KYKEON | The Drink of Greek Heroes

Have you had a long day of fighting and besieging the ancient city of Troy? Uh-huh. Looking for that little pick-me-up halfway through your tenured journey home to Ithaca? Sure am. Well then have I got the brew for you! Kikion, the drink of heroes. Throughout ancient Greek myths and histories, Kikion pops up time and time again. So today I'm going to use the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer to try to recreate this legendary potion as best I can. This time on Tasting History. The drink Kikion crops up in ancient Greek sources over and over again. But what exactly was it? There is no recipe per se, and several of the sources have conflicting descriptions, but at least in the Iliad and the Odyssey we get a list of the ingredients. In the Iliad the Greek warrior Michaon is badly wounded by the Trojan Paris, and King Nestor takes Michaon back to his tent so that his captive servant Hecimede can take care of him and nurse him back to health. Fair-haired Hecimede made a potion for them. First she moved a table up to them, a fine polished table with a dark gleaming stand. On it she placed a bronze dish with an onion in it as relish to the drink, and also yellow honey. Next came the heap of holy barley meal. Thus in a cup the lovely woman made a Kikion for them with Pramnian wine. She grated goat's cheese into it with a bronze grater, and sprinkled white barley meal on it, and she bade them drink when she had made ready the potion. And it seems to have done its work because in the next verse they're both up on their feet like laughing and having a great time. Yay Kikion. That is definitely a better outcome than what happens after someone drinks Kikion in the Odyssey. After escaping the Cyclops and almost being eaten on an island of giants, Odysseus and his crew with only one ship left find themselves the guests of the beautiful sorceress Circe. She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine. But in the food she mixed baneful drugs that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand and penned them in the sties. Spoiler alert she turned them into pigs. Well all but Odysseus who had really great plot armor throughout the Odyssey. So with the exception of a side of onion in the Iliad and baneful drugs in the Odyssey, we have all of the ingredients for our Kikion. Barley meal, honey, goat cheese, and Pramnian wine. Now as for the consistency we get clues from the name. Kikion comes from the verb kikeo which means to churn or mix with the connotation of until thicken. And that makes sense because in his writings on Homeric hymns, the 12th century archbishop Eustathius of Thessaloniki, try saying that five times fast because even one time slow is rather hard, but he said that Kikion is not quite food, not quite drink, but something like a drinkable soup. And that means that we're going to have to add some heat into this recipe, which Homer does not mention, but you know Homer wasn't a chef so I'll give him poetic license. So for your Kikion you will need a half cup or about 100 grams of barley ground into a meal, one cup or more of dry red wine, don't worry I'll explain the or more later, one third cup or 50 grams of goat cheese, and two tablespoons of honey. So first things first you're not going to need your entire bottle of wine, so go ahead and pour your glass while you cook. Cheers. Now add your cup of wine into a small saucepan, and then stir in your barley meal, the goat cheese, and the honey. Mix everything together as best you can, then set it over low heat and stirring continuously bring it to a simmer. Once it starts to thicken a bit after about three minutes take it off the heat, and then you just pour it into a glass and wait for it to cool down to a drinkable temperature. Now if it's thickened up a little too much this is the time that you will add that extra red wine just until it's a consistency that you feel like you're going to want to drink. So while my Kikion cools let us look at where this most interesting of concoctions came from, and for that we must travel back to the time of the gods. Yeah, ancient Greece. Most everything in ancient Greece had something to do with the gods, and Kikion is no exception. And like I said the ingredients vary a little bit depending on the source, but there are always two constants the barley and the wine, both of which have strong ties to the gods. For the barley we must look no further than the goddess of the harvest Demeter, who was often depicted with a laurel of barley, or else with poppies which grow in fields of barley. Some ancient Greek and Roman coins depict her head on one side, and a stalk of barley on the other, and it makes sense that Demeter is associated with this drink, because not only was she the goddess of the harvest, but she also presided over the cycle of life and death, and as we saw in the Iliad Michaon was likely mortally wounded, but very badly wounded. He could have died and just a sip of this Kikion brings him back to health. You're not going to get back to health without a little help from Demeter and her barley. The drink was also a key component of the Eleusinian Mysteries, ancient initiation rites for the cult of Demeter and Persephone held at the Sanctuary of Eleusis. If you've ever played Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you can actually go visit the sanctuary in the game, which is kind of cool to like see it, you know, as an artist's rendering and walk around. Part of the ceremony took place in a great hall called the Telestarion, and revealing anything that had to do with the Telestarion was punishable by death, and it's likely during this part of the ritual where the initiates would fast and then drink Kikion, which would cause them