Cooking the Ancient Greek Myths

Let’s get a cookin’!
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❧ SOURCES

• “At the Table of the Gods? Divine Appetites and Animal Sacrifice” by Jan-Mathieu (Mat) Carbon
• “The Classical Cookbook” by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger
• https://www.hellenion.org/recipes/recipe-for-panspermia/
• “Food in the Ancient World, From A to Z” by Andrew Dalby
• https://baringtheaegis.blogspot.com/2020/04/on-pelanoi-cakes-of-athenians.html
• “Food and Drink in Antiquity: Readings From The Graeco-Roman World” by John F Donahue

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I also am a co-host of the the podcast Test Tubes and Cauldrons, an intersection of science and spirituality. Find us here or anywhere you get podcasts:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG2s0Zf78zGLAOOg-u7GhUw

❧ HELPFUL YOUTUBE CHANNELS
• Aliakai: https: https://www.youtube.com/c/Aliakai/featured
• D. Asklepiades: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJxkvw66oynkclJ7QN4qpaQ

❧ GEAR
• Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k
• Panasonic Lumix G X Vario 12-35mm
• Edited in Premiere Pro

Hello and happy holidays this video was originally filmed before Christmas but uh life finds away and it’s not relevant to Christmas so just go ahead and watch and enjoy some FES Vibes in February bye anyway welcome back welcome to cooking the myths part two see here we’ve got a

Beautiful plate of offerings which I’ll talk about at the end of this video I began this recipe with the way that I begin every video the internet luckily many smarter people before me have uh delved into the world of ancient recipes that’s one thing that’s that’s nice about doing this

Particular video is that it’s uh you know cooking books are very plentiful it actually wasn’t super hard for me to look at recipes but one thing in particular that I wanted to focus on was not just recipes that people have gleaned from ancient Greece there’s an abundance of those just people talking

About they love to talk about the feasts that they had and often go into great detail well they go into great detail in certain ways that are helpful in other ways that are not but they went into great detail about the feast that they would have as they traveled so it’s not

That hard to find recipes but one thing that is a little bit harder to find is recipes that are also tied to religious aspects whether that’s for a specific Festival whether that’s a specific type of offering and that that was what I was focusing on here I’ll list all of my

Sources below there are quite a number of books that I was looking at here also as a note a lot of my recipes come from more of the helenistic period when they were much more into writing down recipes but there are some all of these have very classical elements so I also

Specifically wanted to do a five course meal so we have your appetizers or a super salad you have your main meal you have your dessert and you have your drink and I also specifically included an offering as uh one of those parts of the meal I looked

For the main course first because pretty much immediately I knew for super salad I was going to go with panspermia panspermia is the meal that Theus had when he returned to Athens the whole idea was that to honor Apollo that him and all of the men that all of the

Boys that he had rescued put all of their rations in a pot which naturally was beans a lots and loss with beans and they put them all in a pot and cooked them and this meal is celebrated uh once a year then I got to the hardest one to

Decide basically everything I had decided beforehand except for the main course you see a lot of these main courses were not just meat and I’m not a vegetarian but the meat that they would choose in some of these recipes are like just get a lamb’s head head if you can’t

Find a lamb’s head in the store go ask your local butcher I’m where I am that’s not going to be a thing maybe if I go home to uh rural PA Dutch land Pennsylvania I know I can find a B’s head down there uh but I can’t in New

England at least not very easily meal was also so expensive I I was also taking a risk cuz I didn’t know how all of the recipes were going to come out and I was cooking this not just for me but also for my roommate so took a very

Expensive gamble there and then the other things that I was looking at some of them were like have a hin bulb I don’t know if you know this hin bulbs are super toxic like they’re not going to kill you but they’re they’re going to make you ill this was apparently a huge

Thing and all of these recipes were like if the the hense tastes terrible just blanch it 500 times and it removes the bitter taste and cover it with honey and I was like I’m not I’m not interested in um in being the modern person to experiment with that meal I’m not a I’m

Not a professional chef if someone else out there who’s more inclined for cooking is willing to try some sort of highin bulb recipes and report back that’ be great but uh that’s not going to be me I was like I can’t I can’t find half of these things like and lamb is

Also not super common I only ever really eat lamb for Thanksgiving and I couldn’t really find any lamb also I don’t I don’t really like lamb I don’t I don’t I don’t really like the way it tastes so I was trying to find this blend of something that I

