So I just got back from Greece, and while I was there I visited Olympia
site of the original ancient Olympic games where my favorite Olympian Milo of
Croton would carry a cow on his shoulders the entire length of the field just to
slaughter and eat it when he got there. So to honor Milo and other ancient Greek Olympians
I've decided to make an ancient Greek recipe for marinated calf's liver skewers served
with figs, feta and barley bread. So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this
video as we bulk up like an ancient Greek Olympian this time on Tasting History. So asking the question what did an ancient Greek
Olympian eat turns out to have a lot of answers because the ancient Olympics were panhellenic so men came from all over the Greek
speaking world from city states as far as Iberia in the west all the way
to the shores of the Black Sea in the east. Also the games took place over a very long period of time at least from 776
BC all the way to 393 AD, and so over that span of time
eating habits tended to change. Especially because just like today there always
seemed to be a new fad diet for athletes. When it comes to the very first
Olympic games Diogenes says that "Athletes trained on dried figs,
on soft cheese, and on wheatmeal." So that's easy enough, but not too complicated
so I'm going to fast forward a couple centuries to about the 6th Century BC when it said that "...Their food was bread made from barley
and unleavened loaves of unsifted wheat. For meat they ate the flesh of
oxen, bulls, goats, and deer..." So we'll get some figs, some feta cheese, and some of the dry barley bread from
Crete known as paximadi. That is this, it's basically over baked or
twice baked barley bread that [Greek clack clack] has turned into hardtack. [clack clack] What we're cooking though is the meat
and for that I'm looking to an ancient Greek recipe written on a Papyrus that
was found in Egypt. The Greek text says "Cut up good liver, marinate in oil with salt,
cilantro, thyme, silphium juice, vinegar; grill on a spit at high temperature; serve." Now liver is a rather polarizing meat, so if it's not your cup of tea feel free
to swap it out with a different protein so you are actually making
something that you want to eat. It's the same thing that you can do when you
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free meals at hellofresh.com. Now for this recipe which is not from
Hellofresh what you'll need is: 1 pound or a half kilo of calf's liver, or any other meat. I actually don't even
like liver but I'm having it because that is what is in the ancient Greek recipe but if
you want to do sirloin or chicken then do it. 9 tablespoons or 135 ml of olive oil, 3 tbsp or 45 ml of red wine vinegar, a small bunch of cilantro chopped up, 2 tablespoonds of thyme leaves, a teaspoon
of salt, and a pinch of asafoetida powder. Now that last ingredient might have you saying uh I didn't see asafoetida
in that original recipe and you're right. It actually called for silphium
but silphium went extinct maybe because now they actually think that they possibly
found the plant that it was in parts of Turkey but either way you're not going to get
a hold of it so asafoetida is the way to go. Even in ancient Rome when they ran out
of silphium during the reign of Nero they switched to using asafoetida. Now one thing you want to be sure of when you're using this ingredient is that you just use
a pinch about an 1/8 of a teaspoon at most. It has a really, really strong flavor and especially before it gets
cooked it does not smell good. They call it Devil's
dung, that's another name for it. It smells like rotting burnt garlic and onions. Once it's cooked it has a very unique and and
lovely flavor but before cooked not so much so if you're going to store it in your pantry make
sure to seal it put it into a Ziploc bag or two, and then put it in there otherwise
everything's going to smell that way. So first take the liver and slice it
into bite-sized pieces about an inch or so. Then in a large bowl add the vinegar
and pour in the olive oil in a stream, vigorously whisking the entire time. This
will help the ingredients emulsify. Continue to whisk until the two are fairly well mixed and then whisk in the
salt, and the asafoetida powder, as well as the cilantro and thyme. Then add in the chopped liver and mix until
it's well coated and set aside to marinate. Now you can leave this out of the
fridge and let it marinate for like an hour or better yet put it into the
refrigerator and let it marinate overnight. Once the meat has marinated put the
pieces onto a wooden or metal skewer, and and set it over an open fire or in the oven. I've opted to use a little grill for this one so
I get some of that smokey flavor and a bit of char on the liver, I think it'll help with the texture, and after about 4 minutes on one side just turn the skewers over and cook
