Today, I’ll be taking a look at a medieval Byzantine honey cake - which itself is based on an earlier Greek iron-age cake, amphiphon. This is going to be a light, fluffy cake with a rich, honey flavour!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the world that was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above! If you like what you see, consider supporting me over on Patreon!
Ingredients
1 cup flour
¾ cup butter
¾ cup sugar
½ cup walnuts
salt
orange rind
1 - Cream the Sugar and Butter
To begin with, toss about ¾ of a cup of room-temperature butter into a mixing bowl. Into this, place about ¾ of a cup of sugar. Mix everything together using a wooden spoon, smearing the butter into the sugar along the side of the bowl. Do this until it takes on a rich, creamy texture. At this stage, beat three eggs into the mixture, taking care to mix them all thoroughly before progressing!
2 - Add Dry Ingredients
Next, toss in about a cup’s worth of plain flour, along with a pinch of salt. Mix this together into a smooth batter. If it’s looking a little dry, add a tiny splash of milk to rehydrate it a little.
When the whole thing is combined, and still sticking to the side of the bowl, toss in about a half a cup of roughly crushed walnuts. While it’s stated that walnuts are served alongside this dish, it’s likely that they would have also been baked into the cakes, which help soften the nuts.
3 - Prepare Tin
Using the butter wrapper, grease a baking tin. While metal tins were likely used in late antiquity/the early medieval period, stoneware would have also been widely used! The original recipe doesn’t seem to discuss baking instruments, so I opted for using a shallow square dish.
When it’s been greased sufficiently, grate the rind of an orange into the dish. Though oranges and lemons were seemingly grouped together as “citron” in antiquity, we can assume that cooks would have known the difference between the two. So, I used an orange, as it pairs nicely with the honey and the walnuts here.
4 - Bake
When the tin is prepared, pour your batter into the dish. Make sure it’s spread evenly across it, so it all bakes at the same rate. If you want, you can dust the top of your cake with ground cinnamon. Keep in mind that this will brown faster than your cake will, so it may look burnt in the oven, but really it will only be barely cooked!
Place your tin into the centre of an oven preheated to about 350F or 175C for about a half an hour, or until the edges of your cake have browned and turned crisp!
5 - Finish Cake
Take it out of the oven when it’s done, and let it cool to room temperature. But before it’s fully cooled, pour a good amount of honey over the whole thing! This will let the whole cake become infused with the sweetness of the honey!
When the cake has fully cooled, cut it into segments, and serve up with some walnuts!
The finished cakes are wonderfully light and sweet! The caramelised orange rind on the base gives a wonderful zesty kick to the honey taste. The cake rises a fair bit due to the number of eggs used, but retains a great airy texture.
“Translating is a task of imitation that faces in two directions at once, for it must line itself up with the solid body of the original text and at the same time with the shadow of that text where it falls across another language. Shadows fall and move.”
— Anne Carson, excerpt of “Screaming in Translation: The ‘Elektra’ of Sophokles”, in Sophocles’ Elektra in Performance
What a lovely way of explaining it. And in her case, not just across languages, but c. 2500 years of time and cultural difference.
1. dear; sweetheart: used in referring to or addressing a woman or girl.
Origin: Borrowed from Anglo-Norman cheri, from Old Northern French cherise (“cherry”), from Vulgar Latin ceresia, a reinterpretation of the neuter plural of Late Latin ceresium, from Latin cerasium(cerasum,cerasus (“cherry tree”)), from Ancient Greek κεράσιον (kerásion, “cherry fruit”), from κερασός (kerasós, “bird cherry”), and ultimately possibly derived from a language of Asia Minor. Displaced Old English ciris (also from Vulgar Latin ceresia), which died out after the Norman invasion and was replaced by the French-derived word.
“"I tell you it is like taking the life of a puppy, ma cherie,“ he was saying.” - JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE
1. to affect as a Gorgon; hypnotize; petrify: She felt trapped and totally helpless in his gorgonizing stare.
Origin: Gorgonize is ultimately derived, via Latin, from Ancient Greek Gorgṓ, which comes from the adjective gorgós “dreadful” and is the original Greek name for each of the Gorgons, the triumvirate of mythic sisters with snakes for hair and whose appearance was so frightful that anyone who looked at them directly would turn to stone. The Gorgons were named Euryale, Medusa, and Stheno, and Medusa is the most famous of the three because of her mortality, which allowed for Perseus to behead her by using her reflection in his shield to guide his sword.
“Athena smiled, then turned to Po. “Not a word out of you, Poseidon, or I’ll freeze you so fast you won’t know what hit you. Now watch while I gorgonize your little girlfriend.” - KATE MCMULLAN, SAY CHEESE, MEDUSA, 2002
Has anyone seen the meme floating around that claims that Julius Caesar nicknamed Cleopatra “golden mouthed” because of her oral sex skills? Also that Cleopatra was called “meriochane” in ancient Greek supposedly meaning “she who gapes for 10,000 men”?
