ABSTRACT
From Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19) – Food and Wine in Byzantium. Copyright © 2007 by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd,
As part of a sketch of Byzantine food and cookery,1 I compiled a ‘phrasebook of Byzantine foods and aromas’. I expressed the hope that it would be useful not only to time-travellers but to those conducting research on or interested in Byzantine history. It grew out of the personal glossary that I myself found it essential to compile as I worked on the sources for post-classical Greek food: this work seemed to be needed because existing dictionaries and translations tend to slip out of focus when approaching a technical field such as food and contain some serious misunderstandings. This short paper explores a few identifications that have caused difficulty. It ends with a Byzantine spice that does not appear in the phrase book because I can give it no Byzantine name.