Could find the ingredients wasn’t going to kill me and uh was something that I I liked there was a lot a lot of fish recipes but unfortunately a lot of these fish recipes were for fish that I can’t get like swordfish which is a really common Mediterranean type of fish now I

Do work near an Italian Market again I’m I I was looking for something that cuz I was serving this for not just me but also someone else and I and I it was expensive so like I I wanted to make sure that I was at least going to be

Palatable here I wasn’t going to go I don’t really cook fish I only cook salmon so I wasn’t really going to learn a whole cooking method for this so what I ended up settling on was quite delicious I’ll taco a bit about that once I get to it but ended up selling on

Yellow gourd and date essentially date pesto now of course I don’t have access to um alexandrian yellow gourds so I did substitute with yellow squash that was a good equivalent for me so I went with that the recipe I looked at for this as a main dish was really small so I upped

It a lot so it’s a lot more squash then for the dessert I went with Honey Cakes now I’ll have to pester my roommate about where I got this recipe from because we came up with this for another ritual we did and I pulled from several different sources so this honey

Cake is delicious first of all and very easy to make second of all so I’m going to be covering that in a little bit and then for the drink I just went with wine and then for the offerings I with these peloi These are I’ll get there definitely offering food not say

Something I want to just eat all the time and then I also um I haven’t made it yet cuz I’m going to go out with a bang in this video and make some kikon kikon for those who don’t know uh there’s two different versions there’s ones that was generally served for the

Mysteries we think and one that was more like I almost said fantasy Gator it’s not a well I guess the iliad’s kind of a fantasy but yeah basically ancient Gatorade with a lot more um gross ingredients so I love to cook and I love adding every single kind of

Spice we have our own couple unique medieval spice blend so I love using those I just I just throw whatever spices in there now now for this I wanted to be very very conscious of trying to use only spices that the average Greek household would

Have had so that was something that I I was really trying to make sure of now I’m going to let shopping fell tell you a little bit about my shopping trip which I happened to do in the middle of a norer and I essentially had to caulk

My car and float it along the rivers aka the roads just for this now I a terrible Shopper uh that I it’s the ADHD if I don’t go in with the very precise list I’m going to be circling around I literally someone had an appointment somewhere and this appointment was

Probably going to take really long it took me a little bit longer to shop cuz I kept going around in circles you’ll see all right fell from a few weeks ago in the middle of a nor Easter wondering if you’re going to be able to get get home

Or have to Ford a river take it away trying to find dates I don’t even know where to look I’ve been over this whole store I know I’m not going to ask anyone for help that’s a quitter attitude I found a dried fruit section who knew but the dried fruit would being

Dried fruit hilariously I have like every spice that they can possibly ask for except for ASA which no one has I think you can only get that at like super specialty stores it’s not going to happen oh they’ve got soui that’s a unique spice maybe they do if

As but if not I’m not impressed the next thing I’m looking for is Pine kernels I think it’s pine nuts my friend that they’d be in like the generic International section uh so here we go I don’t even know what they look like would you leave me if I said I’m

Like the world’s most inefficient Shopper I’m in Circ I’m looking for multiple recipes for this and I’m only hunting for the one right now even though I’m going to have to go back around to places I already was was places I already were to where what is

The correct grammar of that anyway see what I said about inefficient shopping yeah so I’m me just kind of a circle back around oh the beans are here actually maybe I won’t have to circle around H I was already in the section though so don’t don’t be too proud of

Me oh my God they have barley I have been looking for barley for literally years I’m worried that they won’t have dried mint they’ll only have mint extract which I feel like it’s not the vibe we’re going for I had a mint plan did not survive the move not because I

Killed it because I left it behind that would be weird if they had things like I don’t know like really like anado but they didn’t have dried mint I actually don’t know if dried mint is a common spice fresh mint that’s what they sell they sell fresh mint I’m a genius let’s

Go back well genius is a interesting statement because I’m going back to where I was mint is also a double whammy for one of the recipes because I’m going to be making Kon which is a drink and it usually is Penny Royal which is in the mint family the penny Royal is an

Abortive fashion and there’s actually growing evidence that it might be toxic so we’re going to go with mint and not Penny Royal I found the mint I’m a genius I finally found wine I always look like a suspicious minor when I walk in there because I don’t know anything about

