Have you had a long day of fighting and besieging the ancient city of Troy?
Uh-huh. Looking for that little pick-me-up halfway through your 10-year
journey home to Ithaca? Sure am! Well then have I got the brew
for you! Kykeon, the drink of heroes.
Throughout ancient Greek myths and histories Kykeon pops up time,
and time again. So today I''m going to use the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
to try to recreate this legendary potion as best I can. This time on Tasting
History.
The drink Kykeon crops up in ancient Greek sources over
and over again, but what exactly was it? There is no recipe per se and several of
the sources have conflicting descriptions, but at least in the
Iliad and the Odyssey we get a list of the ingredients. In the
Iliad the Greek warrior Machaon is badly wounded by the Trojan Paris,
and King Nestor takes Machaon back to his tent so that his captive servant
Hecamede can take care of him and nurse him back to health.
Fair-haired Hecamede made a potion for them. First she moved a table up to them,
a fine polished table with a dark gleaming stand.
On it she placed a bronze dish with an onion in it as relish to the drink,
and also yellow honey. Next came the heap of holy barley meal,
thus in a cup the lovely woman made a Kykeon for them with Pramnian wine:
she grated goat's cheese into it with a bronze grater,
and sprinkled white barley meal on it; and she bade them drink
when she had made ready the potion. And it seems to have done its work because
in the next verse they're both up on their feet like
laughing, and having a great time. Yay Kykeon. That is definitely a better
outcome than what happens after someone drinks Kykeon in
The Odyssey. After escaping the cyclops, and almost being eaten on an island of
giants, Odysseus and his crew with only one ship
left find themselves the guests of the beautiful sorceress Circe.
SPOILER ALERT! She turned them into pigs. Well all but Odysseus who had really
great plot armor throughout The Odyssey. So with the exception of a side of onion
in The Iliad and baneful drugs in The Odyssey we have all
of the ingredients for our Kykeon: barley meal, honey, goat cheese, and
Pramnian wine. Now as for the consistency, we get clues
from the name. Kykeon comes from the verb kykāo which
means to churn or mix with the connotation of
until thickened, and that makes sense because in his writings on Homeric hymns
the 12th century archbishop Eustathius of Thessaloniki
(try saying that five times fast, because even one time slow is rather hard),
but he said that Kyekon is not quite food
not quite drink, but something like a drinkable soup.
And that means that we're going to have to add some heat into this recipe which
Homer does not mention, but you know Homer wasn't a chef so i'll give him
poetic license. So for your Kykeon you will need a half
cup or about a hundred grams of barley ground into a meal, one cup or more of
dry red wine. (Don't worry i'll explain the or more
later). 1/3 cup or 50 grams of goat cheese, and 2 tablespoons of honey. So first
things first, you're not going to need your entire bottle of wine so go ahead,
and pour your glass while you cook.
Cheers! Now add your cup of wine into a small saucepan,
and then stir in your barley meal, the goat cheese,
and the honey. Mix everything together as best you can,
then set it over low heat, and stirring continuously
bring it to a simmer. Once it starts to thicken a bit, after about three minutes,
take it off the heat and then you just pour it into a glass, and and wait for it
to cool down to a to a drinkable temperature. Now
if it's thickened up a little too much this is the time that you will add that
extra red wine just until it's a consistency
that you feel like you're going to want to drink. So while my Kykeon
cools let us look at where this most interesting of concoctions came from
and for that we must travel back to the time
of the gods!
Yeah, ancient Greece.
Most everything in ancient Greece had something to do with the gods,
and Kykeon is no exception, and like I said
the ingredients vary a little bit uh depending on the source
but there are always two constants: the barley,
and the wine both of which have strong ties
to the gods. For the barley we must look no further than the Goddess of the
Harvest Demeter who was often depicted with a
laurel of barley, or else with poppies which grow in
fields of barley. Some ancient Greek and Roman coins
depict her head on one side, and a stalk of barley on the other and
it makes sense that Demeter is associated with this drink because
not only was she the Goddess of the Harvest but she also presided
over the cycle of life and death, and as we saw in The Iliad,
Machaon was likely mortally wounded, but very badly wounded he could have died
and just a sip of this Kykeon brings him back to health.
You're not going to get back to health without a little help from Demeter,
and her barley. The drink was also a key component of the Eleusinian mysteries,
ancient initiation rights for the Cult of Demeter and Persephone
held at the Sanctuary of Eleusis. If you've ever played Assassin's Creed
Odyssey you can actually go visit the sanctuary in the game which is
kind of cool to like see it, you know as an artist's rendering
and walk around. Part of the ceremony took place in a great hall called the Telesterion,
and revealing anything that had to do with the Telesterion and revealing anything
was punishable by death. And it's likely during this part of the ritual where the
initiates would fast and then drink Kykeon which would cause
them to have visions of the gods. Now those visions
could have been caused by getting drunk on an empty stomach, but more than likely
it was because they added extra hallucinogens
to the drink, or it was caused by ergot which is a fungus that grows on barley,
and some other grains that can cause hallucinations. So now if
the penalty for revealing anything about these rights is
death, then how do we know anything about them,
and for that we have to thank those bad boys of ancient Greece,
the playwrights. First we have Diagoras of Melos who revealed many of the
secrets in some of his poems, and according to
Cicero was killed for doing so. Then there's the
great playwright Aeschylus who was actually put on trial for revealing too
much of the secrets of the rights in his plays. Lucky for us, and for him, he
was acquitted possibly because he had a god on his
side the God of the Theater, and it would make
sense because it's that god that gave us our second ingredient: wine.
