Tasting History 亞歷山大大帝吃什麼？｜What did Alexander the Great eat?

我認為沒有任何人聽過 Alexander the Great 他是歷史上最偉大的將軍 他從未戰敗 他掌握了大部分的知名世界 他自稱了很多城市 但是 很多人不知道他喜歡吃什麼 但我們知道 他喜歡浪漫的聚會 可能會有像這個古老的食譜 像這個古老的食譜 所以謝謝Trade Coffee 贊助這個視頻 我們一起聚會 Alexander the Great 這次我們來品嚐歷史 我們知道 什麼樣的食物在馬爾地尼亞 Alexander the Great 就像Alexander the Third 其實不存在 歷史上任何的食譜 所以我必須 去找一些古老的食譜 去找出一個食譜 具有 他們擁有的食材 會帶來的效果 我沿用了這一道食譜 Apicius的 Aliterius in avibus 又一道蔥酥 黑胡椒 香菇 生薑 玉米水 香腸 魚乾 蠔油 A little honey with wine and vinegar, seasoned with garum. Add oil to this in a pot, heat it, stir in green celery and calamint, make incision in the birds and pour the sauce over them. I thought a recipe for birds was appropriate because while we don't have recipes from Alexander's time, 4th century BC, we do have the description of a Macedonian wedding feast that took place shortly after his death. And it says that no sooner had they taken their places on the couches than they were presented with silver cups, one for each to keep as their own. Each guest also had been crowned before he entered with a gold tiara. After they had emptied their cups, they were each given a platter of Corinthian bronze, upon which was a large loaf of bread. Also chickens and ducks and ring doves too, and a goose and an abundance of similar dishes piled high. Many other things to eat were handed round in great variety, following which came a second platter of silver, on which again lay a huge loaf, and geese, hares, young goats, and curiously molded cakes besides, pigeons, turtle doves, partridges, and other fowl in plenty. So of the many foods that were served a lot of them seemed to be types of birds. So you can pretty much do this with any bird if you want a goose, or chicken, or turtle dove if you've got those laying around, but I chose to do two game hens because that's what they had at the store. But really it's not the bird that even matters, it's more the sauce, because it's the sauce that is going to impart a distinctly ancient flavor to this dish because it uses ingredients like garum. So for this recipe what you'll need is two cups or 250 grams of hazelnuts or almonds, one teaspoon of ground long pepper or black pepper. Long pepper was very popular in the ancient world at this time so that's what I'm using, and I'll put a link in the description to where you can get that online. Two teaspoons of minced parsley, two teaspoons of dried or fresh lovage, one and a half teaspoons of dried mint, a pinch of safflower threads, you can also use saffron, one and a half cups or 350 milliliters of dry red wine, two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of red wine vinegar, two tablespoons of olive oil, and two tablespoons of garum. Garum was a fermented fish sauce that was very popular in ancient Greece and later ancient Rome, and you can find modern versions online that are excellent, or you can go ahead and make it yourself but I do not suggest it. I've done it and yeah it's a lot. You'll also need two teaspoons of celery leaves, and one teaspoon of chopped calamint, and if you can't find calamint which I couldn't, then you can use either catmint or spearmint. So the first thing to do is to roast your hazelnuts or almonds. You can either do it on the stove or put them on a pan, and set it in the oven at 350 Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius for about 12 to 15 minutes, moving them around once or twice as they roast. You'll know that they're ready when your kitchen is filled with a wonderfully nutty aroma, an aroma almost as nice as a freshly brewed cup of coffee from today's sponsor Trade. Trade is the USA's number one specialty coffee marketplace. They curate hundreds of coffees from local roasters all around the country, and it allows you to have access to a whole array of coffees that you wouldn't otherwise get to try, and since they are roasted to order and shipped within 48 hours, they always arrive on your doorstep at peak freshness. What arrived on my doorstep this month was not just coffee but one of Trade's gift boxes, specifically this peppermint mocha kit which uses espresso from Klatch Coffee to create the perfect hot or cold holiday coffee drink. I'm also obsessed that the kit comes with this little whisker. Whisker? Thing that whisks? It gives you a froth. It's a frother. Also with the holidays upon us,Trade makes an excellent gift for the coffee lover in your life, whether it's one of these curated gift boxes like I got, or a personalized subscription which sends fresh bags of coffee every month, all curated to the recipient's tastes. So to give the gift of great coffee, head to drinktrade.com slash maxmiller, or just click the link in the description. That is drinktrade.com slash maxmiller. And now it's back to our nuts. Now once your nuts have roasted, you can grind them up in a mortar and pestle until you have fine crumbs, or you can just put them in a blender to save yourself a lot of time. Now the recipe does say that you can use almonds or hazelnuts. I chose hazelnuts despite plenty of the elders warning that hazelnuts cause headache and flatulence of the stomach, and put more fat on the body than one would think at all likely. But fat be damned and flatulence I guess, because hazelnuts are absolutely delicious. So get a saucepan and add in all of the other ingredients except for the celery leaves and the calamint. Then stir everything together and add