December 7, 2025
By Caitlin Bradbury
In a lot of ways, food is a keystone of culture. What we eat, how we prepare it, when and with whom we eat certain foods reflects our beliefs and the environment around our society that helped form those beliefs. Food, as nourishment, is also something we need every day. How and what we eat has pushed humanity’s growth since the beginning. The first settlements emerged in river valleys with a comparative wealth of food and potential for crops.
All that to say, food is important. I would also argue that food is enjoyable. As much as I like eating a delicious meal, I also love preparing the food to share with others. I think that a combination of these reasons is why I tend to write about food so much. As a narrative device, it is something for your character to do or share in a scene. It also brings the sense of taste into a scene easily and allows a reader to better picture themselves alongside the story.
This means a good chunk of my research has been centered around what Ancient Egyptians ate, how they cooked their food, and the sources of their ingredients. It’s a broad enough topic that I know I’ll be returning to it at least a few times in the span of this blog; so welcome to the Ancient Egyptian Cookbook miniseries.
Since it is a festive time of year for me, I wanted to start with the food consumed during festivals and times of celebration. The Ancient Egyptian calendar was broken up with many days meant for celebrating their gods, Pharaohs, and the passage of seasons. At most of these, bread and beer were given out by the state and consumed en masse. A suggested figure from the 12th century BCE is that at one festival, over 11,000 loaves and 3,800 jars of beer were distributed.
In addition to these staples, sweets like fruit and honey-based treats were also eaten. Festivals were also a time for the average person to enjoy more meat than was normal in their limited daily diet. Several factors made meat something only the elite could access regularly.
Cattle were costly in both resources and time to raise and slaughter. The preservation of that much meat in such a hot environment added to the challenge of making beef widely available. In comparison, the average person had easier access to fowl like wild ducks and geese. They also used drag nets to catch fish from the Nile. These smaller sources of meat were still time-consuming and again not a daily activity.
By looking at food, and more broadly, at culture, I think we’re better able to relate to the people who filled the global past. The feeling of connection across hundreds, if not thousands, of years is one of the things I find so fascinating about history. Across the broad story of humans, when we celebrate, we celebrate with good food.
Sources:
Oppenheim, Adela. “Food and Feasts in Middle Kingdom Egypt.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 Nov. 2015, http://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/food-and-feasts-in-middle-kingdom-egypt.
Ruiz, Ana. The Spirit of Ancient Egypt. Algora Pub, 2007.
