Forensic Culinary Archaeology: Seeking the Longevity of Recipes and Their Flavors from Crete

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists work very hard to gain information about the presence and frequency of past food ingredients throughout time, it has been almost impossible to get at actual recipes and flavor combinations from archaeological settings. Food archaeologists worked hard while making great strides uncovering the rich archaeological data about ingredients, foods, and cooking strategies. This is increasingly placing food studies more centrally within archaeological inquiry. Here we present another route to learning about past culinary traditions, by getting at the age of some dishes and their flavor combinations, while gaining a sense of the continuity or change of ingredients, dishes and also flavors from western Crete. By tracking the domestication locale, spread of major ingredients throughout the Mediterranean and their arrival on to Crete, we have been able to roughly date specific recipes that were finally written down in the sixteenth century. From this analysis, we have learned that some recipes are recent, some are from the Bronze Age and some could have been Neolithic. In this way we can begin to learn about the longevity of some flavorscapes on this important island.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Culinary Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35620.0