Ancient Gastronomy: What Did the Egyptians Eat Thousands of Years Ago?
Kenzy Fahmy
A seemingly simple question at first, but to answer we first need to take into account the fact that ancient Egyptian culture and civilization covered a span of around 3,000 years. Much can change over the course of 3 millennia, and much did. But there were also a few staples that remained consistent over the years. The Egyptians were among the most well-fed of the ancient civilizations, but what did their diets really look like? What kind of ingredients and cooking techniques did they use? What do we still eat today?
To understand how the ancient Egyptians used to eat it’s important that we first understand how they lived. The Nile, more than anything else, dictated the cycles of life for the ancients, its floods determining when crops were planted and when they were harvested. It provided enough water to support livestock as well as rich and diverse wildlife, and it enriched the soil with enough nutrients to make it of the most fertile in the world. It also set the pace for the flow of the year, including what was celebrated and when.
The Egyptians were incredibly blessed when it came to food as well as lifestyle, and the ease with which they could farm and raise livestock only made them that much more capable of building such an incredibly successful civilization. Egypt’s location in relation to the rest of the world, or what was known of it at the time, made trade easy and meant that there was also diversity in the ingredients they used as well as how food was prepared. It meant that foreign cultures and cuisines very often influenced local cooking and eating habits.
So what did the ancient Egyptian culinary scene look like? First of all, as in most cultures, what you ate and how depended largely on your social status. Farmers and laborers survived mainly on bread and beer, the two most important staples of the ancient Egyptian diet, while wealthier citizens had access to an impressive variety of produce and meat.
Grains like barley and emmer, which went into making beer and bread, were practically the backbone of the country. The Egyptians actually grew and harvested so much of the two grains that they began exporting them, which provided an important source of income for the country. Beer and bread were often used as currency, and a common theory today is that the workers who built the Giza pyramids were paid with around 4 or 5 liters a day.
Bread, much like today, was an essential part of the Egyptian diet, regardless of wealth or status. Surviving loaves and inscriptions found in tombs tell us a lot about how bread was made and about the central role it played in day to day life, including its role in sacred ceremonies and offerings to the gods. Dense disks of dough were cooked directly over hot ash, stone or over an open flame, and often contained spices like dried coriander or dried fruit.
Pulses, fruits and vegetables were also an important part of ancient Egyptian cuisine, onions and garlic being perhaps the most common. Mallow, the main ingredient of molokhia, was also a common ingredient at the time, as well as lettuce and a type of cucumber indigenous to Egypt. Lentils, and to a lesser extent chickpeas, were also popular, as was the tiger nut, which was consumed fresh, dried, roasted or boiled in beer. Contrary to popular belief though, fava beans were most likely not consumed by the Egyptians until Greco-Roman times.
Grapes were one of the most popular fruits and the Egyptians would consume them fresh, dried or fermented. They were often added to breads and cakes as a sweetener and, of course, were also used to make wine. Pomegranates and figs were also very common and were often used as offerings as well as food. Most of these foods continue to be a part of our diet until today, but some have disappeared over the years, like the Egyptian plum, and can no longer be found in Egypt.
Dairy products like milk, cheese and butter (or ghee) were another important part of ancient Egyptian cuisine, although these were likely consumed more often by wealthier Egyptians and priests. The same goes for meat, which for most of the population was consumed only on special occasions. Scenes depicted on tombs show how animals were butchered and prepared, how they were hunted and how they were consumed.
Very much like today, delicacies like brain, trotters and offal were a culinary favorite, and were usually boiled, grilled or roasted. Mutton, pork, rabbit, wild boar, duck, goose and quail were also common, as were chickens, but those came a little later. More rarely, wild animals like gazelle, hippos, ostrich and crocodiles would also be consumed. And of course, fish, almost a hundred different species, from tilapia and catfish to oysters and other molluscs.
Unsurprisingly, preservation was massively important to the ancient Egyptians, as in all traditional cultures. The absence of fridges meant that food had to be preserved in other ways. Fish and meat was dried, cured, and salted, sometimes even fermented like feseekh, a type of fermented fish that we still consume until today when celebrating Egyptian Easter. Fresh fruit and vegetables were often dried or fermented to increase their lifespan. Herbs and spices were also used to preserve fresh food, as well as add flavor, and things like cumin, fenugreek, coriander and dill were often imported from other countries.
Looking back, not much has changed. Many of the ingredients and techniques we used thousands of years ago are still in use today; if it isn’t broken don’t fix it, right? Globalization and modernization of course means that we have far more ingredients and tools at our disposal, and culinary fusion has practically become the status quo, but this is merely the evolution of our ancient diets rather than it being a whole new way of eating. The ancient Egyptians have left more than one legacy, and their food certainly deserves a spot on the list.