Pharaoh Brewpubs?

We have recipes from ancient Greece and Babylon, but none from ancient Egypt. Certainly we know what ingredients the Egyptians used--they painted them lovingly on their tomb walls--but we don’t have detail on how they cooked them.

The Greeks weren’t very curious about Egyptian food, but they did note that the Egyptians were great bread-eaters. They’re credited with inventing yeast-risen bread, and the best-known dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphics lists about 140 bread varieties. One the Greeks knew of was the sourdough bread kyllastis.

The Greeks also noted that those peculiar Egyptians made a drink out of barley. (The Greeks, like the Romans, were wine-drinkers and didn’t know from beer.) The Egyptians made wine too, though; their word for it was erp, which actually sounds like a better name for beer.

Oddly, when the Greeks wrote about Egyptian architecture, which interested them much more than Egyptian food, they described it in food terms. “Pyramid” comes from pyramis, a Greek cake made of honey and wheat (pyros)--probably boiled wheat berries, because it was said to be like sesamis, which was honey and sesame seeds. It’s not hard to imagine that wheat berries sweetened with honey would naturally form a shape sort of like a pyramid.

And the word “obelisk” is simply the Greek word for a skewer. Not a very accurate name but a little closer than calling something nearly 70 feet high “Cleopatra’s needle.”