for another four or 5 minutes, or until they're cooked all the way through. Cooking it will help with the
texture but it's also going to let those flavors mellow because there
are some really strong flavors fighting for dominance in this dish. You've got the
liver itself which is a very strong flavor as well as vinegar and cilantro, and
the asafoetida powder which can be very, very overpowering if you use too much. It's like the Flavor Olympics and before we
find out who's going to win these Olympics let's talk about the ancient Greek Olympics
and the diet of an ancient Olympian. The first recorded Olympics took place
in Olympia Greece in the year 776 BC, and were held every 4 years for nearly 1200 years. They began as part of a large religious festival
to honor the god Zeus which is why at Olympia they had the great golden statue of Zeus which was
one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now the athletes that competed were all male Greek
citizens or after the rise of the Roman Empire male Roman citizens but
especially before the rise of the empire it was not always safe to travel
in the Greek-speaking world because the city states were always fighting hence in the month surrounding the games a sacred
truce known as ekecheiria was called. Athletes, officials, and spectators
were all under the protection of the ekecheiria and should you break
this truce then you would be banned from participating in the Olympics. There was actually one point where the entire
city of Sparta was banned for just that reason. Now the link between the games and food starts with the very first winner of
the first recorded Olympics. He was a man named Koroibos and he was a
cook and baker from the nearby town of Elis which was the town that hosted the
Olympics but it wasn't baking that won him the kotinos or the olive
wreath that they gave to winners, but rather it was because he won the
stadion which was a race around the stadium, and was at that point in time
the only game that there was. It was one race so it was quick, and then you know they'd go on
and do the rest of the festival. It actually wasn't until the 12th Olympic
games that more events began to be added. Eventually there were 18 events that included
several foot races, wrestling, boxing, chariot racing, horse racing and the hoplitodromos
which was a race dressed in full armor of the Greek military including
helmet, shield, and spear and that makes sense because for much of the history of the Olympics it was
a way to show one's military prowess so many of the games mimicked things that
you would be doing on the battlefield. Even the training would be things that were
done in battle like the ancients talk about Olympians training by holding 4 horses by their reigns or dressing all in that
armor and then going swimming. Less militaristic activities might include
chasing wild animals around or as we do today just lifting heavy things, like on the isle of Thera sometimes now called
Santorini there was a stone of volcanic rock found. It weighed 1,060 pounds and it was
inscribed with the name of the strong man Olympian who had lifted it up off the ground ground. "Eumastas the son of Kritoboulos
lifted me from the ground." Now much of this training was done in a gymnasio or gymnasium which is quite different
from what we think of as a gym today. One of the big differences was it
wasn't just a place to train your body but also to train your mind. They would have libraries and
lecture halls attached and there are even a number of dialogues
from the great philosophers like Plato and Antiochus which take place in gymnasio. It was all about gaining control over the mind
as well as the body and some of the training was more centered on your mind, like you would spend an entire day
just doing breathing techniques or you would have to stand for two full
days with your arms raised up in the air. I could go maybe for like 5 minutes. One of the more common ways to focus your
mind so you were ready to compete was to abstain from sex. A man named Kleitomachos who was a champion
at pankration, a sort of violent fusion of boxing and wrestling took his abstenion from
sex during training to a whole new level. If anyone at dinner turned
the conversation to copulation he would stand up and leave, and on the streets if "He saw dogs entwined, he turned away." He was definitely hardcore
as was anyone who practiced any of these sports that involved boxing, because they didn't wear any
kind of protective head gear, and the bouts could last up to
4 hours and really only stopped when somebody either gave up or
broke the rules. The Roman poet Lucillus wrote about the face of
one of these contestants after a fight. "When Ulysses returned to his
birthplace after twenty years of absence his dog recognized him immediately.
