The syllabus for professor Mary Jaeger’s Greco-Roman class reads a little like an ancient shopping list. She requests that students provide certain supplies: a bowl, spoon, knife and a few basic ingredients including fl our, water and salt. Students should be ready to learn about milk and honey one day and the Mediterranean triad of cereals, olives and wine the next.
The class is called “Food in Ancient Greco-Roman Culture,” and it explores the meanings and traditions behind all the delicious ingredients one finds in classics like Homer’s Odyssey and Petronius’s Satyricon.
To bring literature to life, Jaeger’s students dabble in the ancient art of cooking. For instance, they prepare their own sourdough starter in week four and share their loaves in week six. They experiment with ancient recipes, mixing sweet with savory or disguising foods as the Romans did. One standout recipe consists of dates stuffed surprisingly with whole almonds, then rolled in salt and pepper and fried in honey.
Students learn that in the classic texts, food had social and economic impacts. For instance, says Jaeger, sometimes a cheese is not just a cheese. It’s also a means of transporting milk safely from the barbaric, pastoral lands to the civilized city. What was the first thing Odysseus planned to do after blinding the Cyclops? Steal his cheeses!
Jaeger came to her love of food and ancient literature honestly. She’s a classics professor who now bakes her own bread, makes her own wine with friends and tends her own vegetable garden, but the outline of this eclectic class has been passed down. Jaeger once had to prepare a great Roman banquet for her own classics professor. It was, said Jaeger, the first time she’d ever seen prosciutto or cooked with olive oil.
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