Origin of greek food?!
Answers: Please, is there a book that tells origin of greek food? [ancient or Turkish?} Thx!
"Greek Meat" by Paula Holes has 1200 greek recipes in it, and depicts the historical attributes of Food in Greece.
Origins of Greek cusine:
As any of the latest naval stand offs between Turks and Greeks in the Aegean shows, the Greeks are not much amenable to the idea that their food might be indebted to Turkish cooking. It is commonplace for Greek food writers to introduce Greek cuisine as one “shaped through over 3,000 years of history.”
The sumptuous feasts described by Homer or Plato and menus from Athenaeus--all this will be described as part of the Greek culinary heritage. Sometimes it can get rather silly, such as the comment of one writer that “When you start your day with rolls and coffee, you are following an ancient Greek custom.”
One Greek writer went so far as to state that Greek cuisine is twenty-five centuries old and is the ur-cuisine that the Turks, Italians, and other Europeans borrowed from, not the other way around.
Nicolas Tselementes was a noted Greek food authority who claimed the Greeks influenced western European foods via Rome; he traced the ancestry of such dishes as keftedes, dolmades, moussaka, and yuvarelakia to ancient Greek preparations that subsequently became masked behind Turkish and European names. He also said that bouillabaisse was an offspring of the Greek kakavia.
The Greek food writers are right about one thing: Greece is the source for an original European cuisine, just as it is the source of Western philosophy.
The Hellenist influence on the Mediterranean is no doubt a powerful and important one and should no be underestimated.
But whether it is the only font to Mediterranean cuisine is another matter. Greek culinary nationalism has hindered any reasoned debate and research on this question of the degree to which the Greek people preserved and maintained the classical heritage through 2,500 years, including Roman occupation, barbarian invasions, and 500 years of occupation by the Turks, not to mention interference and occupation by Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans.
They ignore the fact that the majority population of peninsular Greece in the Middle Ages was Slav.
They also underemphasize the importance of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek successor state to the Roman Empire in the East.
hope this helps. good luck.
Greek Food is the cuisine of Greece and of the Greeks . It is typical of Mediterranean cuisine accompanied by commonalities with the cuisines of Southern France, Italy, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Middle East.