in the ground flatulence inducing hazelnuts. Mix this together and set it on the stove over a medium heat and bring it to a simmer, and as it simmers stir it around for about five minutes and then remove it from the heat and add in the celery leaves and the calamint, or whichever substitute for calamint that you're using. And that is the sauce. That's really all there is to it, and it can be eaten in two ways. You can either roast or boil the bird. They very often boiled birds back then. Take the meat and dip it into the sauce, but if you really want the flavors to sing, and I do, then you can actually cook the sauce with the bird. So to do that just brush whatever fowl you're using with a good amount of olive oil, and then pierce the bird's breast with a knife several times, and then pour the sauce over the birds, letting the crushed hazelnuts form a crust on top. Then set this in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 205 Celsius for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and while it roasts I just wanted to remind you that another great holiday gift is that tasting history cookbook for the history or food lover in your life. However if they want to learn what Alexander the Great ate, well they'll have to watch this video. Alexander was born in the Greek kingdom of Macedon in July of 356 BC. Being the son of King Philip II, he had the luxury of being tutored by none other than Aristotle himself. Though much of his military knowledge came from his father Philip, as Philip conquered many of the Greek city-states to form the League of Corinth, a united Greece under Macedonian control. Then just as his father was planning to use this united Greece to invade the Persian Achaemenid Empire, he was assassinated by one of his own guards, Posenius. This left Alexander, who had recently had a falling out with his father, as the new king of Macedon, Alexander III. But Alexander had always been obsessed with the ancient epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he fashioned himself after the great hero Achilles, even believing that he himself was descended from the gods. So being remembered as Alexander III just wasn't going to cut it, he wanted to be Alexander the Great, and to be great he needed to do something great, and that was to pick up where his father had left off and conquer the Persian Empire, and that's exactly what he did. In only a few years he defeated the great Persian king Darius III, winning every battle he fought against him, often with odds of five to one in Darius's favor. Also I've heard that name pronounced Darius and Darius. I'm not sure which one is correct. It seems that people can't agree so I went with Darius. Anyway Alexander went on to conquer Egypt where he founded the city of Alexandria, and he sacked and burned the Persian capital of Persepolis, and as he and his army moved east Alexander became less and less Greek and more Persian, adopting a lot of their customs, at least according to many of his men, and this adoption of Persian customs would not only have political consequences but also consequences on how he ate. See the Macedonians at least at this time were not known for having big feasts. They were known for drinking a lot but not having big luxurious feasts like the ones that the Persians were famous for. They lived a simpler, at least food-wise, lifestyle. This difference is illustrated in a story by the Macedonian historian Polyaenus when he talks about Alexander reaching the palace of the Persian king and seeing a brass column in the courtyard inscribed with a menu. Really it was just a list of different foods that were served for lunch and dinner to a previous king, Cyrus, and it's a really, really long list so I'm not going to read the whole thing but just to give you a taste it called for a thousand artabas of wheat flour and another thousand of barley flour, four hundred sheep, three hundred turtles, a hundred oxen, and six hundred small birds, one talent or about sixty-six pounds of garlic, three talents of raisins, and five hundred maris of wine. Then there were also huge amounts of costly spices like anise, cinnamon, and silphium. Now of course this wasn't just for the king, it was for his entire court but still it was said that this was one day's food, and Alexander seeing this column was disgusted and ordered it to be destroyed, and told his men that it was no advantage to a king to live in so luxurious a manner for cowardice was the certain consequence of luxury and dissipation. Now to be fair the story might be apocryphal and is likely the author conflating it with a previous story of when the Spartans came across a feast from the Persian king Xerxes when he was invading Greece some years earlier but regardless it shows the difference between the more temperate life of the Macedonians and the opulence of the Persians but this was not to last because once Alexander got a taste of that opulence he was singing a different tune and he quickly fell in love with having large and lavish feasts. Alexander the Great whenever he supped with any of his friends spent a hundred mine a day as perhaps 60 or 70 of his friends supped with him. One story about a feast that he had with his closest friends included a second course where all the food came out covered in gold. Then they took off the gold and threw it on the ground so that their friends