How to eat like an ancient Olympic athlete: figs, feta, and liver

Sometimes the diets of ancient Olympians were vegetarian, but Miller’s recreation added a little variety with a recipe for calf liver from around the ancient Olympic era. He got the idea for the recipe from a partially intact Greek cookbook found at Oxyrhynchus, an archaeological site in Egypt.

Substituting an extinct ingredient

The ancient recipe is written in Greek and translates to the following in English, according to “The Classical Cookbook” by historians Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger: “Cut up good liver, marinate in oil with salt, coriander, thyme, silphium, opos, vinegar; grill on a spit at high temperature; serve.”

Since silphium went extinct over 2,000 years ago, Miller substituted the plant and its juice, known as opos, for another common ancient ingredient called asafoetida. The gum resin taken from Ferula plants is common in Indian food and has a pungent aroma and garlicky flavor.

He cut a pound of calf liver into 1-inch pieces. To make the marinade, he added 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar into a bowl then slowly poured in 9 tablespoons of olive oil while whisking. Once those ingredients emulsified, he added 1 teaspoon of salt, a pinch of asofetida, a bunch of chopped cilantro, and 2 tablespoons of thyme.

He let the meat sit covered in the marinade for an hour. (You can also leave it in the fridge overnight.) Then he put the meat on skewers and grilled them for about four minutes per side. He ate them with feta, figs, and hard bread called paximadi.

Since he’s not a fan of liver, Miller thinks the recipe would be great with a different protein. He loved the flavor but not the chewiness of the meat.

Eating like an Olympian can mean a lot of different things

In the early days of the Olympics, which started in 776 BCE, athletes stuck mostly to “dried figs, moist cheese, and wheat,” according to one ancient historian.

So Miller’s figs and feta would be right at home on their plates. Participants didn’t add meat to their training diet until a couple hundred years later, according to another writer, Pausanias.

One Olympian, Greek athlete Milo of Croton, had a slew of wrestling victories around 540 BCE. His daily diet supposedly consisted of 20 pounds of meat and bread each with copious wine. The last part strictly goes against the advice of philosopher Epictetus, who said wine should be consumed only in small quantities.

“It’s just interesting to see how it changed over time,” Miller said of ancient Olympian’s diets. “And sometimes it would be exactly the opposite of what it was just a couple generations before.”

That’s not so unlike today, where diet fads come and go, he added.