（书籍翻译）拜占庭的味道：传奇帝国的美食 （第十四部分）

作者生平：

          安德鲁·达尔比（Andrew Dalby）是一位古典学者、历史学家、语言学家和翻译家，以他关于食物史（尤其是希腊和罗马帝国）的书籍而闻名。 《Siren Feasts》 是安德鲁·达尔比的第一本美食书籍，获得了 Runciman（朗西曼）奖，他的第二本书《dangerous Tastes》在2001年获得了美食作家协会年度美食书籍。他还是《The Classical Cookbook》和《Empire of Pleasures》以及巴克斯和维纳斯的传记的作者。

《Tastes of Byzantium ：The Cuisine of a Legendary Empire》于 2003 年首次出版

ISBN: 978 1 84885 165 8

本书完整的 CIP 记录可从大英图书馆、美国国会图书馆获得

由 Thomson Press India Ltd 在印度印刷和装订 

Bread, grains and legumes

面包、谷物和豆类

 The dietary qualities of bread depended on four variables (so Simeon Seth carefully explains): the kind of grain, the making of the dough, the form of oven and the baking process. He later adds a fifth, the length of time between baking and eating: different qualities are allowed to bread which is still warm, to today's bread which is cold, and to bread one or two days old: after that, it is not good to eat.

          面包的膳食质量取决于四个变量（Simeon Seth 仔细解释）：谷物的种类、面团的制作、烤箱的形式和烘焙过程。他后来又增加了一条，即烘烤和进食之间的时间长度：仍然保温的面包、今天冷的面包和已经烘烤后放置一两天的大的面包，皆允许有不同的品质：在那之后，就不好了吃。

One can tell the superior power of wheat, Simeon Seth continues, from the fact that the raw grain can scarcely be broken by the teeth. By contrast with bread made from fine wheat, emmer bread (artos olyrites) was a makeshift when there was no other bread to be found; for example, the people of Thessalonica, almost starving in the course of the siege and sack of the city by the Normans in 1185, managed to keep going on emmer bread and on bran bread baked under the ashes. Again, it was possible to make bread from oats. But oats were 'food for cattle, not people, except when extreme famine dictates that bread be baked from them ... Such bread has an altogether unpleasant flavour' (Simeon Seth, On the Properties of Foods ，p. 137).

          Simeon Seth继续说：人们可以从“粗粮几乎不能被牙齿破碎”这一事实中看出小麦的优越性。与用优质小麦制成的面包相比，二粒面包（artos olyrites）是在没有其他面包的情况下临时使用的。例如，塞萨洛尼卡人在 1185 年诺曼人围攻城市的过程中几乎挨饿，他们设法继续吃二粒面包和在灰烬下烘烤的麸皮面包。同样，可以用燕麦制作面包。但燕麦是“牛的食物，而不是人的食物，除非极度饥荒要求用它们烤面包...... 这种面包有一种完全令人不悦的味道”（Simeon Seth, On the Properties of Foods，第 137 页）。

One almost-poetic evocation of good bread is due to the enthusiastic compiler of the dietary text De Cibis (see text 2 section i). He calls for white bread 'with a moderate use of yeast and salt, the dough kneaded midway between dryness and rawness', but that is only the beginning. There should be 'a little anise, fennel seed and mastic', additions still favoured by many Aegean bread-makers. Those same aromatics also contribute their flavour to the favourite spirits of modern Greece, ouzo and mastikha, and this is no coincidence: their health-giving qualities are widely recognized. Readers 'with a hot constitution' will not be averse to including sesame, as further instructed; bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, poppy seeds or linseed was familiar in Greece from the very earliest records and was evidently commonplace in the Byzantine Empire. The idea of kneading in a little almond oil - a very good idea - seems to be unique to De Cibis.

