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Tastes of Byzantium book cover
Tastes of Byzantium
The Cuisine of a Legendary Empire
2003
First Published
3.83
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages
For centuries the food and culinary delights of the Byzantine empire—centred on Constantinople—have captivated the west, although it appeared that very little information had been passed down to us. Andrew Dalby's Tastes of Byzantium now reveals in astonishing detail, for the first time, what was eaten in the court of the Eastern Roman Empire—and how it was cooked. Fusing the spices of the Romans with the seafood and simple local food of the Aegean and Greek world, the cuisine of the Byzantines was unique and a precursor to much of the food of modern Turkey and Greece. Bringing this vanished cuisine to life in vivid and sensual detail, Dalby describes the sights and smells of Constantinople and its marketplaces, relates travellers' tales and paints a comprehensive picture of the recipes and customs of the empire and their relationship to health and the seasons, love and medicine. For food-lovers and historians alike, Tastes of Byzantium is both essential and riveting—an extraordinary illumination of everyday life in the Byzantine world.
Avg Rating
3.83
Number of Ratings
89
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Andrew Dalby
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.

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