Food That Made The History
If we talked about Egypt we can’t miss the food, the food was the pillar and the source for Ancient Egyptians’ to give them the power and strength which gave them the energy that helped them in the building process of their civilization.
As we all know ancient Egyptian food was the source of so many dishes in the modern times in Egypt or even outside Egypt in all periods, for simple example the sourdough bread was originally originated in ancient egypt as the bakeries used to leave pieces of the previous dough to activate the new one and this was the oldest type of yeast found in ancient Egypt.
The Ancient Egyptians knew huge number of types of bread some said that it reached to over 100 types from the sweet bread to the sour one, the bread was given to the gods as offerings with meat with geese and ducks of course.
Food was very important for the ancient Egyptians and they usually eat three meals a day on a small circular table and they always eat one meal as a family, sometimes the food is sacred or more particularly drinks as milk and wine which were offered to gods as offerings in the Nu jars sometimes the food is forbidden as the huge fish in the Nile as they thought that this fish ate some parts of the sacred body of Osiris when he was in the Nile after the conspiracy of his brother Seth.
Some food was for the wealthy families as the ox meat or the various types of birds as the geese and ducks with bread that were mixed by eggs and butter and fresh fruit baskets with some sweets for desserts, the poor families were used to have bread with some legumes and fruit jams for desserts as the Egyptians were civilized enough to know the basic meal courses and having a treat after meals.
Let’s have a brief introduction about the food in Ancient Egypt:
The agricultural products:
Of course we should but this in the top of the list; the whole civilization was based on this base which is the agriculture.
The products divided to three sections; first one is the grains and mainly consists of barely the basic grain in ancient Egypt which was used in making beer and it’s not like the modern beer but it’s some sort of purification mechanism for the water to purify the water from any impurities and also was used in making bread, wheat which came next was the main grain in making bread as it’s more softer to chew and helped in producing the oldest yeast in ancient Egypt which is called the sour dough nowadays in more specific the gluten in the skin of the wheat grains is containing gluten which is helping in raising the dough, the ancient Egyptians used to make the best use of all their surroundings and resources as they invented nearly more than a hundred of bread kinds and we still use it as Egyptians nowadays as the Solar bread which is still used in Upper Egypt, this kind of bread used to be fermented under the sun rays and then completely cooked in the oven and other types of bread appeared with the evolution and passage of time in ancient Egypt as mixing the bread with honey and dried fruits with butter and eggs or flatten the dough to a very thin layers and place them over each other and cover it with ghee to make the modern delicious Feteer that you can eat everywhere in Egypt with many types of bread that we don’t have recipe written because they used to tell the recipe to each other not to write it down unfortunately.
The meat products:
The ancient Egyptians were mainly rely on the meat products in their diets to give them proteins for their hard labor that they used to do every day like Cows, Buffalos, and Ox and for the white meat they used to raise geese and duck the chickens were introduced in the time of Tuthmose III, for the fishes the Nile was the main source of fishes with different types but some types now are extinct from the famous types are Tilapia, Zander, Mullet, Synodontis and the Catfish.
The Diary products:
Of course the Egyptians knew milk and how to use it wisely, they drunk it and gave them as offerings to gods in the Nu jars as in the statues of King Tuthmose III in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But the most amazing thing that they knew how to make butter and cheese from this milk and it was found in the tombs as food for the deceased to eat in the afterworld.
Other products:
The ancient Egyptians used to as we said before used to make the best use of all their surroundings and resources; there were some food that were getting bad quickly so they invented some ways to save this food for long time to have the ability to store them for long time; they used to dry the fruit from water and save it dried or to boil it with some sweeteners to make jams, they also used to clean the inner of the fish and cover it with salt and dry it as the Nile was producing more than the need of the people so to save the large amount of the fish they dried it with salt and this habit is strong enough to continue to our modern days where the modern Egyptians used to eat this salty dried fish in Sham El Nessim day which is a celebration for the spring season, they also was the first to make grapes wine in history as they used to squeeze the juice in large press for only the grapes and it was mainly for the wealthy people.
The ancient Egyptians used to made high quality food and also serve it to the gods in the temples and shrines from the milk and the wine to the meat and Feteer.
