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Foods and Culinary Utensils
of the Ancients
Compiled from standard historical works by Charles Martyn.
Published by
THE CATERER PUBLISHING CO.,
New York
CONTENTS.
| Page. | |
| "In the beginning"—The coming of the nations | 3 |
| Assyria and the other kingdoms of the "tawny men" | 9 |
| Egypt and the Egyptians | 13 |
| The "vegetable kingdom" of Ancient Egypt | 25 |
| Greece before the age of luxury | 30 |
| Rome in the days of her greatest prosperity | 39 |
| The ancient Jews | 49 |
| The Chinese | 60 |
IN THE BEGINNING.
The influence exerted by different foods over the physical and mentalfaculties of mankind is so marked as to verify the famous pun of thephilosophic Feuerbach, "Der Mensch ist was er isst" (Man is what heeats). The advance of civilization has always been accompanied by anincreased knowledge of culinary matters, until cooking has become ascience and its various forms great in number. So in tracing back thehistory of foods, culinary utensils and their uses, we of necessitytrace back the history of the world.
It is of course impossible at this late date to determine what was thefirst food of primeval man; ignorant as we are of even the approximatedate of his first appearance and of the manner and means of thatappearance.
But it is worthy of note that if he had not been endowed with anintelligence superior to that of the other inhabitants of the globe, hisexistence here would have been very brief. Nature provided him with abody which, in those days, was well nigh useless. His prehensile organs,his teeth, jaws, feet and nails, did not fit him for overcoming any ofthe difficulties entailed by the adoption of most foods prepared bynature. He could not tear his prey conveniently nor crack many nuts, norgrub roots, nor graze. His digestive viscera were in the middle age t