For years we believed that the ancient Greeks didn’t go to pubs or brothels - that somehow they were programmed differently and that their way of life didn’t make provision for something so base. After all, they were the thinkers and some of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known, sprang from the loins of the proverbial Athena. However, the need to meet with your fellow man, to converse, to laugh and to enjoy the fruit of the vine is inherent in all of us and where there’s a will, there’s a pub. Interestingly a new archaeological study may have solved the puzzle of the kapeleia - the lively, bustling Greek taverns so often mentioned in plays and poems but of which no solid evidence was ever found. Discovery News answered the question a while back and now we know the Greeks did it all at home! “Taverns are indeed so well hidden. We know them to have existed, yet seemingly, we cannot find any physical evidence for the buildings themselves,” said Clare Kelly Blazeby, from the University of Leeds in the UK, who presented her research last week at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Philadelphia. Suspecting that archaeologists were missing something, Blazeby reviewed artifacts unearthed at several private houses across the Greek mainland, dating from 475 to 323 B.C. She was struck by the fact that some houses had yielded hundreds of drinking cups - far too many even for well-off families hosting lavish parties. The most likely explanation, according to Blazeby, is that Greek homes doubled as pubs. “There was nothing to stop part of a house being utilized for commercial gain by using a room fronting onto the street as a shop, or indeed from using the household courtyard for business transactions,” she said. Domestic walls might have also hidden other dubious commercial activities.
Ingredients
- 950 g lean lamb, minced
- 3 large aubergines
- 150-175ml extra virgin olive oil
- 1 large red onion, finely chopped
- 3 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole and only lightly smashed
- 50ml white wine
- 1 x 400g tin diced tomatoes
- 1 x 5cm piece cinnamon stick
- 4 black cardamom pods
- 1 x handful fresh oregano leaves, chopped
- Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Topping
- 75g butter
- 75g plain flour
- 600ml full cream milk
- 200 g parmesan cheese, finely grated
- 2 medium free-range eggs, beaten
Method
- Preheat the oven at 200 C
- Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan and fry the onions until they are soft and golden and remove from the pan.
- In the same pan, add the minced lamb and fry on high until the meat is brown and loose - make sure that there are no lumps, add a drop of oil if you really need to but try to do this on the pan without the oil because lamb is quite fatty.
- Add the wine, the garlic cloves, the tomatoes, the cinnamon and the oregano and simmer gently for 30-40 minutes.
- Cut the stalks off the aubergines and cut them lengthways into ½ cm thick slices - heat up the oil in a large saucepan until it’s hot, add a splash of olive oil and fry the aubergine slices quickly until they are just soft and lightly coloured on each side, lift them out with tongs and start to layer over the base of a large (about 2,5 litre) ovenproof dish and season to taste with salt and pepper.
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This post was written by:
Jacoba Budden- who has written
71 posts on the WineCountry Blog. Jacoba's fascination with food began at a very early age and in her travels found herself gravitating towards a kitchen whenever it was possible. She traveled extensively in the past 30 years and food as well as it's history, eventually, became an all consuming obsession. Today she lives in Somerset West and when she's not studying and writing about food, she's a free lance food critic.Author's web site: Just Food Now
