Black broth

Melas zomos, the dish that made Spartan food proverbial. Pork boiled in its own blood, sharpened with vinegar and salt. It was the staple of the common mess, and the older men are said to have preferred it to the meat itself.

Plutarch preserves the account that a visitor from Pontus, having bought a Spartan cook in order to taste it, found the broth disgusting, and was told by the cook that it wanted one seasoning: a bath in the Eurotas first. The joke is not about cookery. It is the standard Greek explanation of Spartan diet, that the food was designed to be endured rather than enjoyed, and that hunger and exertion supplied what the pot did not.

No recipe survives from a Spartan hand. Everything known about the dish comes from outsiders describing a city they found strange, which is worth holding in mind whenever Spartan austerity is quoted as fact.