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COOKERY IN ANTIQUITY |
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By the time of the earliest settled communities, cookery had become more than merely a means of survival; people had begun to concern themselves with flavor and quality, rather than simply quantity. By the standards of the great 19th-century French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (who declared, “Beasts feed; man eats; only the man of intellect knows how to eat”), the craft of cookery was evolving into an art. The peoples of the Indus Valley, for example, are known to have ground spices, and their Chinese contemporaries preferred tender young pigs to meatier but tougher older animals. By early Babylonian times the succulent fungi called truffles were being rooted from the ground for the delectation of those who could afford them, and the tough meat of old oxen was deemed fit only for dog food. Forty kinds of breads and pastries were available to upper-class Egyptians by the 12th century bc. Nine hundred years later the Athenians had already stolen a march on frugal modern restaurateurs by inventing the hors d’oeuvre trolley, which, according to one 3rd-century BC complaint, “seems to offer variety but is nothing at all to satisfy the belly.”
Throughout much of its history, indeed, cookery of classical Greece was far more concerned with the belly than the palate. As a result of disastrously poor soil conservation, olives and grapes grew in abundance, but meat was scarce, and domestically grown staple grains almost nonexistent. Except during the later period of Athenian greatness, rich and poor alike subsisted largely on a monotonous diet of imported grain eaten for the most part in the form of oil-bound pastes. Meat rarely was eaten, except during ritual feasts, when it was prepared as simply as a steak at a modern backyard barbecue. With the emergence of Athens as the preeminent city of classical antiquity, however, Greek cookery for the wealthy, prepared by slaves, took on pretensions to what would eventually be called haute cuisine.
It remained for the Romans to elevate cookery to the status of high art and to make elaborate dining a major preoccupation of civilized life. Unlike the slave cooks of Greece, the hired chefs of imperial Rome commanded salaries that the Roman historian Livy termed “prohibitive,” and their employers literally spent fortunes on single meals. No foodstuff was too costly or too esoteric for the upper-class Roman table, and the known world was scoured for such exotic items as flamingo tongues, peacock brains, oysters from Britain, hams from Gaul, and ostriches from North Africa. To satisfy this gastronomic lust a sophisticated culinary technology was developed, and even in the restricted space of town houses kitchens were furnished with large grills, vast preparation tables, and complex masonry cookstoves; these stoves contained a number of separate ovens, each with its specific function.
Although the 19th-century French master chef Marie Antoine Careme denounced it as “essentially barbaric,” classical Roman cookery might easily have evolved into something much like Careme’s cuisine had not the Roman Empire broken up. With the barbarian sweep across Europe in the 5th century ad, the progress of Western cookery came to a virtual standstill and was not revitalized until the Renaissance.
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