Black soup

Did You Know?

• According to the comic poet Euphron, a man named Lamprias was said to have invented the Spartan black soup.
• Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the US Declaration of Independence, praised the Spartan black broth.

Ancient sources

Most ancient descriptions of black soup come from non-Spartan authors. Pherecrates, in his fifth-century BC comedy The Miners, has a woman returning from the underworld report seeing black broth flowing freely through the streets. Alexis and Matro of Pitane, Nicostratus, and Euphron also wrote about the dish. Antiphanes, a contemporary of Alexis, noted in his play The Archon that black soup was a staple of Spartan culture. Nicostratus once mocked a cook for not knowing how to prepare it, along with dishes such as thríon, kándaulos, and mattýe. An indirect reference appears in Aristophanes' Knights, where a line about tasty stews exported from Athens for the Spartan fleet is thought by scholar David Harvey to mock Spartan black broth. Julius Pollux's Onomasticon records that the black broth was a Spartan dish cooked with meat and blood.

Ingredients

No exact recipe for black soup survives. Ancient literary, medical, and lexicographic sources indicate that the Spartans used pig's blood and meat, with salt and vinegar as the only seasonings. According to Plutarch, the solid meat chunks were removed and served separately to younger attendees at banquets. In his Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch calls black soup Sparta's most famous dish and says the elders drank only the liquid while saving the meat for the young. In De Tuenda Sanitate Praecepta, Plutarch states that Spartan cooks could use only vinegar and salt and were required to use all parts of a sacrificed animal. Historian Maciej Kokoszko theorized that vinegar was not used to marinate the meat but was mixed with the animal's blood during cooking to slow clotting and prevent spoilage.

Occasions of consumption

Ancient sources disagree on how often Spartans ate black soup and whether it was a delicacy. The seventh-century BC poet Alcman suggested that ordinary Spartans ate pea soup, not meat-based black soup. Other evidence points to black soup being a modest dish: in a poem by Matro of Pitane, it appears alongside akrokólia, boiled animal off-cuts such as skin, ears, and snouts. Dicaearchus' Tripoliticus lists black soup as one of the side dishes served at communal Spartan banquets, along with máza, boiled pork, olives, cheese, figs, and sometimes fish, hare, or pigeon.

Máza, a barley bread, gruel, or flat griddle cake, was a common food for the poor across Greece and could be used as a plate. Based on Alexis and Plutarch, Maciej Kokoszko inferred that both black soup and máza were unsophisticated foods, not delicacies. Spartan banquets ended with dessert and included wine, according to Plutarch. However, Plutarch's Life of Cleomenes describes Spartan banqueting as unsophisticated, without side dishes or baked goods.

Herodotus relates that the Spartan general Pausanias, when visiting the Persian camp, ordered a Laconian dinner to show its simplicity.

Notoriety

Black soup was well known to other Greeks in antiquity. Plutarch recounts that a king of Pontus bought a Lacedaemonian cookbook to recreate the dish but disliked it; the cook replied that one could only appreciate the broth after swimming in the Eurotas River, implying that taste for it was acquired only in Spartan society. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations tells the same story but names Dionysios of Syracuse instead of the king of Pontus. Plutarch also records that the Athenian general Alcibiades ate black soup when he fled to Sparta to fit in.

In Plutarch's Life of Pelopidas, a Sybarite claimed that Spartans sought death in war to escape their wretched life and hardships, which historians Maciej Kokoszko and Joan P. Alcock have taken as evidence of Sparta's unbearable customs and food. In the Life of Cleomenes, the Spartan king Cleomenes argued against serving black soup to foreign visitors, who could not appreciate its flavour. Maciej Kokoszko theorized that the Spartans were reluctant to share the dish because of its unique taste.