Alcohol so I got the one that was the least expensive of the Merlo’s why I got Mero simply cuz I like it I don’t know if it’s best for cooking Just when I thought I couldn’t find him but the sh Pine I have a bad feeling that this is going to end up being a little bit more expensive than I wanted so when do I start getting to write things off on my taxes for YouTube videos just asking for a Friend so the first recipe I did was pan spermia Which is served at the festival of P pepsia like like a bad helic polytheist anyway it’s like a feast founding day for Athens often times dedicated to uh dedicated to Apollo I don’t really celebrate it because I

Don’t focus on Athens necessarily and I I don’t really find most of the the rest of the festival that uh moving for me so uh things went arai quite quickly as you saw in the video I couldn’t find all the types of beans and I swear I left that store with dried split

Peas and I did not come home with them did they end up under my car seat did I leave them in the the basket and sacrifice it to the the Star Market Gods I don’t know I definitely bought it it made it to the register um so so that’s

Just a little bit of split pee money down the drain and then again I live near an Italian or I work near an Italian market so I could have gotten fava beans but the market was closed on the day that I was working and I’m going

To be honest I wasn’t about to drag this out another week just so I could go back to that specific market and I also wasn’t going to fight my City’s abysmal public transportation just to get uh one cup or even a/4 cup of these beans it

Ended up instead of being like a four bean soup which is what it’s supposed to be it ended up being like like a two bean soup so we had chickpeas and lentils and then I had lots of onions chopped lots of celery thir cup of olive oil and seven bayed

Leaves specifically because seven relates to Apollo and I had just made some wonderful vegetarian soup stock so that was in the meal as well yummy let me tell you but it was delicious yummy I did not know how it was going to come out especially since the garnishes were like vinegar and

Olive oil which I’ve never garnished a soup with that I usually Garden garnish a salad with that but it was it was freaking delicious so definitely uh let’s see when am I going to rate this Bean what Bean when I going to rate this

Soup I’m going to rate it um I’ll say 4 and2 out of five Pythagoras’s if you find that funny then you know pagas hates beans then the next recipe I did was from the uh the classical cookbook and this recipe was then updated on the British Museum’s website

This was squash and Marrow alexandrian style here it is from a uous uous gourd alexandrian fashion drain boiled gourd season with salt arrange in a dish crushed pepper cumin coriander seeds fresh mint asaeda root moisten with vinegar add kiota date Pine kernel Crush blend with honey vinegar fish

Sauce concentrated must and oil and pour the whole over the gourd when it has Bo boiled season with pepper and serve now as a note um I could not find as asaeda they recommended that you could replace it with with garlic and onion powder which is what I did pine nuts Pine

Kernels are pine nuts they’re super expensive but they’re very very good so I was able to get that any other there oh fish sauce they mean garam garam uh doesn’t really Max Miller from tasting history first of all having haven’t seen him highly recommend but he he did a whole

Video on garam you can’t really find garam proper anymore you usually have to like make it or some Italian Markets will say like anchovie sauce which is the most I would say modern equivalency of that so I just used regular old actually no I didn’t because I forgot it

I was supposed to get fish sauce and I forgot so I just added wor worser sauce because it has a similar level of like high salt quantity and I ended up adding also a pinch of soy sauce so those not the ACT I didn’t make a must a must just like

Reduced grape juice I didn’t make that because I frankly bought a bottle of wine and I was like I’m just going to use that I’m going to let cooking fell tell you a little bit about cooking here now they didn’t tell me how uh how hot

To the squash was boiled and you kind of reheat it in the oven and they didn’t tell you how to how much to reheat it like what temperature sew is a a lot of this is Vibes [Applause] based First Step was making the date sauce and soaking the dates and this proved to be harder than I thought because dates are kind of difficult to blend up and mash up but in the end we got there and the entire time I had no idea how

This was going to taste so I was just sort of going with it and and going with the vibes this recipe was both fairly simple and complicated complicated in the sense of I’d never made something like this before and simple as in its boiled squash and making a sort of date pesto for

M mhm isn’t that nice yeah yeah wow I don’t know what I was expecting it wasn’t that but it’s quite nice yeah and I was my brain could literally not comprehend the recipe I was like what is going on here let me tell you this was 10 out of 10

Absolutely freaking delicious I had zero idea what it was going to taste like because it had sweet it had salty it had cumin and coriander I literally no idea it could have tasted not very good but it not only did it taste good it tasted like my

Roommate and I still talk about this and this happened like a couple weeks ago I still dream about It now making it was a little bit difficult because the the recipe was like just use a mortar and pestl um I don’t know how big they thought my mortar and Pistol was but uh I ended up having to transfer everything into a blender because I I’m not that strong

