Last night, as I lay awake with a touch of insomnia, I started reading a book by Clifford Wright, called
A mediterranean Feast.
I was trying to find imformation on where, what we call “modern Mediterranean” food started.
You know the trendy dishes we see in so many restaurants for the past decade or so.
What I read was very interesting, why? Because as I told my wife last night “it seems that everything to do with food and wine has its roots somehow buried in the mediterranean”
It seem because of the fall of the Roman empire, and the beginning of the modern era, the agricultural revolution, innovations in technology, and the transition to a capitalist economy…as well as exploration and the renaissance, where the catilyst for what we consider the cuisine of today.
The book goes on to explain how the food writers sought historical roots of mediterranean cuisine in classical literature, rather than looking at the wider picture.
A comprehensive food history would rightly begin, if not in prehistoric times (when I was born),
With the works of the first century AD Greek writer Athenaeaus (c 170-230), who lived in Rome.
Athenaeus did not write cook books per say, but his volumesand body of work is about food.
In the same century there were several Roman writers with the name Apicius, one of whom wrote what is called the first cookery book, a work that was finally compiled in the fourth century
(I think the Apicius I mentianed is the one we have discussed in symposium)
These writers are usually taken as the beginning of contempory European cuisine.
They are certainly first, temporally, but whether there was a continuous development from the classical era to the cuisine of the modern meditarrean is less certain.
With some help from the boards, I hope to try to find out how the research into mondern cuisine continues.
A mediterranean Feast.
I was trying to find imformation on where, what we call “modern Mediterranean” food started.
You know the trendy dishes we see in so many restaurants for the past decade or so.
What I read was very interesting, why? Because as I told my wife last night “it seems that everything to do with food and wine has its roots somehow buried in the mediterranean”
It seem because of the fall of the Roman empire, and the beginning of the modern era, the agricultural revolution, innovations in technology, and the transition to a capitalist economy…as well as exploration and the renaissance, where the catilyst for what we consider the cuisine of today.
The book goes on to explain how the food writers sought historical roots of mediterranean cuisine in classical literature, rather than looking at the wider picture.
A comprehensive food history would rightly begin, if not in prehistoric times (when I was born),
With the works of the first century AD Greek writer Athenaeaus (c 170-230), who lived in Rome.
Athenaeus did not write cook books per say, but his volumesand body of work is about food.
In the same century there were several Roman writers with the name Apicius, one of whom wrote what is called the first cookery book, a work that was finally compiled in the fourth century
(I think the Apicius I mentianed is the one we have discussed in symposium)
These writers are usually taken as the beginning of contempory European cuisine.
They are certainly first, temporally, but whether there was a continuous development from the classical era to the cuisine of the modern meditarrean is less certain.
With some help from the boards, I hope to try to find out how the research into mondern cuisine continues.