Ancient Celtic meals

[guy]

Very little is known about the diet of the Celts outside of the very biased ancient sources. Here’s Strabo In Book IV, chapter 4 of “Geography.”
 

 

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Most of them, even to the present time, sleep on the ground, and eat their meals seated on beds of straw. Food they have in very great quantities, along with milk and flesh of all sorts, but particularly the flesh of hogs, both fresh and salted.

 

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/strabo/4d*.html

 

Here’s an excellent article about the suspected pre-Roman Celtic diet:

 

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The ancient Greek philosopher, historiographer, geographer, Strabo has one of the oldest written accounts of the Celts. While Strabo himself never visited the British Isles, his accounts quote the works of Pytheas who did go to Ireland in 325BC (well before the Roman conquest in 84AD). Strabo and many of his contemporaries describe Celtic agriculture as unsophisticated, but this contradicts the various archeological sites that have been studied. Strabo does say that the Celts cultivated grain, and produced dairy (though not cheese). This is consistent with archeological finds, that show that many if not most agrarian communities in the centuries prior to the Roman invasion were heavily reliant on cattle and all the products it produced. He describes their cultivation of grain in more detail by saying that they simply “cut off no more than the heads and store them away in roofed granges, and then each day they pick out the ripened heads and grind them, getting in this way their food” (Strabo.) The grain could be used for grinding and making bread or porridge, as well as fermented to make ale.

 

 

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One of the oldest archeological sites in Ireland, Ceide Fields, is a great glimpse into Celtic agriculture. This site is over 5,000 years old, and has been studied thoroughly by archeologists. Ciede reveals that an agrarian community lived there and domesticated cattle for centuries. This was discovered through cattle bones found on site. Given that cattle is not native to Ireland, it is assumed that it was imported from continental Europe when Celts initially arrived to the British Isles in 7,000BC (Snook, 2020) . The Celts of Ireland and the British Isles grew several kinds of grains and legumes. Generally these grains and legumes were ground into flours and meals to make porridge, bread, and gruel. Ceide Fields also had remnants of grain grinding stones (or Quern stones) to make flour. Archeological analysis of skeletal remains of Celtic people reveals that the method of grinding grains made for extremely coarse flours with bits of stone, which caused people’s teeth to become worn down. 

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8ced9f818eb94929b90ce2e6c28dfda6

 

So what did they drink? Studies looking at the organic residues found on Greek ceramic fragments found in Celtic hillforts in pre-Roman France show that the Celts drank imported Greek wines, as well as local beer in these imported ceramic vessels.

 

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/11218012

 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218001

 

Max Miller does a wonderful job preparing a Celtic meal based on Strabo and the other ancient sources in this episode of “Eating History with Max Miller”:

 

 

 

Edited August 5, 2023 by guy