Archestratos

Archestrate of Gela is a Poète, gastronome and large Greek traveller .

Archestratos de Gela or of Syracuse, of the first book of Greek Cuisine in the first two thirds of fourth century BC is the author, in the form of a poem epic to which five names were given by the Old ones: Gastronomia , Gastrologia , Opsopoïa , Deipnologia and Hedupatheia (this last name, Ηδυπαθεια , means the Delicacies ). This work, of which reached us nearly 60 fragments of approximately 334 worms by the Banquet of the sophists of Athénée, is presented itself in the form of a gastronomical voyage in the Mediterranean. If one considers the average length of a work at the time (approximately 1200 lines), one can consider that a third of the book reached us. It treats gastronomical art as much as social conventions of the table of the end of the traditional era. It was copied or translated into Latin by Ennius, Greek born in Calabria towards 239 av. J. - C..

Of his author, one knows only that it was about a man highly cultivated, living at the age of Denys the Young person, and that he would have travelled in Grande Greece and in the east of the the Mediterranean: Hellespont, Black Sea, Ionian coast. According to information of the philosopher Cléarque de Soli, Archestratos would be the disciple of Terpsion, which, the first, would have composed of the dietetic precepts.

At the time of its peregrinations, it tasted the local specialities, took notes, wrote Recette S while trying to obtain the best possible marriage between the dishes, between “quality and quantity”. According to Chrysippe de Soli, it limited the number of guests to the banquets with three or four people, so that each one can taste the dishes in the calm one: “A meal of more than four people becomes a meal of days laborer and soldiers, who eat their spoils. ”

As many texts attest it, the Greek culinary tradition made great great strides in Sicily, where the symposia (time to drink after the meal) were famous, at the richest citizens, for their ostentation and their duration. It was spread in particular in the whole of the Greek world with the appearance of the works of kitchen in prose, including two authors, Herakleides of Syracuse and Mithaïkos, came from the same island.

The French poet Joseph Berchoux, which popularized the word “gastronomy” in the French language with the whole beginning of the 19th century, thus summarizes the remarks of Athenaeum about Archestratos:

He is the author of a poëme entitled: the Gastronomy . This author was the friend of one of wire of Périclès. He had traversed the grounds and the seas to know by itself what they produce of better. He informed himself in his voyages, not of manners of the people, of which it is useless to be informed, since it is impossible to change them, but it entered the laboratories where the delights of the table prepare, and it had of trade only with the men useful to its pleasures. Its poëme is a treasure of light, and does not contain worms which is not a precept. It is in this school that several cooks drew the principles of an art which made them immortal.

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