page_title: Ancient Greek cuisine
section_title: Breads and cakes
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Greek cuisine / Ingredients and dishes / Grains / Breads and cakes
caption_attribution_description: Figurine de femme en train de pétrir de la pâte à pain. Tanagra (4044), Érétrie (4052) et Chalcis (6006), vers 500-475 a. C. Musée archéologique national, Athènes, n°27.
context_page_description: Ancient Greek cuisine was characterized by its frugality for most, reflecting agricultural hardship, but a great diversity of ingredients was known, and wealthy Greeks were known to celebrate with elaborate meals and feasts. The cuisine was founded on the "Mediterranean triad" of cereals, olives, and grapes, which had many uses and great commercial value, but other ingredients were as important, if not more so, to the average diet: most notably legumes. Research suggests that the agricultural system of Ancient Greece could not have succeeded without the cultivation of legumes.
  Modern knowledge of ancient Greek cuisine and eating habits is derived from textual, archeological, and artistic evidence.
context_section_description: Cereals formed the staple diet. The two main grains were wheat (σῖτος sitos) and barley (κριθή krithe). Pliny the Elder wrote that commercial bakeries arrived in Rome during the Macedonian Wars around 170 BC. Plato favored home production over commercial production and in Gorgias, described Thearion the baker as an Athenian novelty who sells goods that could be made at home.
  In ancient Greece, bread was served with accompaniments known as opson ὄψον, sometimes rendered in English as "relish". This was a generic term which referred to anything which accompanied this staple food, whether meat or fish, fruit or vegetable.
  Cakes may have been consumed for religious reasons as well as secular. Philoxenus of Cythera describes in detail some cakes that were eaten as part of an elaborate dinner using the traditional dithyrambic style used for sacred Dionysian hymns: "mixed with safflower, toasted, wheat-oat-white-chickpea-little thistle-little-sesame-honey-mouthful of everything, with a honey rim". Athenaeus says the charisios was eaten at the "all-night festival", but John Wilkins notes that the distinction between the sacred and secular can be blurred in antiquity.
caption: Woman kneading bread, c. 500–475 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Athens
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