The Persians were first to set an example of luxurious cookery, at least as it was understood in ancient times—the favourable climate and fertility of their products, as well as their natural inclination to ease, all tending to foster a love for the pleasures of the table. The oldest books of which we have any knowledge refer to their pomp in banqueting, and portray the brilliant revels of the Oriental kings.
Thousands of years before Henrion de Pensey pronounced his famous aphorism, a novel culinary preparation was regarded as of vaster importance than a new celestial visitant. The saturnalia of Darius and Xerxes, the powerful Persian despots, are notorious in history, as are also the feasts of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Chaldea, and those of Belshazzar, the final ruler of corrupt Babylon who fêted and feasted a thousand of his lords, his wives, and his concubines. Anticipating the munificence of the Roman emperors, Sardanapalus, last of the Assyrian kings, offered a guerdon of a thousand pieces of gold to him who would produce a new dish. "Eat, drink, amuse thyself: all else is vanity," was his maxim, and the precept he desired to have engraven on his tomb.
The book of Esther records the magnificent royal feast at Shushan given in the third year of his reign by the Persian king Ahasuerus: a carnival which lasted an hundred and fourscore days—where the beds were of gold and silver upon a pavement of red and blue and white and black marble; where were white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble; and where the people were given to drink, in vessels of gold, of royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the king. From the land of Zoroaster, therefore, the Greeks received their first lessons in gastronomy.
Simplicity in their habits was a characteristic of the early Greeks, this simplicity extending in a marked degree to their cookery, when the famous Spartan black broth, composed of pork-broth, vinegar, and salt, became a national dish. But this epoch of abstention was of comparatively short duration. The spiritual sense was overcome by the carnal, and, imitating the Arians, they soon converted a natural craving into a hypersensuous pleasure.
The dinner or supper developed into an elaborate banquet, partaken of on reclining couches, accompanied by wines of Corinth, Samos, Chios, and Tenedos, the fumes of incense, the strains of music, and the singing of pages and beautiful maids. The couches on which they partook of their repasts and offered their generous libations to the gods were ornamented with tortoise-shell, ivory, and bronze, some being inlaid with pearls and precious stones; the mattresses were of purple embroidered with gold. Then Archestratus, the Syracusan, who had travelled far and wide in quest of alimentary dainties of different lands, was the Carême of the Attic cuisine. His much-lauded poem on "Gastronomy" is unfortunately lost to posterity, and thus it may not be compared with that of Berchoux, composed twenty centuries later. This poem Athenæus has termed a treasure of light, every verse of which was a precept, and from which numerous cooks drew the principles of an art that rendered them illustrious. The cook in the "Thesmophorus" of Dionysius, however, denounces Archestratus, his rules, and his maxims. But cooks are notoriously jealous and prone to asperse their rivals, just as a jealous woman will decry another member of her sex whom men admire. His aspersions, therefore, are not to be weighed against the avalanche of encomiums that Archestratus has received. It was to the select few who appreciated the delicacies and importance of his art that his poem was addressed. He spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Witness his stately opening stanza, one of the few surviving fragments of his epic:
"I write these precepts for immortal Greece,
That round a table delicately spread,
Or three, or four, may sit in choice repast,
Or five at most. Who otherwise shall dine
Are like a troop marauding for their prey."