Food from around year 1000

[Lady Rose]

I have recieved the book 'Greek Byzantine Cuisine'. It's a modern book. I've had a quick squizz at it and several of the dishes have tomatos in them but there are plenty that don't. I'll have to do some sampling as well as marry up the research on available foods in the timeframe.

Ginny

[stefano]

Apicius or De Re Coquinaira is an imperial roman cookery book. I wonder if it might be a decent starting point for Byzantine cookery?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

Apicius is the title of a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century AD and written in a language that is in many ways closer to Vulgar than to Classical Latin.

Apicius is a text to be used in the kitchen. In the earliest printed editions it was given the overall title De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking"), and was attributed to an otherwise unknown "Caelius Apicius", an invention based on the fact that one of the two manuscripts is headed with the words "API CAE". The name Apicius had long been associated with excessive love of food, apparently from the habits of an early bearer of the name. The most famous individual given this name because of his reputation as a gourmet was Marcus Gavius Apicius, who is sometimes mistakenly asserted to be the author of the book.

The text is organised in ten short books which appear to be arranged rather like a modern cookbook:

Epimeles — The Chef
Sarcoptes — Meats
Cepuros — From the garden
Pandecter — Various dishes
Ospreos — Peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc.
Aeropetes — Fowl
Polyteles — Fowl
Tetrapus — Quadrupeds
Thalassa — Seafood
Halieus — Fish

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I believe it's available in print as "Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome".

There are also various english translations (works in progess) available online:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius/home.html

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/ethnic/historical/ant-rom-coll.html

And copies of the original latin here:

http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost04/Apicius/api_re00.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16439

As I recall, Apicius is keen on fish, meat, salad, bread, pulse stews, fruit, fish sauce and various pungent condiment mixtures.

Barring discovering any extant Byzantine texts, I think using it judiciously, as one point of reference, as well as extant middle eastern texts as another, and modern Greek/Turkish cookbooks as another (as you say, excluding the aperiod ingedients like tomatoes and corn, etc), would achieve pretty reasonable results.

In the extant arabian texts, I recall there are even references to Byzantine 'fake' murri, murri being a pungent arabic soy-sauce-like or marmite-like condiment apparently originally made from fermented rotted barley:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/recipes_introduction.html#bm

http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-CONDIMENTS/murri-msg.html