Mithaecus

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Mithaecus (Ancient Greek: Μίθαικος) was a cook and cookbook author of
the late 5th century BC. A Greek-speaking native of Sicily at a time when
the island was rich and highly civilized, Mithaecus is credited with having
brought knowledge of Sicilian gastronomy to Greece.[1] Specifically,
according to sources of varying reliability, he worked in Sparta, from which
he was expelled as a bad influence,[2] and in Athens. He earned an
unfavourable mention in Plato's dialogue Gorgias.[3]
Mithaecus is the first known author of any cookbook, and his is the first
known (if not extant) Greek cookbook. One very brief recipe survives from
it, thanks to a quotation in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. It is in the
Doric dialect of Greek (appropriate both to Greek Sicily and to Sparta) and
describes, in one line, how to deal with the fish Cepola macrophthalma,[4] a
ribbon-like fish here called tainia (known in Italian as cepola and in modern
Greek as kordella):
Tainia: gut, discard the head, rinse, slice; add cheese and [olive] oil.[5]
The addition of cheese seems to have been a controversial matter;
Archestratus is quoted as warning his readers that Syracusan cooks spoil
good fish by adding cheese.[6]
Notes[edit]
1 ^ Dalby (2003), p. 220; Hill and Wilkins (1996), pp. 144-148.
2 ^ Maximus of Tyre. Dissertations, 7.
3 ^ Plato. Gorgias, 518c.
4 ^ Dalby (1996), pp. 109-110.
5 ^ Athenaeus. Deipnosophistae, 325f; Bilabel (1920). English translation from
Dalby (2003), p. 79.
6 ^ Hill and Wilkins (1996), pp. 144-148.