Siren Feasts

A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece

By Andrew Dalby

1995

First Published

4.18

Average Rating

336

Number of Pages

10H15M

Audio Length

Cheese, wine, honey & olive oil—4 of Greece's best known contributions to culinary culture—were well known 4000 years ago. Remains of honeycombs & of cheeses have been found under the volcanic ash of the Santorini eruption of 1627 BCE. Over the millennia, Greek food diversified & absorbed neighboring traditions, yet retained its own distinctive character. In Siren Feasts, Andrew Dalby provides the 1st serious social history of Greek food. He begins with the tunny fishers of the neolithic age, & traces the story thru the repertoire of classical Greece, the reputations of Lydia for luxury & of Sicily & S. Italy for sybaritism, to the Imperial synthesis of varying traditions, with a look forward to the Byzantine cuisine & the development of the modern Greek menu. The apples of the Hesperides turn out to be lemons. Great favor attaches to Byzantine biscuits. Fully documented & comprehensively illustrated, scholarly yet readable, Siren Feasts demonstrates the social construction placed upon different types of food at different periods (was fish a luxury in classical Athens, tho disdained by Homeric heroes?). It places diet in an economic & agricultural context; & provides a history of mentalities in relation to a subject which no one can ignore.

Avg Rating

4.18

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

42%

4 STARS

36%

3 STARS

18%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Andrew Dalby

Author · 13 books

Andrew Dalby (born Liverpool, 1947) is an English linguist, translator and historian who most often writes about food history. Dalby studied at the Bristol Grammar School, where he learned some Latin, French and Greek; then at the University of Cambridge. There he studied Latin and Greek at first, afterwards Romance languages and linguistics. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970. Dalby then worked for fifteen years at Cambridge University Library, eventually specializing in Southern Asia. He gained familiarity with some other languages because of his work there, where he had to work with foreign serials and afterwards with South and Southeast Asian materials. In 1982 and 1983 he collaborated with Sao Saimong in cataloguing the Scott Collection of manuscripts and documents from Burma (especially the Shan States) and Indochina; He was later to publish a short biography of the colonial civil servant and explorer J. G. Scott, who formed the collection.[1] To help him with this task, he took classes in Cambridge again in Sanskrit, Hindi and Pali and in London in Burmese and Thai.