You, on the other hand, are so unrecognizable after four hours of fighting that neither dogs nor
people will know who you are." And it's said that Eurydamas a man from Cyrene
lost most of his teeth during a boxing bout but swallowed them rather than
spit them out just so he wouldn't give his opponent the satisfaction of knowing that he'd knocked most of his teeth out. Though the severity of some of these fights
might have been rather exaggerated by some of the later authors like the
Greek Pausanius wrote that a Greek named Damoxenos once punched
a man in the gut during a fight and "With the sharpness of his nails and the force
of the blow he drove his hand into his adversary, caught his bowels, and tore them out." I mean that's some real Mortal
Kombat stuff right there. Fatality. Perhaps my favorite story of Olympic training
comes from the 6th century BC wrestler, and winner of six Olympic Games Milo of Croton. Now he was very likely a real person but the tales of Milo have gone to
mythic proportions and so it's kind of hard to tell what's real and what's not, but they still give us us
an idea of what the ancient Greeks thought were great feats of strength. "He would grasp a pomegranate so firmly that
nobody could rest it from him by force, and yet he did not himself crush it. He would stand upon a greased quoit, and make fools of those who charged him
and tried to push him from the quoit... He would tie a cord round his
forehead as though it were a crown. Holding his breath and filling with
blood the veins on his head, he would break the cord by
the strength of these veins." But most famously it was said that following
each Olympic game he would get a calf, and would carry it around on his
shoulders for the next four years until the next Olympic Games at which
point it would be a full-grown cow weighing like 1,200 pounds so probably not true but still great story. Then he would take the cow and walk the
entire length of the Olympic stadium, and slaughter it. Then they
would feast on this cow. Details of that are sparse but I'm going to say that they probably marinated it and
put it on skewers before roasting it just like we're doing with the liver today. Either way it would have been a lot of food
so surely he shared it because even the most outlandish stories of Milo of Croton say that he
ate 17 pounds of meat a day, far from a full cow. Now whether or not he was actually eating a
full cow at the beginning of each Olympic Games or even had a cow to eat it is definite that people feasted on
beef at the end of the Olympic Games, because on that last day they would make a
sacrifice of 100 oxen known as a hecatomb. They would be brought up to the altar of Zeus and
sacrificed then they would be roasted or boiled, and the smoke or steam would
rise up to appease the gods leaving a lot of meat for everybody
else to eat, everybody else to eat and for most Greeks that was the only time
that you really got to eat a lot of meat. Though Greek olympians were
far from your average Greek, most of them came from very wealthy
military families who could afford meat, and should they win they would
be treated like celebrities and would often be given free food for life. Though like Diogenes says at least
at the beginning of the Olympic Games the Olympians didn't want meat. They wanted dried figs, soft cheese and wheatmeal. It wasn't until Pythagoras came
along that meat was on the menu. Diogenes says that he "Was the first
to prescribe athletes a diet of meat, the first athlete being Eurymenes." What's interesting is that while many
people agree that this Pythagoras is the Pythagoras of Pythagorean Theorem fame Diogenes is not so sure. Yes he does include this tidbit
in his biography of Pythagoras. He says that Pythagoras was a vegetarian and so it
might have been a different Pythagoras altogether though according to another ancient writer Pausanias it wasn't Pythagoras at
all who brought meat to the table. Rather he says it was a long-distance runner named Dromeus of Stymphalos. "He is said to
have conceived the idea of a meat diet; up to this time athletes had
fed on cheese from the basket." But whoever it was by the 6th century BC
people had stopped just eating figs and cheese, and had definitely gotten on that meat train. This is the point when Philostratus says that they would eat their barley bread as well
as oxen, bulls, goats, and deer..." Now he was from Athens but was writing at the height of the Roman Empire and he
kind of pined for the older days, the pre-Rome days in Greece and he says that
the ancient Olympians not only did they eat meat but they "Washed in rivers and springs...
