Mithaikos and Other Greek Cooks

Shaun Hill & John Wilkins (1996)

From Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food in Antiquity - Cooks and Other People 1995 pp. 144-8.

The gastronomy of the Greeks has been studied recently by Andrew Dalby (1994: chapters 5 and 6) in his work on eating in Greek society. On this topic he looks at the quality of wine, quality in food, and 'influences from the periphery', the Lydians of Asia Minor and the Greek cities of Sicily. Moving to literature, he cites the cookbooks of Mithaikos and Glaukos of Lokri, and then the gastronomic poetry of the fourth century BC, which appeared in the form of lyric, comic iambic and the epic verse of Archestratus. In this paper we consider this material from different perspectives, with particular reference to the cookbook of Mithaikos which was written around 400 BC. His influence in antiquity appears to have been extensive, but what we know about him is minimal. General issues arising from the gap between these two statements are instructive. In case we may be thought perverse in our choice of cook, we hasten to point out that no more is known about any other ancient chef. We thus propose a way of recovering the famous cooks of antiquity.

'Gastronomy' can be an imprecise term. Dalby covers a time span of several centuries and a large number of independent states. He understands gastronomy as eating at a level well above basic subsistence, at a level of luxury where both choice and quality production are available, and where foreign influence is felt. People are not ‘just eating', they are eating thoughtfully and probably with an element of social competition. But these conditions obtained in aristocratic city states for some centuries before the cookbook of Mithaikos appeared. Aristocratic men reinforced their social position by eating and drinking with their friends, presumably using the best materials for foods and tableware and furniture that they could afford. Named wines are cited in poetry of the seventh century BC, the luxury of the Lydians in the sixth. Is all this gastronomy? Or is it the standard behaviour of a social elite which marks out its superiority with social ritual and displays? Can the case be sufficiently demonstrated? If the evidence did exist, would it actually add up to'gastronomy'? We are told, for example, of the fine wines and the fine cuisine of Chios. Prima facie a good case. But how to demonstrate it, particularly in the badly documented period before Mithaikos? Certain conditions must be met before it will be possible for a 'cuisine' or an influential cook to emerge. One set of such conditions is set out by Goody (1982). In Chapter 4¹ of his book on food and eating in West Africa, he looks at why cuisine and elaborate foods emerge in some cultures and not others. Comparing the 'simple cuisine' of Gonja in Ghana with Egypt, China and Europe, Goody argues that essential elements for the development of a 'high' culinary culture are (1) availability of a number of ingredients, some imported, together with a wide variety of recipes, (2) demand from critical eaters, (3) the association of pleasure with eating, (4) developments in agriculture and commerce. He also stresses the importance of intensive agriculture, writing, and especially a hierarchical structure of society in which cooking for the rulers and the rich is transferred from the hands of women to men.

Of these criteria, Dalby's picture for the early period before Mithaikos meets 1 (but without the recipes) and perhaps 4, but 2 and 3 would be harder to show. Only some of the conditions for 'gastronomy' or 'cuisine' are met. We believe that Sicily and southern Italy from the late fifth century BC probably meet all these criteria. Concentration on this region will also allow us to narrow the geographical area under consideration. Sicily and southern Italy fit Goody's criteria well. Here was some of the most fertile agricultural land known to the Greeks; the fishing grounds were good too.² There were large and flourishing cities, some of them of fabulous wealth - Taranto, Agrigento, Syracuse, Gela - and they traded with the Greek mainland and the eastern Mediterranean.³ Recipe-writing could be brought to a region whose wealth had been legendary over several centuries, in particular in the case of the city of Sybaris which was sacked in 511 BC. One wealthy citizen, Smindyrides, son of Hippocrates, who, according to Herodotus 6.127, took luxury to unparalleled lengths, is reported⁴ to have entered the race for the hand of an aristocratic bride on the Greek mainland and to have taken with him to impress the family 1000 cooks, wild-fowlers and fishermen. Wealth, luxury, aristocratic competition and display: but this does not constitute cuisine or gastronomy.⁵ There are (unreliable) reports of the patenting of recipes in Sybaris - indicating a competitive approach to cooking - and the piping of wines.⁶ It is in this rich region, a century later, that the earliest - known recipes in Europe were written, in Syracuse. For some 150 years before Mithaikos, Sicilian poets had written about food⁷ - the interest was there - but not in the form of recipes. The book of Mithaikos appeared precisely at the moment when prose treatises on various sciences and crafts were beginning to evolve, in medicine, science, botany, biology, horsemanship and many other areas. This is crucial. With the development of the treatise, the recipe could be invented, on the pattern of medical recipes for various disorders in Hippocrates or veterinary recipes for dealing with horses. The form of the writing makes a huge difference.