          对好面包的一种近乎诗意的呼吁源于饮食文本 De Cibis 的热心编纂者（见文本 2 第 i 部分）。他呼吁白面包“适度使用酵母和盐，面团揉在干燥和生涩之间”，但这仅仅是开始。应该放“一点茴香、茴香籽和乳香”，许多爱琴海面包制造商仍然喜欢这样做。这些同样的芳香剂也为现代希腊最受欢迎的烈酒、茴香酒和马斯蒂卡贡献了它们独特的风味，这并非巧合：它们健康的品质得到了广泛认可。正如进一步的指示，“体质热”的读者不会反对加入芝麻；撒上芝麻、罂粟籽或亚麻籽的面包从最早的记录开始就在希腊很常见，而且在拜占庭帝国显然易见。 揉入少许杏仁油的想法——这是一个非常好的想法——似乎是 De Cibis 所独有的。

Bread was the staple food of Byzantium. That evaluation is strongly suggested by the fact that grain comes first in 'Categories of Foods' (text 2) and wheat comes first among grains. Bread likewise comes first in Simeon Seth's On the Properties of Foods - admittedly it is helped to do so by a roughly alphabetical arrangement: the classical Greek word for 'bread' begins with alpha, artos. Epithymo to psomin kai kytalon kai psikhan, 'I love bread, both crust and crumb', wrote a hedonistic and hungry author in one version of the fourth Prodromic Poem. The phrase-book (chapter 8), under classical artos and the colloquial medieval Greek word psomin, lists all the usual types of Byzantine bread. Each had its devotees; each had its moral and dietetic qualities. 'I won't eat the bread they call "white foam", but the not-so-white bread they call wholemeal. This is the kind that grammarians and versifiers like,' to quote once more the fourth Prodromic Poem;' and the grammarians and poets knew, from reading dietary handbooks, that this wholemeal bread was much better for the digestion than any imaginable bread called 'white foam'.

          面包是拜占庭的主食。谷物在“食品类别”（文本 2）中排在第一位，而小麦在谷物中排在第一位，这一事实强烈表明了这种评估。面包同样在 Simeon Seth 的 On the Properties of Foods 中排在第一位——诚然，大致按字母顺序排列有助于做到这一点：古典希腊语中的“面包”一词以 alpha, artos 开头。 Epithymo to psomin kai kytalon kai psikhan，“我喜欢面包，面包屑和面包屑”。在第四卷 Prodromic Poem 的一个版本中写了一位享乐主义和饥饿的作者。短语手册（第 8 章）在古典 artos 和口语化的中世纪希腊词 psomin 下，列出了所有常见的拜占庭面包类型。每个人都有自己的推崇；每个人都有其道德和饮食品质。“我不会吃他们称之为‘白色泡沫’的面包，而是他们称之为全麦的不那么白的面包。这是文法家和作词家喜欢的那种，'再次引用第四卷Prodromic Poem;' 语法学家和诗人通过阅读饮食手册知道，这种全麦面包比任何可以想象的被称为“白色泡沫”的面包更利于消化。

Close substitutes for freshly-baked bread, for those unable to get this prized commodity, were the ring-shaped loaf boukellaton and the thickly sliced barley bread paximadi, both of them to be discussed when we come to army food. Pasta in some form was known, under the classical name itria, but it was not a major part of the diet. The cereal grains of the Byzantine diet were often eaten in the form of soups and porridges. These were the usual ways to eat pistos or kenkhros, millet, names that were synonymous, for the princess Anna Comnena, with unsatisfactory food. Zeia or olyra, emmer, was eaten in similar ways. Perhaps the most frequently encountered among such products was grouta, emmer gruel, the same as what is called kourkouti in late Byzantine Greek and essentially the same as korkota in dialectal modern Greek. There was also alix, emmer groats, eaten 'well boiled and rather watery, seasoned with honey, spikenard and cinnamon'. There was the rustic standby now called trakhanas - emmer dried and formed into balls with milk or yoghourt, later to be reconstituted as a sourish gruel. Trakhanas was already well known in Byzantium under the names tragana, traganos, tragos, and the oldest recipe for it, from the Geoponica, is quoted in chapter 7. Slightly less of an acquired taste was frumenty, katastaton, which with the addition of ground almonds and sugar became a luxury dessert, quite aside from the virtue (attributed to it in text 2 section i) of 'relieving dysentery'. Rice, orizin, still a relatively rare commodity, was customarily eaten in the form of a dessert - cooked with milk (as Simeon Seth helpfully specifies) and sweetened with honey or with sugar.