to have visions of the gods. Now those visions could have been caused by getting drunk on an empty stomach, but more than likely it was because they added extra hallucinogens to the drink, or it was caused by ergot, which is a fungus that grows on barley and some other grains that can cause hallucinations. So now if the penalty for revealing anything about these rites is death, then how do we know anything about them? And for that we have to thank those bad boys of ancient Greece, the playwrights. First we have Diagoras of Melos who revealed many of the secrets in some of his poems, and according to Cicero was killed for doing so. Then there's the great playwright Aeschylus who was actually put on trial for revealing too much of the secrets of the rites in his plays. Lucky for us and for him he was acquitted possibly because he had a god on his side, the god of the theater, and it would make sense because it's that god that gave us our second ingredient, wine. Dionysus, god of theater, fertility, and wine, and hands down the coolest god of the bunch. Now the wine that's mentioned by Homer is Pramnian wine, so this wine is a special wine from ancient Greece that has quite the close connection with Dionysus himself. According to the writer Athenaeus, the wine originated on Mount Pramnos on the Isle of Icaria, a stronghold for the cult of Dionysus, and the inhabitants of the island claimed that the vine where the grapes grew to make this wine had been given to them from Dionysus himself, and to this day they still make wine on Icaria using an indigenous grape called Focchiano. Now we don't know that that is the grape that was used to make Pramnian wine, but it could be. What we do know is that the wine that they make there today is nothing like Pramnian wine of ancient Greece, and that's probably for the best because it was described as black wine which should never be drunk without watering it down first, and both Hippocrates and Galen said that it should be reserved for its therapeutic qualities. Archbishop Eustathius, here's that name again, said the Pramnian as they say is fat and strengthening, and it's not suitable for quenching thirst but rather for alleviating satiety. So if you ate too much and you're a little bloated that's the time to reach for the Pramnian wine. It was basically the ancient Greek Pepto-Bismol. The Greek grammarian Hesychius hedged his bets when describing the wine as a praiseworthy although hard wine, and Aristophanes said that the Athenians didn't like it for the Athenian people did not like hard and sour poets nor hard Pramnian wine which contracts the eyebrows and the stomach, but they prefer a fragrant wine ripe and flavored like nectar. I think I would have been an Athenian. But my two favorite allusions to Pramnian wine come in verse, something the Greeks really excelled at. Ephippus of Olympus most famous for his chronicles of Alexander the Great saying Oh how luscious, oh how fine is the Pramnian lesbian wine. All who are brave and all who are wise, much the wine of Lesbos prize. Sounds like one of those songs in the Lord of the Rings books that people just always skip over. Kind of love that. Also the the term lesbian here does not refer to the modern term lesbian but as coming from the Isle of Lesbos, which the modern term lesbian actually comes from. Etymology is fun. Finally there's the great comedic playwright Aristophanes. Shun my boy the Pramnian cup, nor Thasian drink, nor Chai on sup, nor let your glass with Peperithi and Brighton, for bachelors that liquor's too exciting. The Greeks are just so cool. Anyway we don't actually know what Pramnian wine tasted like so I'm doing my best by getting a dark dry red Greek wine. A dark dry red Greek wine that I added barley to, and cheese, and honey, and should be about ready to drink by now. I'm a little scared. Okay so here we go. Kikian. Now you'll notice I do not have a glass like they mention in the Iliad which is big and ornate and has handles and is supposed to be so heavy that when full no man could lift it. I have instead what I think is probably made for margaritas but it will just have to do. Here we go. To being a hero I guess. Greek hero. Smells like wine. It's very very thick. It's um It tastes like wine with I mean it tastes like what you'd think it would which isn't good because it's wine with barley, and cheese, and honey, and barley. That's gonna be stuck in my teeth for a while. Yeah I cannot in good conscience have anyone else make this. I mean if you want to go ahead but I'm not going to endorse Kikian at all. It's um it's really interesting. I uh if I mean even if even if you didn't cook it it would I think it would have the same flavor. It would just be even more like just things floating in it. This at least kind of reminds me of like boba tea which I don't really like because of the texture because the barley pieces just like and I don't maybe it's also some of the cheese didn't isn't like completely melted it's I don't know it's not I can see why I can see why maybe it lost favor after the heroic age because you have to be a hero to drink this. Mmm Kikian. I'm gonna take another. That wine is really dry. That wine is really dry even the honey it just doesn't oh and I can taste the cheese in that one. That's weird. That's not good. That's not good at all. Wow. Yeah I'm glad that I did this. I'm glad that I did this and and saw you know what it could be. There are different versions written about but this is essentially going to be what it is and it's um it's not good. It's not good. But that's what it's all about right? Tasting History. Um so that's that's the name of the show. He said the name of the show mom. Anyway uh yeah like this video subscribe and I will see you next time on Tasting History.