might witness their extravagance and their servants might become masters of the gold. This is in stark contrast to Alexander's father Philip who was said to have a gold cup that he slept with because he was so worried that somebody was going to take it. Alexander on the other hand was famously generous which very quickly led to his banquets rivaling those of King Darius the Persian and so to make these banquets work he had to also adopt some of the courtly positions that the Persian court had including the position of Edeatros which was basically like the master of the royal table. He gave it to one of his closest friends and bodyguards Ptolemy Lagus later called Ptolemy Soter when he was given rule of Egypt as pharaoh. This was the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt which lasted nearly three centuries finally ending with Cleopatra. But before he was pharaoh, a living god Ptolemy was basically an event planner. He was in charge of setting up these banquets and sometimes even being a food taster for Alexander. He was even given charge of planning a big old wedding. Alexander often used the marriage of his generals to the noble women of lands that he conquered as a way to solidify his rule and in 324 BC after conquering Persia he gave Ptolemy the task of arranging a wedding ceremony and feast at Susa in Persia. This would include not only Alexander's marriage to Statera the daughter of the former now deceased King Darius but also the marriage of 80 of his men to various Persian nobles. Now while Alexander was generous to his men and was known for giving them these fantastic feasts there was at least one time where not only could he not have them feasting but many of them starved and that was on their way back from India. See as Alexander took his army further and further east his men were like you know what we kind of want to go home. It's been years since we've seen our families and so while they were in India after winning a battle they were like yeah we're done we're going back and they mutinied. Well Alexander gives this rousing speech and gets his men back together but does turn them around and heads them back home but he does so through the Gedrosian Desert where they were reduced to extreme want of food in so much that they were forced to feed on their camels and other beasts of burden and with no wood for fire they ate the flesh raw. There was much silphium growing in the area and this alone allowed them to digest their food. Silphium was the magical ingredient that the ancient Greeks and later ancient Romans loved to the point that they made it extinct. They just ate all of it. It basically could do anything. It was healing. It was delicious. It could make you fall in love. All these different things did a whole video on silphium. Now Claudius Allemus who wrote that little passage actually says that this took place during a different period but most of the ancient historians agree that this happened on their way back from India but other than that one snafu which cost him about half of his army Alexander was able to take care of his men with big old feasts. Though according to one later historian Plutarch Alexander never indulged himself at these banquets. He was so very temperate in his eating that when any rare fish or fruits were sent to him he would distribute them among his friends and often reserved nothing for himself. His table however was always magnificent the expense of it still increasing with his good fortune till it amounted to 10,000 drachmas a day. Plutarch tells a story of a woman named Ada of Caria which is an area in what's now southern Turkey and after Alexander conquered this area he set this woman up as queen of Caria and actually called her his mother When namely in the kindness of her heart she used to send him day by day many foods and sweet meats and finally offered him the most skilled bakers and cooks he said he wanted none of them for he had better cooks which had been given him by his tutor Leonidas for his breakfast namely a night's march and for his supper a light breakfast. Now maybe these stories are true. Maybe Alexander instead of having breakfast did like to just go for a brisk walk but maybe it's also that Plutarch who is living several centuries after Alexander died is giving Alexander characteristics of what for Plutarch was a modern day hero characteristics of strength and temperance is definitely what he did to Alexander when he talked about his drinking. He insisted that in the use of wine Alexander was less addicted than was generally believed. The belief arose from the time which he would spend over each cup more in talking than in drinking. So yes while Alexander would sit there for hours with a cup of wine in his hand he was nursing it the whole time. He was busy chatting and didn't actually drink to excess except that pretty much none of the other ancient historians agree with this. Claudius Alienus says that even Alexander himself is said to have drunk more than any man and according to Epipus the Olynthian it wasn't just Alexander but all the Macedonians. Macedonians had no notion of moderation in drinking. But started off at once with enormous draughts before eating so as to be drunk before the first course was off the table and to be unable to enjoy the rest of the banquet. And they enjoyed this wine chilled and would go to great lengths