learned to sleep on the ground... others on beds made of straw
they gathered from the field... they rubbed themselves with the oil of
the wild olive and phylia. This style of living made them free from sickness
and they kept their youth a long time. Some of them competed in eight Olympic Games, others for nine, they were
also excellent soldiers... They made war a training for athletics, and
they made Athletics a training for war." He laments that the Greek athlete under Roman
rule had become not a warrior but a civilian, lazy, soft in a large part due to their diet. "As the Sicilian gluttony for
fancy food has gained popularity, the guts went out of athletics and more important, trainers became too easy on
their pupils... [Doctors] gave us chefs and cooks to please our palates. They turned athletics into
glutton with bottomless stomachs. Doctors fed us the bread of Mykonos, white bread
made of ground meal sprinkled with poppy seeds, and introduced the eating of fish,
contrary to previous medical practice. They also introduced the
use of pork to athletes..." Luckily Philostratus also gave us a way to clock these overeating athletes
should you come across one. "You can recognize an athlete who overeats
by his thick eyebrows, gasping breath, and prominent collarbones, as well
as rolls of fat around his waist. Those who drink too much wine have
an excessive paunch... and too much drinking is noted by a quick pulse." But if as an athlete preparing for the Olympics
you find that you have indeed eaten a bit too much worry not for "Those athletes who have eaten too much...
should be massaged in a downward direction, so that the excess weight may be removed
from the important parts of the body." Oh how I wish it actually worked that way, just like squeezing toothpaste
out of a toothpaste tube. I do appreciate his advice to those who have imbibed a little bit too
much the night before training. "An excess of wine in the athlete's body
requires moderate exercise to bring on sweating. We should not make people in this
condition take hard exercise, but we should not excuse them
from their workout entirely." And it is a good rule of thumb not to
push yourself too hard after a long night of partying. There's actually a story of an
ancient Greek Olympian who won the Olympics. His name was Gerenos and after he won he decided
to celebrate and partied with his friends drinking a lot and eating a bit too much. "As a consequence of this unaccustomed
way of life, he was short on sleep. On the third day after his victory he came to the gymnasium and told his
trainer that his stomach was upset and that he felt terrible." Well the teacher was a bit upset because
Gerenos had thrown off the tetrad which was the 4-day training cycle
of Olympians and so as punishment he made the workout even
harder and halfway through Gerenos just died. 0_0 Which is probably why I'm not cut out
to be a ancient Greek Olympian but that doesn't mean that I can't eat like one. And here we are a meal fit
for an ancient Greek Olympian. So I'm going to start with the liver even
though I don't really like liver... Here we go... So first the good stuff, the
flavor is actually surprisingly uniform and mild. None of the flavors- the very strong flavors are
popping out as kind of dominating everything else, you get that asafoetida. There's definitely like
a garlickyness there, kind of a burnt garlic, but in a pleasant way, and it's not
overpowering. It can be overpowering. The liver is not overpowering and that's actually what I was most worried about. So yeah
the flavor is quite nice. It's earthy but it doesn't have that metallic taste
that some sometimes liver has. It's more of an earthy, kind of an
herby flavor and you do get that smoke. Now for the not so nice, I don't like liver. Sorry I'm knocking things
off. I just don't like liver. The texture is so- I'm expecting meat and I'm getting like really chewy mushroom. It's kind of
chewy and then porous and then kind of like just dissolves into grit. :x That's not
a good thing. Also gets stuck in your teeth. Like, not a fan of that. I would definitely go
with something more like a sirloin. But you know it is what it is. Now when it comes to the figs and cheese, I
mean it's going to be delicious, I know it is. So good. One thing I really love is those two things, the saltiness of the feta
and the sweetness of these figs. They just compliment each other so well and then- [tiny clacks] these, the Creten hardtack. [Clack Clack] Hm. Crunch on this. The flavor is fantastic. So to sum it up: cheese fantastic, figs fantastic, the bread fantastic. Even if it is a little bit hard to eat. And the meat, the flavor A+, the texture F. Just hate that. But you know use a different meat and then it's
going to be absolutely fantastic, and it is a unique flavor that you're not going to get with
a lot of modern foods, so yeah! So if you stuck around to the end of the video I'm going to share
with you a little bit more about Milo of Croton, and specifically how he died. There was an old tree stump that was in his town and so he decided that he
was going to rip it apart, and tear it out from the ground, but he can't. The tree wedges his arm in, he
can't get his arm out, and so that night dogs, and lions, or wild beasts
come and devour him. So we don't really know what the moral of that
story is except don't you know stick your arm inside of a dead tree, it might get
stuck and you'll get eaten by animals. I guess that's a good moral, it's a good moral. Anyway make this food or at least some of it, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