On other criteria in Goody, pleasure⁸ and luxury were already associated with dining by this date,⁹ and philosophers were preparing moral attacks against it.¹⁰ By the time of the presumed date of Mithaikos' book (400 BC), the preparation of prestigious food was entirely in the hands of men.¹¹

It might be objected that there are better criteria to be used that those proposed by Goody. But Goody is valuable for our purposes because his scheme can be applied across cultures without value judgements of what is better and what is worse.¹² He enables us to define our terms and draw lines between what is 'high cuisine' and what is not. We therefore exclude all those good cooks of antiquity, male and female, who influenced those around them and passed on recipes by word of mouth, perhaps from mother to daughter. These cooks may have developed new techniques, but they are excluded because their names have not entered the historical record, and in this sense their recipes have not been influential on haute cuisine. If Mathaikos had lived a hundred years earlier, when there was no demand or format for the writing of a recipe book, then he too could in theory have cooked the same dishes but not have been heard beyond his circle of employment and acquaintance, and not qualified for Goody's criteria.

Plato, in his dialogue Gorgias writes [518bl, 'if I asked who were good at caring for the body [as opposed to the mind and spirit] you would say in all seriousness Thearion the baker and Mithaikos who wrote the Sicilian cookery book and Sarambos the merchant have become fabulous carers of the body, the one preparing fabulous loaves, the second delicate dishes, the third wine.'¹³ This passage describes a culture of food provision in which bread can be brought from a baker (obviating the need for home baking), wine from a merchant instead of direct from the farm, and recipes can be read. Plato does not approve, This disapproval is echoed in his Republic, where he dismisses the 'Syracusan table' and the 'Sicilian elaboration of delicate dishes' (404d). At 373c, 'cooks and makers of delicacies' are in the category of the luxurious.

The sage of Athens does not approve. Instead of the simple old-fashioned preparation of food at home, there are now enterprises set up to market bread and wine. Worse, there is this Sicilian cookery book. How does he know about it? If it is circulating in Athens, then it is influential indeed. If Plato came across it on a visit to Sicily, as Aelius Aristeides surmises, then he has been drawn to the luxurious world of the Western Greek tyrants which gave birth to the work.¹⁴

Perhaps we should not take Plato too seriously, perhaps he has just flipped with puritanical horror at this outrage to the ascetic life of the philosopher.¹⁵ Let us examine Mithaikos in the context of Goody's categories.

All that remains of the cookery book is three notes in Athenaeus.¹⁶

Fragment I (7.282a): 'Mithaikos mentions the alphestes (wrasse?)¹⁷ in his cookery book’.

Fragment 2 (7.325a): 'Mithaikos in his cookery book says 'gut the ribbon-fish, cut the head off, wash it and cut it into slices and pour on cheese and oil'.'

Fragment 3 (12.516c): 'The Lydians were the first to invent karuke, on the preparation of which the composers of cookery books have pronounced, Glaukos of Lokri, Mithaikos, Dionysios, the two Herakleides of Syracusan descent, Agis, Epainetos, Dionysios, Hegesippos, Erasistratos, Euthydemos and Krito, and in addition Stephanos, Archtas, Akestios, Akesias, Diokles, Philistion'.¹⁸

On these fragments we note:

(1) Fine fish were the main component of haute cuisine at this time. They were plentiful off the coasts of Sicily.¹⁹ Meat was classified as festive but often not suitable for haute cuisine.

(2) Clear, practical instructions resemble those of Archestratus,²⁰ but the Sicilian taste for cheese with fish was rejected by the later author.

(3) Karuke was a famous sauce, originally from Lydia in western Asia Minor.²¹ The book of Mithaikos clearly extended to more traditions than the Sicilian, and even to a tradition with a meat-based speciality. Some on this list - Diokles certainly - were doctors advising on diet. Sauces were often associated with luxury, as in other cultures. The cooking of Mithaikos could thus be described as 'luxurious' on two counts, the use of whole fish (the wrasse) and sauces.

