La littérature gourmande : Un signe de révolution culinaire?

Abstract

Modern scholarship often claims that ancient Greeks possessed “haute cuisine”. A survey of the vocabulary used in literature from the Archaic to the Early Hellenistic eras suggests that cooking was a marginal subject. Despite this, literary genres such as philosophy and comedy give the impression that cuisine had some importance in Greece. But one has to admit that there is a discrepancy between descriptions of Greek cuisine and reality. “Cookery books” (Opsartutika) are mentioned in Greek literature but often seem to be linked to a literature of entertainment. There is very little evidence of actual “cookbooks” of the kind we might think of as such in ancient Greece.