Both of these claims sound like complete BS and I haven’t been able to find a single citation to back them up.
*Also someone should tell the 4th century CE theologian John Chrysostom (“golden mouthed”) about his name.
The Siren Vase is an Ancient Greek art masterpiece, created circa 480 BC - 470 BC in Attica, Greece. This piece’s medium is pottery. The image on the Siren Vase shows Odysseus (Ancient Greek King) passing the sea through The Sirens, whom were three sea nymphs that had the power to kill sailors with their bewitching tune.
The sirens of ancient Greek mythology were bird-women whose enchanted singing lured sailors off course, causing shipwreck and disaster. This vase is painted with this famous scene and is known as the Siren Vase. It is a wide-necked vessel thought to have been used for serving wine. The image is of beautiful detail in a magnificent black ground. These two colours contrast very well together enabling the siren painter to create the beautiful Siren Vase.
So I just discovered that not only some of the Greek books that I own are over 200 years old, they also belonged to someone famous?!
Here are the books in question:
They are a collection of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, in Ancient Greek, with no translation. None of them have publishing dates, but the typography is clearly old - notice the use of ϖ for π:
(Notice, also, the handwritten corrections by one of the book’s owners.)
All three books have names inscribed in the front. The first volume has this one:
Boissier is an old and eminent family in Geneva, Switzerland, which just happens to be where I found these books. The volume may have been owned by Adélaïde Boissier (1799-1857) or by one of her parents. Either way, the person who penned the inscription must have lived around 1800 at the latest; the long S (ſ, used here to spell Boiſsier) went out of fashion in French in the early 19th century.
Adélaïde Boissier married Charles Gautier. The books passed down to their children, as evidenced by the signature in the second volume:
This would be Émile Gautier (1822-1891), a Swiss astronomer who studied under Urbain Le Verrier, one of the scientists credited with the discovery of Neptune. Given the date (1839), it is likely that Émile was given this book while studying Ancient Greek at school. He would’ve been seventeen years old at the time.
Émile gave the books to his son Lucien (1850-1924), who was rather more fond of doodling:
This was in 1866; Lucien Gautier was sixteen years old. He would later go on to become a protestant theologian and the professor of Hebrew in Lausanne. Notice that there is another name and date in the corner of the page: I’m struggling to read the surname, but it seems to be Adolphe Boissier, 1812. This gives us the latest possible year these books could have been published - over two centuries ago.
The text is also interspersed with a few doodles, which also seem to be Lucien’s:
Who the books went to after him, I have no idea. All I know is that eventually, they found themselves in the private library of a man who donated it to the University of Geneva in his old age. His Ancient Greek books were distributed to anyone who wanted them, for free… and that’s how these small pieces of history came to me.
… but remember me forever more, when one of the people who dwell on earth, some stranger who has suffered much, comes here and asks: ‘Girls, which man is the most pleasant singer to you who comes here, and in whom do you delight most?’ Then you will all answer, with one voice: ‘He is a blind man, and lives on rocky Khios. All his songs are forever more supreme.’
Homeric Hymn to Apollon 166-173, transl. my own. The name of the hymn’s author is unknown.
So, I wanna point out a thing. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, there’s a line that says the following:
“Then Hekatê approached them, the one with the splendid headband. And she welcomed back the daughter of holy Demeter with many embraces. And from that day forward, the Lady [Hekatê] became her [Persephone’s] attendant and substitute queen.” (438-40)
The phrase I bolded suggests that Hekate assumes Persephone’s roles as Queen of the Underworld when Persephone is with Demeter. While we already know Hekate has power over the dead and is a goddess of the Underworld in Her own right, it seems that She may actually rule beside Hades while Persephone is away.
This is just really interesting to me, that Hades and Hekate may have a platonic monarchical relationship over the Underworld at times. Also, this illustrates that Hekate’s role over the dead may be far earlier in origin than many people give credit for. It’s just a small quote and piece of info, but I think it’s nifty.
I’m very sorry I have to correct this, but this interpretation is based on an inaccurate translation. The Greek text reads:
I can only assume what was translated as “substitute queen” is ὀπάων ἔπλετ᾿ ἄνασσα. The actual translation, however, should be “the queen (Hekate) became (Persephone’s) companion”. Ὀπάων, from the verb ὀπάζω “to follow”, refers to a comrade or attendant; “substitute” is nowhere near the realm of its meanings, and I have no idea where the above translation got it from. [EDIT: I found the source and it’s Gregory Nagy’s translation. Still have no idea how he came up with that though.]
Other online translations of the hymn give its correct meaning, e.g. Theoi has “from that time the lady Hecate was minister and companion to Persephone”.
Still, the actual translation doesn’t entirely disassociate Hekate from the Underworld. By becoming Persephone’s attendant, Hekate takes on a role in her cult, and may well have acquired some chthonic aspects from that.