Of the form of the book, we should note that it is in prose (and therefore closer to a practical treatise than the poem of Archestratus mentioned below) and (to judge from fragment 2) in the Doric dialect spoken in Sicily and the Peloponnese. It was not in the influential Attic dialect.²² There are clear and practical instructions, with no ornamentation, not indeed any boastful claims.

The influence of Mithaikos-beyond Plato.

The next Sicilian writer was Archestratus. We have less reason to call him a chef, for he wrote in epic verse rather than prose and seems to give a gourmet guide for the discerning palate based on product and place more than recipe. When he does give recipes they are simple and elegant treatments of the best products. He censures his predecessors for using cheese sauces (Archestratus fr. 45). From the second fragment, it is plain that he has Mithaikos in mind. Mithaikos is the earliest of many Sicilian and south Italian cooks. Among his successors were (from fragment 3 above) Glaukos of Lokri, the two Herakleides from Syracuse, Hegesippos of Tarentum.

After Mithaikos, the gourmet chef, particularly the Sicilian chef, became a stock figure in Athenian comedy.²³ This implies, unless comedy existed in a purely literary world divorced from reality (this we deny), that Mithaikos contributed to a large social development, the hiring of speciality chefs for private dinner parties. If he made no contribution whatsoever (the minimalist position), he nevertheless wrote his cookery book at precisely the time that such chefs are first mentioned. Plato implies that he was of note on the Greek mainland, in towns, Athens in particular, who were receptive to outside influence.

The demand for hired chefs at private parties reflects a social development in the fourth century BC as important for our argument as the appearance of the treatise-format. The rich elite in Athens (in particular) and other towns over several decades moved towards greater privacy, towards the concerns of their friends and families rather than the concerns of the community. This change of emphasis was probably felt in dining, as home entertainment was undertaken on a scale not seen before. People still ate at civic and religious functions, but we hear much more of private meals than in the fifth century BC. To reflect this new emphasis and new style, the chef was hired to lay on something special. This increased the demand for novelty and new recipes, and was the motor behind the popularity of the newly-discovered form of the recipe book.

Goody had something to say of Greco-Roman culture in his chapter but confines himself to Athenaeus and Apicius, familiar names at these meetings, but neither of them a cook. The book that carries the name of Apicius was not written by him,²⁴ nor did he cook any of the recipes, in all probability. The collection is named after one, two or three gourmets of that name who travelled the world in search of expensive and rare treats. Apicius and his/their compiler attest a cuisine based on spices and exotic products such as flamingos. Athenaeus, in his turn, attests a society in Greece and Rome in which the luxurious banquet provided the demand for the inventive chef and his recipes.²⁵ In a literary way, he gives ample evidence for the importance of the chef as cook and performer in the banquets of Greece and Rome. His interest extends to cookery books, but rarely to the extent that he preserves much of them. It is possible that when he does quote from them, it is only at second hand. We would class Athenacus and Apicius / the Apicii / the compiler(s) of 'Apicius' as consumers rather than preparers or producers of food, whereas Mithaikos we consider a more suitable subject for the present enquiry. Archestratus seems to belong somewhere in between.

If Mithaikos was so important, why does so little of his book survive - three fragments in the text of Athenaeus? Cookbooks can be influential in what they inspire, and ephemeral in themselves. They are a form of treatise that the author thinks worth writing, but that people do not keep in the long term. In the second century AD, Aelius Aristeides was wondering how Plato came to see a copy - was it in Athens or was it during his first trip to Sicily? We should note that nearly all the cookery books cited by Athenaeus do not survive and had probably not survived to his day (they were perhaps not thought worthy to have a place in the great library collections). Recipes in verse fared better, and that is why Athenaeus saw a copy of Archestratus and Matro's Attic Dinner, but even the latter is cited as a rarity.

Another rhetorical author of late antiquity, Maximus of Tyre, mentions Mithaikos²⁶ as the Syracusan master chef²⁷ who went to Sparta and was told to leave for cities elsewhere in Greece. The story may well be apocryphal, but reflects broad knowledge of the name as a cook of influence.

We believe he is important, both in the ways we have set out, and also because he is at the head of the Sicilian / southern Italian tradition which formed the backbone of ancient haute cuisine as far as we can tell, at least in the two metropoleis in which it was first mocked, Athens and Rome. There were other influences, but this is the influence.

