Rusks and Mastic

Teaching Byzantine history offers educators a fascinating opportunity to explore how the Roman Empire continued from antiquity into the late Middle Ages. As with any history course, standard lectures and discussion of primary sources are essential to teaching effectively about Byzantium. Via lectures, instructors can explain complicated subjects such as Chalcedonian Christology and the Byzantines’ relationship with the Kyivan Rus’. Through primary source discussion, instructors can guide students into analyzing historical evidence in texts like The Secret History by Procopius and The Alexiad by Anna Komnene. In addition to these traditional teaching methods, I have adopted another strategy for my university-level Byzantine Empire course: incorporating food and food history into the curriculum. During a class meeting dedicated to “Byzantine Cuisine,” I bring in six Byzantine foods for my students to sample: barley rusks, olives, feta cheese, pork sausages (loukaniko), bougatsa (a pastry), and the sweet Easter bread called tsoureki. I also pass around five of the Byzantines’ favorite spices – rosemary, cinnamon, anise, mastic, and mahlep – so that students can inhale their aromas. A significant learning outcome of this lesson is that students will be able to explain a fundamental aspect of daily life in Byzantium: what and how people ate and drank. More specifically, as students sample these foods and smell these spices, they are adding gustatory and olfactory experiences to the historical facts they have learned.