Dionysus, God of Theater, fertility and wine, and hands down the coolest god
of the bunch. Now the wine that's mentioned by Homer
is Pramnian wine, so this wine is a special wine from ancient Greece
that has quite the close connection with Dionysus himself.
According to the writer Athenaeus, the wine originated on
Mount Pramnos on the isle of Vicaria, a stronghold for the cult of Dionysus,
and the inhabitants of the island claimed that the vine where the grapes
grew to make this wine had been given to them from Dionysus himself,
and to this day they still make wine on Icaria using an indigenous grape called
Fokiano. Now we don't know that that is the grape
that was used to make Pramnian wine, but it could be. What we do know is that
the wine that they make there today is nothing like Pramnian wine of ancient
Greece, and that's probably for the best because it was described as black wine
which should never be drunk without watering it down first, and both
Hippocrates and Galen said that it should be
reserved for its therapeutic qualities. Archbishop
Eustathius, here's that name again, said the Pramnian
as they say is fat and strengthening and it's not
suitable for quenching thirst, but rather for alleviating satiety. So if
you ate too much, and you're a little bloated that's the time to reach for the
premium wine it was basically the ancient greek Pepto-Bismol.
The Greek grammarian Hesychius hedged his bets when
describing the wine as a praiseworthy although hard wine. And
Aristophanes said that the Athenians didn't like it
for the Athenian people did not like hard and sour poets,
nor hard Pramnian wine, which contracts the eyebrows and the stomach
but they prefer a fragrant wine ripe and flavored like
nectar. I think i would have been an Athenian.
But my two favorite allusions to Pramnian wine come in verse,
something the Greeks really excelled at. Ephippus of Onlythus, most famous for his
Chronicles of Alexander the Great saying
Sounds like one of those songs in the
Lord of the Rings books that people just always skip over,
kind of love that. Also the term lesbian here does not refer
to the modern term lesbian, but as coming from the Isle of Lesbos which
the modern term lesbian actually comes from. Etymology is fun. :D
Finally there's the great comedic playwright Aristophanes.
Shun my boy the Pramnian cup, nor Thasian drink,
nor chian sup; nor let your glass with Peparethian brighten
for bachelors that liquor's too exciting. The Greeks are just so cool.
Anyway we don't actually know what Pramnian wine tasted like so i'm doing
my best by getting a dark dry red greek wine.
A dark dry red greek wine that i added barley to,
and cheese, and honey and should be about ready to drink by now.
I'm a little scared. Okay! So here we go, Kykeon. Now you'll notice I
do not have a glass like they mentioned in The Iliad which is
big, and ornate, and has handles and is supposed to be so heavy that when
full no man could lift it, I have instead what I think is probably meant
for margaritas, but it will just have to do.
Um, here we go. To being a a hero I guess, a Greek hero.
Smells like wine..
...
X_X
It's very, very thick. It's um,
it tastes like wine with, I mean it tastes like what you'd think it would,
which isn't good because it's it's wine with barley,
and cheese, and and honey... and barley
that's gonna be stuck in my teeth for a while.
Um yeah I cannot in good conscience have anyone else make this make this. I
mean if you want to, go ahead but i'm not going to endorse Kykeon at all.
It's um, it's really interesting, I uh if I mean even if, even if you didn't
cook it it would i think it would have the same flavor, it
would just be even more like just things floating in it. This at
least it kind of reminds me of like boba tea, which I don't really like because of
the texture, because the barley pieces just like,
and I don't maybe it's also some of the cheese didn't,
isn't like completely melted, it's I don't know. It's not, I can see
why, I can see why maybe it lost favor after the Heroic Age, because you
have to be a hero to drink this.
Hm, Kykeon! I'm going to take another.
That wine is really dry .That wine is really dry, even the honey it just
doesn't, oh and I can taste the cheese in that
one. That's weird, that's not good
that's not good at all. Um, wow, yeah i'm glad that I did this.
I'm glad that I did this, and and saw you know what it could be.
Uh there are different versions um written about, but this is essentially
gonna be what it is, and it's um
it's not good. It's not good but
that's what it's all about right, Tasting History
Um so that's that's the name of the show. (he said the name of the show mom!).
Anyway, uh yeah, Like this video, Subscribe and I will see you next time
on
Tasting History. ^_^y