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’.
AD 636
AUTHOR: Linghu Defen, FROM: The Book of Zhou
While wearing the mourning of nine months, one might eat vegetables and fruits, and drink water and congee, using no salt or cream.
Of the official twenty-four histories of Imperial China, The Book of Zhou stands out – fifty chapters long, some inevitably lost over time – as the one that mentions a dish now enjoyed daily by millions across Asia. As well as recommending it as appropriate to eat during times of mourning, it records how ‘Emperor Huang Di was the first to cook congee with millet as the ingredient’. Today congee is mostly made with rice, but as the emperor showed, where rice wasn’t available it might be substituted with another cereal.
The dish has spread to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and South Korea. Each culture has its own way of preparing it, although the basic method is pretty much the same, the rice being cooked in large quantities of water so that it disintegrates in the liquid as it’s heated and becomes a sort of thick porridge or soup. It would have been made in this way back in the days of the Tang Dynasty, when The Book of Zhou was commissioned by Emperor Taizong to give the official history of the earlier Northern Zhou Dynasty. Although congee was regarded as a little more special in those times – presented as a gift to the emperor’s nobles. No doubt given as a measure of respect with no end of bowing, it was then gently brought to the lips with gold-tipped chopsticks made of ivory.
Despite all the ceremony, it was, as now, a plain dish – the humblest gift signifying the greater respect. In fact, served on its own without the addition of other ingredients, it would have been almost tasteless. Think of gruel, stodgy from cooking in the pot overnight and served with little more than a smile. Yet its blandness belies its strength. Congee fortifies the body at the start of the day. It is easily digested, providing instant energy and making it a good dish to wolf down if you’re about to be attacked by some aggressive warrior. An expert congee consumer will tell you that by turning a hot bowl of congee in your hands and slurping the cooler parts around the rim, you can get through three bowls in as many minutes. And as it doesn’t sit uncomfortably in your stomach, but is absorbed quickly, you won’t get a stitch while wielding your sword at your attacker.
Congee is sustaining too, ideal for those who need a quick energy boost after exercise or are recovering from illness. Indeed, its fortifying properties are held in such regard that it is often served at funerals. More than that, it has provided life-saving nutrition in a nation ravaged by famine over the centuries. From 108 BC to 1911, China experienced 1,828 famines – that’s almost one a year. The one thing that enabled people to survive, that kept millions of families from starvation, was congee. Congee because of its warming and sustaining qualities and because it is made with rice.
Rice is one of the most important global foods, of which there are some 10,000 varieties. Eight thousand of these are grown for food and they have many advantages over cereal crops such as wheat and barley. Yields are higher and the moisture content is low which means rice can be stored for longer and used during periods of famine. In fact the Tang Dynasty – which lasted from AD 618 to 907 – made much of the value of storing rice by building storage depots near their newly built canals so the rice could be transported to