SC - Midas feast redux

[margali]

Well, sounds like more food myth is spread.

I do hope that their handouts explained things better than this reporter
reports!

margali
lamb stew too spicy - crap. Take that boy to any indian resteraunt and
feed him real food! I bet he has never had anything but american style
lamb-roast til it is well done and served with mint/apple jelly!

<<Sunday September 24 1:53 PM ET
Scientists Eat Midas Feast of Grog, Lamb Stew

By David Morgan

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - For only the second time in nearly three
millennia, the legendary King Midas of Phrygia was honored this weekend
by
admirers who gulped a special golden elixir and devoured an authentic
spicy
lamb stew.

This time, the entourage was led not by purple-robed Phrygian noblemen,
but
by U.S. archaeologists in dinner jackets and cocktail dresses who
recreated
Saturday parts of the 2,700-year-old funeral feast of the king known for

his golden touch.

In a first for science, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology reconstructed the recipes for the drink and

main course of the original dinner from leftovers unearthed in Midas'
Iron
Age tomb 43 years ago in central Turkey.

``Pan scrapings,'' joked archaeologist G. Kenneth Sams of the University
of
Pennsylvania. ``When you come right down to it, that's what's brought us

here tonight, pan scrapings.''

Universities have been hosting recreated Greek and Roman banquets for
some
time.

``But what you usually get from those is a composite of foods eaten over

hundreds or even thousands of years,'' said Patrick McGovern, a
University
of Pennsylvania archaeological chemist who identified the world's oldest

wine, from about 5,400 B.C., and the oldest known beer, from about 3,400

B.C. ''I don't think anybody's ever tried to produce a feast like this,
recreating a specific historical event by using the actual remains as a
guide,'' said McGovern, who led the team which did the chemical analyses
on
the ``pan scrapings'' recovered from Midas' tomb in the ancient city of
Gordion, about 60 miles southwest of Ankara.

The 150 dinner guests, who paid up to $150 to attend, sat at tables
covered
with royal purple and decorated with golden apples.

For an aperitif, diners got ``King Midas's Golden Elixir,'' an odd
mixture
of beer, wine and honey mead that was the grog of choice not only for
Midas
but for other monarchs of the ancient Mediterranean world including the
mythical King Agamemnon of Mycenae, who led the Greeks against Troy.

``The stew is way too spicy,'' University of Pennsylvania archaeologist
Keith DeVries said of the piece de resistance -- lamb stewed in lentils,

olive oil, honey, wine and anise.

The museum's guests also munched on olives, figs, goat cheese, a garlic
and
olive spread and rustic breads. Diners were also served a watercress and

goat cheese salad with cherry vinaigrette. Dessert was a fennel tart.

The meal included a decidedly unauthentic chocolate truffle and coffee.
Cocoa is native to what is now Latin America while coffee is thought to
originate in Ethiopia.

According to myth, Midas was a Macedonian king with a rose-garden palace

when the god Dionysus granted his wish that everything he touched would
turn to gold. The wish became a curse when even food turned to gold.
Midas
won reprieve by journeying to Asia Minor and washing in the river
Pactolus.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown some of the
myth
to be true.

The Midas of history was a warrior king of an Indo-European people who
migrated to Asia Minor from the Balkans around 1,000 B.C. Known as King
``Mita'' to the neighboring Assyrians, he had a large palace on a
semi-arid
prairie that came to life with wild flowers each spring.

But scholars suspect that Midas' legendary gold was actually polished
bronze vessels that Greek storytellers either mistook for gold or
embellished for the purposes of entertainment.

``The real gold was what we found in those vessels,'' said McGovern,
referring to a handful of copper-colored dust that had been the grog and
a
clump of material resembling dried tree-bark shavings that had been the
spicy lamb stew.

The museum, which has research projects under way in 18 countries from
Mongolia to Bolivia, is hoping to turn the menu of the Midas feast to
gold
by offering it as authentic royal banquet fare to banks, law firms and
other possible donors.

The days of adventurous archaeologists like the fictional Indiana Jones,

who pilfered ancient relics from exotic sites and brought them home, are

long gone.

The contents of the Midas tomb, for instance, remains in Turkish
museums,
leaving this weekend's diners to sit in an Egyptian gallery beneath the
3,800-year-old stone visage of the Pharaoh Ramses II.

``Today, we need to find creative ways to connect our research to the
public,'' said museum director Jeremy Sabloff. ''This is one of
them.''>>