Haute cuisine in ancient Athens. Investigations into the dining habits of a Classical city
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to explore the dining habits of ancient Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, through the concept of haute cuisine. Using Goody’s (1982) conditions necessary for an elevated form of cooking to appear in a society, I am investigating literary and archaeological sources. The literary sources hint to a change in food attitudes in the 4th century BC. For instance, in comedies, the character of the cook appears. Moreover, the first cookbooks are also written around this time. In the archaeological material, when elite and non-elite contexts from Archaic, Classical and Early Hellenistic periods are quantified, an increase in table vessels is also noticeable around the same time. The wine of the symposium, so important in earlier times, starts to lose its dominance; food consumption becomes more visible in pottery assemblages. In addition, I will present more evidence for the presence of haute cuisine, following Goody’s conditions. I will investigate an increase in the innovation and the complexity of kitchen equipment, such as new shapes (e.g., fish-plates) and new cooking techniques (e.g., frying). Furthermore, as a center of trade networks, Athens receives new and foreign ingredients and foodstuffs (e.g., wine, spices, etc.). New people, ideas, and attitudes are also streaming in, creating favorable circumstances for new cuisines. I conclude that, according to Goody’s ideas, haute cuisine was, to a certain degree, present in 4th century BC Athens. I will also suggest that the spark for such a transformation may have originated in Athenian taverns, probably run by non-locals. The further culinary developments of later Hellenistic and Roman times have their roots in the 4th century BC Athenian changing dining habits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".