| Divine Confections Long before the arrival of refined sugar,the ancient Greeks were using honey in the kitchen to add a touch of sweetness to all manner of cakes and culinary delights Athens News SUGAR, as we know it today, was not enjoyed by our ancestors. There was fruit, of course, but the traditional sweetener used in ancient Greek kitchens was honey. Even today, in some parts of the world, the product of the beehive is still the major sweetener for a few tribes of hunter-gatherers. In countries where the vine grows, grape sugar in the form of grape juice was often consumed, at times concentrated into what the Greeks now call petimezi – a kind of must syrup. A jar with the inscription “unfermented grape juice” was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt. The Egyptians, who chewed parts of the papyrus plants abundant in the Nile Delta, might also have extracted a sweet juice from them, but we don’t know enough about this to say so with confidence. Another source might have been carobs. Sugar was a later development, being used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in medicinal preparations, something that continued through to the age of Pliny or the first century AD. It is this usage that has given the sugar cane plant the name saccharum officinarum. Sugar was far too expensive at the beginning to be used in the preparation of foods. Some of the earliest traditional sweets we know about were what the ancient Greeks called melitomata or melipecta, which was basically honey-cakes. The Romans called the same sweet panis mellitus, consisting of flour (frequently sesame flour) and a variety of other ingredients. In this case honey was poured over the cake at the end, a kind of melomakarono, or honey-macaroon, nowadays traditionally prepared around Christmas time. Apicius appears to have been famous for his cakes, many of which were named after him, but there is little evidence of them in his surviving book. Later the same preparation came to be known as “spice-bread” and “ginger-bread” in English, attested to in Chaucer’s “roial spicerye and Gyngebreed.” This was the same as the French pain d’epices made out of breadcrumbs, honey, spices and saffron, according to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat – no doubt to give it a yellow hue, which was considered then, no less than now, an elegant and appetizing colour. The ancient Greeks had numerous cakes and similar confections, which were apparently described in the third chapter of the book Articles Pertaining to Ceremonial written by Aristomenes of Athens (a work that is now unfortunately lost). They used the name plakous (plural plakountes) for a large variety of “flat cakes” which is the meaning of the Greek word. Many of these were fairly elaborate and considered good enough to be offered to the grateful dead. From poets as early as Stesichorus and Ibycus of the 6th century BC and in the poem ‘The Games’, “sesame cakes, oil-and-honey cakes, and other sweet cakes” are mentioned. Anexandrides, a 4th century BC writer of the Middle Comedy period, in his play Protesilaus, where he is ridiculing the symposium of Iphicrates, mentions “visions of tender-flaked barley cakes”, “fine meal cakes” and “milk-cakes”. Callimachus wrote about books on cake-making by Aegimius, Hegesippus, Metrobius and Phaestus. And Matron of Pitane, the 4th century BC writer of parodies, in his ‘Attic Dinner’shows the narrator of the poem stuffed to the point of bursting, Aside from plakountes, the Greeks also made and offered kollyvos to their gods. The word derives from kollyvos, a small coin. The plural kollyva was originally applied to the small round cakes, probably offered to the dead together with melikreton, a potion made of milk and honey, used as libations to the shadows of the nether world. Later the word in the plural came to refer to wheat grains boiled with pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, almonds and walnuts. These mildly sweet offerings, were associated with the perideipna and nekrodeipna of the ancients, the dinners eaten on the grave to honour and celebrate the dead. The Greek Orthodox Church has continued this five-thousand year-old custom by including it in their religious rituals. Recipes
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