First of all and I didn’t have this this bad boy and even if I did have this bad boy back then I don’t I don’t think uh those dates were going to be crushed up very easily I don’t have all day like they would have SE and a very important part

Of making this meal is in the middle of it just go to the Ballet oh god oh jeez for the third meal third of course which was our dessert we had Honey Cakes now these Honey Cakes were pulled from a couple of different recipes using partially a reci recipe for these guys over here these penois here and also using a recipe pulled from various more

Modern honey cake recipes there’s no yeast in it there’s no leavine agents in it at all in fact I think it’s like mostly honey it’s very flat type of cake and I think my issue this time around we did something wrong I think we didn’t

Have it hot enough I don’t think we left in the oven long enough something went a little wrong but it was still let me tell you absolutely delicious five out of five for this recipe even with some of the wonkiness that happened towards the end of the baking delicious and

Again made with all ingredients that they would have been able to have access to back then honey was seen as sacred and it’s especially sacred to demer and I just I just love using honey it’s one of my favorite things in ancient Greek like recipes is just add a little honey

On it call it an offering you’re all done now for the penois These Guys these sometimes if you look up ancient Greek honey cake this is what comes up they’re basically like like hard tack when you just have water and oil and flour it becomes so

Hard that’s one way of making like a type of papier-mâché very difficult to eat and hard attack is some type of thing that the sailors would eat and they would dip it in their beer they dip it in hot water to melt it or to loosen

It up and make it into like a thick stew I think my problem with panoy is I don’t roll them out thin enough I think that’s my main problem they might be more palatable if I rolled out the dough thin and you’re really supposed to roll it

Thin I just am not good at rolling things very very thin yeah the dough delicious the actual Result M I like my Kee oh and there’s a cat yeah even he’s not going to eat it it’s not that it’s bad it’s just not good do you mind s I’m literally in the middle middle okay they do they do the job I also like using these cuz uh I like to

Compost my offerings in these compost very nicely now kikon Kon was a drink consumed during the ucini Mysteries and was also consumed in The Iliad it long has myths surrounding it that some part of it was hallucinogenic and that’s what caused the Mysteries however most of the

Ingredients in kikon you have wine you have barley you have Penny Royal and cheese barley potentially might have had some sort of um what’s that called so there’s some concern around that but they wouldn’t always have barley in it some people have called it the ancient Greek smoothie I think that’s a kind

Word I’m going to go over to the table and make it now the stove I’ll see we on the I’ll see you on the other side here I have with my with my my barley the recipe that I’m looking at is like making it for more than one person but I’m going

To be honest I’m not going to sub I already promised my roommate that I was not going to subject them to the to this I’ve subjected them to Kon before for for ritual purposes and I’m not going to do that here today this one calls for 3/4

Cup that’s insane I didn’t cut this very well F it’s got Bly everywhere the corn Rigs and the B all right okay the last thing well with all the alcohol eventually it won’t taste so bad hello it’s editing Fel from the future of this video and the very near past as you are watching this here so I finished editing it and realized I never gave a

Conclusion of my final thoughts to be honest I did not cook this all in one night as you can tell by the fact I went to The Nutcracker in the middle of it so I didn’t cook it all in one night I’m not sure I’m I’m not sure how it all

Would have gone together as a meal but it was fun to do these recipes it was a little bit more expensive than I usually like to cook there are definitely several takeaways loved the the squash with the date sauce I probably would have made Those portions a lot

Bigger and the paneria was good I can’t believe I even up until like just a couple days ago I thought that I had purchased split peas when I in fact had not purchased split peas so I’d like to try it again with the actual proper beans in it but it was still delicious

Either way uh Honey Cakes I still need to figure out what went wrong with the Honey Cakes cuz this you know they’re they’re kind of weird and which sometimes they’re Hit or Miss they were tasted good they just kind of looked weird the peloi again I feel like I just

Need to roll them thinner and maybe that will make them a little bit more like communion Wafers where like you know they’re not good but they’re they’re not something that you’re going to literally chew on and break your teeth uh kikon it’s a ritual drink that’s pretty much

All there is to it yeah so let me know what you thought in the comments is there any meal that you’re going to try have you tried making ancient Creek recipes before and thanks so much for your patience this video was a blast to make but it took me forever and I look

Forward to seeing y’all in the next one and now it’s time for my patrons shout out to $5 and uptier Annie Nagle grumpy Grandpa aada hakubi tanith a little bay leaf a narco witch Brook smooy Charles Schneider Ember Kelly and Tiny atas