          对于那些无法获得这种珍贵商品的人来说，新鲜出炉的面包的紧密替代品是环形面包 boukellaton 和厚片大麦面包 paximadi，两者都将在我们谈到军用食品时进行讨论。某种形式的意大利面以经典名称 itria 为人所知，但它并不是饮食的主要部分。拜占庭饮食中的谷物经常以汤和粥的形式食用。这些是吃 pistos 或 kenkhros、小米的常用方法，这些名字对于安娜康奈娜公主来说是很熟悉的，但食物并不令人满意。 Zeia或ollyra，emmer，以类似的方式食用。在这些产品中，最常遇到的可能是 grouta、emmer gruel，与晚期拜占庭希腊语中的 kourkouti 相同，与现代希腊方言中的 korkota 基本相同。还有阿利克斯（alix）、埃默碎粒（emmer groats），“煮得很好，有点水，用蜂蜜、甘松香和肉桂调味”。有一种乡村备用，现在称为 trakhanas（特拉哈纳斯） - 将二粒小麦干燥并与牛奶或酸奶一起制成球，后来被重新制成酸粥。 Trakhanas 已经在拜占庭以 tragana、traganos、tragos 的名字而闻名，第 7 章引用了来自 Geoponica 的最古老的配方。 后天的味道稍微少一点是 frumenty（？），katastaton，它加上了地面杏仁和糖成为一种奢侈的甜点，但完全没有“缓解痢疾”的效果（在文本 2 第 i 节中归因于它）。大米，还是一种相对稀有的商品，通常以甜点的形式食用 - 用牛奶烹制（如 Simeon Seth 有益地指出的那样），并用蜂蜜或糖加糖。

The use of pulses, too, reached a high level of sophistication. Like the bread so much enjoyed by the scribe of De Cibis, these staple foods were carefully spiced, full of astonishing flavours. The phrase-book (chapter 8) gives some brief sketches of suitable recipes: see under aukhos 'Lathyrus Ochrus', erebinthos 'chickpea', lathyris 'grass pea', phaba 'broad bean', phasioulia 'black-eyed pea', telis 'fenugreek seed'. The 'Dietary Calendar' (chapter 6 text 4) shows how the spicing was to vary depending on the seasons, in order to keep the human constitution properly in balance. Simeon Seth recommends a soup of 'black chickpeas', turnips and celery, seasoned with almond oil, for anyone afflicted with renal and urinary problems. Of grass pea and L. Ochrus we read that they 'can be seasoned with olive oil and ground cumin'; broad beans might be boiled then 'tossed in salt and the best green olive oil'; black-eyed peas were boiled with pepper or mustard or oregano or caraway, and served with olive oil and vinegar or with honey vinegar. Fenugreek seed or telis, not much eaten by humans these days, was recommended by Byzantine dieticians in at least three forms - as soup; as a dried bean 'steeped, sweetened, and sprouted, eaten as a starter' with a variety of dressings; or 'well boiled, cold, flavoured with honey, spikenard and cinnamon', and in this form fenugreek was ideal as a component of the March menu.

           香料的使用也达到了很高的复杂程度。就像德西比斯的抄写员非常喜欢的面包一样，这些主食经过精心调味，充满了惊人的味道。短语手册（第 8 章）给出了一些合适食谱的简要草图：参见 aukhos 'Lathyrus Ochrus'、erebinthos '鹰嘴豆'、lathyris '草豌豆'、phaba '蚕豆'、phasioulia '黑眼豌豆'、telis '胡芦巴种子'。 “饮食日历”（第 6 章第 4 章）显示了香料如何根据季节而变化，以保持人体体质的适当平衡。 Simeon Seth 建议任何患有肾脏和泌尿问题的人都可以喝一杯“黑鹰嘴豆”汁、萝卜和芹菜汁，并用杏仁油调味。关于草豌豆和 L. Ochrus，我们读到它们“可以用橄榄油和孜然粉调味”；蚕豆可能会煮熟，然后“加入盐和最好的绿色橄榄油中”；黑眼豌豆与胡椒、芥末、牛至或香菜一起煮，配上橄榄油和醋或蜂蜜醋。拜占庭营养师推荐了至少三种形式的胡芦巴种子或telis，这些天被人类吃得不多，而且是做成汤食用；作为一种干豆，“浸泡、加糖、发芽，作为开胃菜食用”，搭配各种调味品；或“煮熟、冷、用蜂蜜、甘松和肉桂调味”，这种形式的胡芦巴非常适合作为三月菜单的组成部分。

未完待续！

新 年 快 乐 ！