Honey in ancient Greek food and drink
Honey in Greek eating and drinking: cakes for festivals and offerings, honey with cheese, honeyed wine, and a named regional honey treated as better than the rest.
Current status
Historical
No longer practised. Known from documents, excavation or ethnography.
The classical practice is historical. Several individual foods — honey with cheese, honey on yoghurt, honeyed pastries — continue in the region, which is continuity of a dish rather than of the culture that produced it.
Cakes that were also offerings
A large part of what is recorded about Greek honey food comes from contexts that are simultaneously culinary and religious. Honey cakes appear as festival food and as offerings, and the same object can be both — something baked to be eaten at a festival and something set down for a god or for the dead. Separating Greek food history from Greek religion at this point produces two thinner and less accurate accounts.
Honey with cheese is attested as a straightforward everyday pairing, and it survives in the eastern Mediterranean in essentially the same form. Honeyed wine, and honey mixed with water, are both recorded as drinks.
A honey with a name
Greek writers single out the honey of Mount Hymettus in Attica as superior, which makes it one of the earliest examples anywhere of a honey being valued for where it came from rather than only for what it was. That is the origin of an idea this entire site is organised around: that geography and flora make honeys different from one another, and that the difference is worth naming.
Sweetness before sugar
Honey was the concentrated sweetener available, but it was not the only source of sweetness: dried figs, grapes and raisins, and reduced grape must all did related work and were cheaper. Reading honey as the sole sweetener of the ancient world overstates it, and understates how much sweetness came from fruit.
Cultural significance
The earliest well-documented case of honey being graded by place of origin, and a food culture in which cooking and offering were not separate categories.
What this page does not claim
That honey was the only sweetener available, that Hymettian honey was a regulated designation, or that modern Greek honey desserts descend unbroken from classical ones. Fruit and grape must supplied a great deal of the sweetness, and the culinary line from antiquity to now runs through several intervening cultures.
In short
- Honey cakes served as festival food and as offerings, often at the same time.
- Hymettian honey is an early instance of honey valued by its origin.
- Figs, raisins and grape must supplied much of the era's sweetness alongside honey.
Sources
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
- Naturalis Historia (Pliny the Elder) — Rome, completed around 77 CE · Historical text
- The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore — Houghton Mifflin (1937) · Ethnographic record
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.