Fish sauce and fast days

The rules were set by the church and kept by monks most strictly, and the monastic foundation charters, the typika, are the most detailed evidence for how they worked. A typikon set out what the monks ate on every day of the year. On ordinary days there were two meals, of bread with a cooked dish of pulses or vegetables, cheese, eggs or fish, and a measured cup of wine. On fast days there was one, without the cheese and the eggs. On the strictest days of Lent there was dry eating, xerophagia, of bread, raw vegetables, fruit and water, sometimes only after the ninth hour.

Lay people kept a lighter version, and how strictly depended on piety, rank and money. A great household could keep Lent in comfort on fine fish, oysters and wine from the islands, while a poor one kept it on beans and bread without much noticing the difference from the rest of the year. But the pattern was the same for everyone. Meat was for the feasts, especially Easter, when the end of Lent was celebrated with lamb, and for the days in between. For a large part of the year the protein on the plate came from fish, beans, lentils and chickpeas.

Fish counted differently in different rules. Some typika allowed it on lesser fast days, others only on great feasts that fell in Lent. Shellfish and octopus, having no blood, were often allowed when fish was not, and so was caviar. The rules produced an inventive Lenten cooking that the Orthodox world still keeps.

The dead were fed too. Kollyba, boiled wheat with nuts, pomegranate seeds and honey or sugar, was made for memorial services and shared out at the church. It still is.

Constantinople was well placed for a cuisine of fish. Every year shoals of tuna, bonito and mackerel moved between the Black Sea and the Aegean through the Bosphorus, past the city walls. The Byzantines caught them with nets and fixed traps, salted and dried what they could not sell fresh, and ate fish in quantities that impressed every visitor.

Fish sauce went into everything. It was the old garum of Rome, garos in Greek, made by layering small fish and fish entrails with salt and leaving them in the sun for weeks until they turned to liquid. The Geoponika, a tenth-century collection of farming advice compiled at the court of Constantine VII, gives the recipe. Liudprand found it disgusting. To a Byzantine it was salt, and a good one.

Vegetables came from inside the walls. Constantinople’s land walls enclosed large areas of gardens and orchards, and Johannes Koder, who studied the vegetables named in Byzantine texts, found cabbage, leeks, onions, garlic, lettuce, cucumbers, gourds, beets and a long list of herbs among them. Cheese came in from the countryside, much of it from the shepherds of the Balkans. Wine was resinated, as Liudprand noticed. Resin was used to seal and preserve wine in its jars, and many Byzantines liked the taste it left.

The capital had to be fed whatever the season, and the state left as little as possible to chance. The Book of the Eparch, a set of rules for the guilds of Constantinople issued in the reign of Leo VI about 912, is the best record of how.

It has separate chapters for the grocers, the butchers, the pork dealers, the fishmongers, the bakers and the innkeepers, and it regulated all of them closely. Butchers had to buy their sheep at a set market and could not go out to meet the flocks on the road to buy them cheap. The pork dealers had their own market at the Forum of the Tauros. Fishmongers bought from the boats and sold at prices the eparch’s officials checked. Innkeepers had to close at night and put out their fires, so that drunken customers did not cause trouble after dark.

The bakers got special treatment. They and their animals were exempted from public burdens, so that nothing would interrupt the bread. The eparch fixed the price of a loaf, and a baker who sold short weight could be flogged, shaved and expelled from the guild. How the city got its grain in the first place, from Egypt until 618 and after that from Thrace and Asia Minor, is told on the page on the city.

Away from the capital the diet was simpler and the fasting calendar mattered less, because meat was a rarity anyway. Michael Decker’s study of farming in the late Roman east describes the basis of it. Wheat where it would grow and barley where it would not, olives and vines on the slopes, pulses in rotation, a few sheep and goats on the hills, and pigs fed in the oak woods. Bread was the meal, with olive oil, onions, cheese and whatever the garden gave, and wine was drunk by almost everyone, usually watered.

The army needed bread that kept. The Strategikon, the field manual written under the emperor Maurice about 600, tells each soldier to carry several days’ supply of twice-baked biscuit in his saddlebags, since an army that had to stop and bake could not move fast, and a column on the march could not count on the country it passed through. The biscuit was called boukellaton, from the Latin, and later paximadion. Greek bakers still sell paximadi, the hard rusk that is soaked in water or oil before it is eaten, and Cretan shepherds still carry it.

A hungry army foraging was as dangerous to its own side’s farmers as to the enemy’s. Feeding soldiers from stores, and keeping them out of the farmers’ fields, was a constant concern of Byzantine military writers, and it was part of how Byzantium held its frontier provinces through centuries of raiding, and the system that grew out of that is on the page on the themes.

At the top the meal was a ceremony. The Kletorologion of Philotheos, written in 899, is a guide to who sat where at the imperial banquets, and it ranks every official in the empire by his place at the table. The great dinners were held in the Hall of the Nineteen Couches in the Great Palace, where into the tenth century the emperor and his chief guests still reclined to eat in the Roman way.

Liudprand’s dinners were at the other end of the scale of honour. He sat fifteenth from the emperor without a tablecloth, and he took it as a deliberate insult, which it was. Seating at a Byzantine dinner said exactly what the emperor thought of a guest’s master. Liudprand’s account of the goat is quoted at the foot of the page.

The palace also gave the West the fork. In 1004 Maria Argyropoulaina, a sister of the future emperor Romanos III, married the son of the doge of Venice and went to live there. According to Peter Damian, writing later in the century, she would not touch her food with her fingers but had it cut up by her eunuchs and ate it with a little two-pronged golden fork. He thought it a sign of a vanity that God punished, and her death a couple of years later confirmed it to him. Forks had long been part of a rich Byzantine table. It took Italy several centuries to come round to them.

Byzantine dietary medicine travelled further than Byzantine forks. In the early sixth century a Greek physician called Anthimus, who had left Constantinople after some political trouble, served at the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic in Italy and wrote a little book on diet in Latin for Theuderic, king of the Franks.

It is one of the earliest cookbooks of medieval Europe, and it is a Byzantine one. Anthimus tells the Franks how to cook beef so that it digests, how to make a sauce with honey, vinegar and pepper, which fish are good and which are not. He is also tactful. He knows the Franks like their bacon raw, and he does not scold them for it.

Food became theology in the eleventh century. The Greek church used leavened bread in the Eucharist and the Latin church unleavened, and for centuries nobody made much of it. In 1053 Leo, archbishop of Ohrid, wrote a letter attacking the Latin use of unleavened bread, azymes, as a Jewish practice. The pope’s legate Humbert replied in kind, and the argument over bread became one of the points that hardened the break of 1054.

Leavened bread was not a detail to the Greeks. The yeast stood for the living soul, and bread without it, they argued, was dead. Popular Byzantine polemic began to call the Latins azymites, the people of the unleavened. How that quarrel ended in a divided church is told on the page on 1054.

The best Byzantine food writing is comic. The so-called Ptochoprodromic poems, written in the vernacular Greek of the twelfth century and attributed to Theodore Prodromos, are begging poems addressed to the emperor, and they are about being hungry. In one a scholar complains that learning has left him starving while the craftsman next door eats well. In another a young monk describes the abbots eating fish and drinking good wine while the brothers get thin bean soup.

Under the jokes are the foods of twelfth-century Constantinople, named one after another with a hungry man’s precision. Salt fish, cheese, cabbage stews, mullet, sardines, caviar, chickpeas and wine from the islands. Andrew Dalby’s two books on Byzantine food lean on them heavily, and with reason. Nothing else from Byzantium reads so much like a menu.