Mediterranean food is rooted in the vast cultural world of the Near East.
Homer tells how the Phoenicians (2nd millennium to 8th century BCE) traded with Libya which he describes as a land rich in cattle and thus meat, milk and cheese. Salt extraction complemented fishing. Forests were important, yielding important supplies of game, deer, antelopes, gazelles, wild boar. Products picked or gathered, along with meat from hunting, had for long been man’s only food, including grasses, roots, tubers, fruits and seeds, which continued to be eaten for many centuries.
The civilisation of Carthage was characterised by an agricultural development entirely dependent on Mediterranean trade. Classical sources provide a whole series of reports of the Carthaginians’ diet, especially at the end of the Punic era, from which a history of the food production and customs of the first phase of Phoenician colonisation of the West can be constructed.
Undoubtedly, these colonies preserved the food traditions of the motherland.
However, these Eastern traditions then adapted to local customs, marked by the geography of the Western regions. Cereals were the chief food of the Phoenician colonies in the West. The Carthaginians were labelled by Plautus as “great eaters of puls punica”, a porridge made of several cereals which then served as the basis of the daily meal, and sometimes the only dish, in which cheese, honey and eggs were mixed. Cereals were also the basic ingredient of a biscuit called “punicum”.
The presence in many houses of “tabounas”, earthenware bread ovens still used today in Morocco and Tunisia, show that the Phoenician populations in the West were great eaters of bread, both leavened and unleavened. Vegetables were grown in the luxuriant gardens and orchards of the large estates. Olive growing was widespread, as was that of fruit trees: pears, apples, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pistachio nuts, chestnuts. The date palm, often depicted on votive stele and coins, may have had a religious function, while the Carthaginian pomegranate was so famous at the time that the Romans called it “mela punica”. Unlike cereals, for which yields remained modest, the best lands were devoted to olive and vine growing. Grapes were eaten fresh or dried.
Livestock raising (sheep, goats and cows) provide milk and dairy products, but the meat of these animals was only eaten on certain occasions. North-African votive stele sometimes depicted sheep with a short fat tail, typical of the species still found today in Tunisia.
Fish products were also eaten by the Carthaginians, who ate fish, shellfish and crustaceans (mullet, bass, grouper, sea bream, red mullet, mackerel, sole, tuna, swordfish, prawns, lobsters).