We live in a time when the printed and electronic media exert enormous influence on cooking of every kind. What of a period (and this covers most of human history in most cultures) without such media? Influence depends on royal or other patronage: a cook could never have the power to be an independent agent. Quality of work could rarely carry the day. Ancient Greece is a little different. There was the written word to a limited extent. But who does the writing? And who does the cooking? And who influences what is on the plate?

REFERENCES

1 'The high and the low: culinary culture in Asia and Europe'.

2 Fertile agriculture: Lombardo (1995) 267, Diodorus Siculus 12.9, Strabo 6.2.7, Varro 1.44.2; good fishing: Athenaeus Depnosophistae 12.518e (quoting Clearchus of Soli) 'famous for luxury were the tables of the Sicilians also. They claim that the sea off their shores is sweet, such pleasure do they take in the foods produced from it'. See note 19.

3 There was also political instability - the overthrow of Sybaris in the sixth century BC, warring tyrants, a democratic interlude in Syracuse, wars with the Carthaginians.

4 By Chamaiieon of Pontos in Athenaeus 6.273b-c; cf, Lombardo (1995) 267.

5 The Persian king brought many bakers and special chefs with him on his invasion of Greece in 480BC, but this was royal provisioning, not gastronomy: Herodotus 9.82.

6 A year's patent on a recipe and tax exemption for eel sellers, Athenaeus 12.521d; wine pipelines Athenaeus 12.519d. See Lombardo (1995) 267-9.

7 Dalby (1994) 108-10, Wilkins and Hill (1995) 430-1.

8 We discuss pleasure in our edition of Archestratus (1994) 25-8.

9 In his description of the luxurious dry, Plato (Republic 373b-c) lists among many other things dining couches, dining tables, delicate dishes, myrrh, incense, party girls, cakes, chefs, cooks and swineherds.

1O Wilkins has argued (1996a) that the concept of luxury in ancient dining (and more widely) was seen as a dust to a well-ordered male society built on restraint and traditional values. This conformed with ancient notions of restraining appetites, particularly of people seen as a threat, women, slaves and men who were insufficiently masculine. Athenaeus in Book 12 has examples of cities brought low by men who lived too softly and had too little body hair.

11 See Wilkins (1996b).

12 Athenians did not produce cookery books at c. 400 BC and freely judged adversely those who did.

13 Dalby points out (1994: 111) that Plato mentions the Greek triad of cereal, protein and wine. This may imply that Mithaikos'book was principally concerned with fish, the most favoured protein-delicacy; but it may simply reflect Plato's elegant composition.

14 Athens, with her democracy and comparatively simple cuisine, was a fine producer of philosophers and tragic poets, but they showed much interest in the courts of the tyrants in Syracuse (Aeschylus and Plato) and Macedonia (Euripides and Aristotle).

15 Plato, incidentally, shows few signs of living such an ascetic life.

16 Their context in Athenaeus is discussed in Wilkins and Hill (1995).

17 Neither the alphestes nor the tainia (ribbon fish) is securely identified: see D'Arcy Thompson (1947) 10-11 and 258.

18 Some of these names appear only here. Pollux gives a rather different list of ancient chefs - he is not picking out karuke recipes - at Onomastikon 6.71.

19 See Epicharmus' comedy The Marriage of Hebe which celebrates dozens of fish in a glorious wedding banquet (early fifth century BC), and Archestratus, fragments 8, 11, 16, 19, 24, 34, 38, 40, 51.

20 Whom we cite because there are far more fragments extant.

21 Ingredients, according to Hegesippus of Tarentum: meat, breadcrumbs, cheese, anise and fat meat stock.

22 We can probably discount forgery, a problem considered seriously by Dalby (1994) 112. If fragment 2 were a forgery, we might disbelieve also Athenaeus' citadon of Mithaikos in fragment 3. If these were to prove two forgeries, then Mithaikos' reputation remains strong (he is worth forging) but what little remains of his work is misleading.

23 Mithaikos himself is mentioned only once in Athenian comedy, in a fragment of unknown date and author (Adespota 374 Kock).

24 The Apicii we know of date from the first century BC and the first AD. The book we have is a compilation probably of the fourth century AD.

25 He writes in the early third century AD.

26 Dissertationes 17.1.

27 Maxirnus describes Mithaikos as a great sophist or philosopher. The same term is used of a chef from comedy adduced by a chef in Athenaeus at 9.376e-380c, especially 377f. Maximus also compares Mithaikos, famous in Greece for his cooking, with Pheidias, famous in Greece for his sculpture (eg. Athena in the Parthenon).

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