to make that possible. One of the people who actually traveled with Alexander into Persia said that at a siege Alexander dug 30 large trenches close to one another and filled them with snow. He then heaped on the snow branches of oak for that way the snow would last a long time. And that they used to cool wine for the sake of drinking it in a colder state. But Alexander's love of wine would often get the better of him perhaps most famously at a banquet in 328 BC. He had made his friend Clytus a man who had saved his life at the Battle of Granicus satrap or governor of Bactria. And in celebration Alexander decided to have a big banquet where they drank a lot and as they drank they started to argue over some military matters and eventually Clytus reminded Alexander that he had saved his life which did not go too well with Alexander. And then as Alexander is boasting about all the great things that he has done Clytus says that it was actually him following in the footsteps of his father Philip. Well Alexander really hates this and in a rage he grabs a spear from one of his guards and throws it at Clytus killing him. Immediately Alexander is filled with remorse takes the spear and propped it against the wall with the intention of falling upon it himself thinking that it was not proper for him to live who had killed his friend when under the influence of wine. Obviously he did not go through with this because he then went on to conquer most of the known world but wine was known to often get the better of him. In fact there are theories that it helped contribute to his early death. Exactly what caused his death is unknown but it definitely didn't help the matter at least according to the ancient sources. See when he was only 32 he was in Babylon when he got some bad omens and he took omens very seriously and so he was sullen and decided that he was going to give gifts sacrifices to the gods for some good luck and those sacrifices then people would eat so then they have a big banquet and he was feasting with his friends and was drinking far into the night. According to several ancient sources this eating and drinking was taking place at the home of one of his men Medus and the next day as one does after a whole night of drinking he rose up took a bath and slept then again supped at the house of Medus and again drank till far into the night. After retiring from the drinking party he took a bath after which he took a little food and slept there because he already felt feverish. This cycle of feverish bathing, napping, eating and drinking took place the next day and the next until finally he died. And immediately there were rumors flying around that he had been poisoned by one of his own men. Conspiracy theories were nothing new and a lot of the ancient historians lean into this and say oh who could have done it but both Plutarch and Arian basically say he died of excessive drinking and a fever. So just to be safe I'm not going to drink like Alexander but I am going to eat like Alexander. And here we are roasted game hen with a sauce of hazelnuts. So I'm going to do a little leg here. You can see that there is a definite crust that has been made on this. The fragrance is pungent but not in a bad way. There is like a what it is is that garum I think. It just kind of comes through and adds this interesting scent that you really only get from from fish sauce. Here we go. Terrible manners. So the predominant flavor is that hazelnut which I like. I really love that flavor but it's so much more complex because of all of the all of the herbs and that garum especially just kind of create a new flavor. You can't really pick out any one thing except for the hazelnuts. Everything else brings something to brings something to the party and together they equal this new flavor. I am pleasantly surprised that the bird is not dried out. You know usually today we would we would roast a small game hen like this rather differently. We definitely wouldn't poke a bunch of holes in it but I did and it turned out pretty well. So yay. I think that it really would work with any any bird at all. The flavor that you're getting is definitely from the sauce and kind of from that crusting. And you could of course dip it in some of the sauce. You can reserve some and get even more of that flavor but and as you get deeper down into the bird you might want to do that but at least on the top you don't need to. So while the ancients were obviously obsessed with Alexander the Great so too were the people in the Middle Ages because there are numerous stories from medieval Europe that cast Alexander the Great as sort of a character in historical fan fiction. One series of stories has Alexander after he conquers the world wanting to conquer other things like the air and the sea and so there are a lot of medieval images of Alexander flying around usually in a cage held aloft by griffins or else pulling a Jacques Cousteau in deep sea diving in an early version of a bathysphere. And I guess we still kind of do this today. We take historical figures and place them in news stories that are sort of outrageous. I'm thinking of like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and frankly I think that we should do more of that and not less. So make sure to check out the Tasting History cookbook, try the sauce, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.