citron and mandarin orange would come all modern types of citrus (citron = citrus).

No tomatoes, either! Or peppers. Or those yummy Greek potatoes. All this produce is native to the Americas, and appeared in Europe only after 1500.

No sugar from sugar cane! Sweetening came from honey (and a bit from sugar beets). Herbs and spices were both known, but imported spices (pepper, cassia, cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom) could be expensive. Herbs were more common, including anise, thyme, oregano, dill, fennel, hyssop, rosemary, rue, saffron, coriander, mint, and silphium. That latter is now extinct, but was enormously popular in ancient cuisine.

Drinks were simple. You had water, or you had wine. In fact, the Greeks often watered their wine. Think “wine spritzer” (without the carbonation). This practice served the dual purpose of making the wine go further, but also diluted its alcoholic effects. The usual mix for dinner was 3 parts wine to 2 parts water. The most common ancient Greek wine cup (kylix, see below) looks to us more like a soup bowl. It’s wide, flat, and decorated around the outside as well as in the bowl center. Other cup types existed, but the kylix was especially associated with the symposion, or supper party. Yet the literal meaning of symposion ISN’T “supper party,” but “to drink together.” Wine—not food—was the focus, and Greek wine service was ritualized and elaborate, not unlike tea service in some countries.

 

There were also a number of games played at supper parties, including the popular “kottobos,” which was a weird mix of spin-the-bottle and darts. In Kottobos, guests threw the wine lees (junk at the bottom of the cup) at a target on a tall bronze pole. (See the image inside the cup below.) If they hit the target and knocked it down, they got to claim a kiss from a fellow reveler.

Not all ancient wine-drinking cultures engaged in the practice of watering their wine, including the Macedonians, as described in the novels. Southern Greeks (rather haughtily) considered drinking wine “neat” or a-kratos (without the mixing krater [a type of pottery]) to be a sign of a barbarism. (Horrors!)

The Greeks ate two primary meals each day. The first was a light lunch (or “day-meal” as I call it in the novels): mostly finger foods, plus bread. Meat was rarely included. The main, evening meal was typically served after sunset, when men came in from the fields or finished other work and cleaned up. Even today, Greeks eat late, relatively. (“Breakfast” was just a hunk of bread dipped in wine-water to make it less stale, so not considered a real “meal.”)

Dinner could range from simple to elaborate, and while it usually involved at least some bread or grains, vegetables and meat (if any) varied: from porridge with a few veggies and some stew meat, to a many-coursed banquet.

Another thing, while families did occasionally eat together, having an evening “family meal” wasn’t an ancient Greek cultural assumption. It’s what happened in the absence of alternatives. Even among the poor or village farmers, a bunch of male buddies might get together at the house of one, to share conversation and food, while the family women (and male children) would be excluded to eat in the kitchen, or upstairs.

Ergo, Greek families might gather in the courtyard at sunup to pray together at the family altar, but they didn’t necessarily end the day eating together at a supper table.