Mediterranean

Recipes by the places recorded in their sources.

Mediterranean

4 recipes

Whole figs, plums, and other fruit surrounded by golden honey in a clear glass vessel, illustrating the fruit-in-honey practice.

Fruit preserved in honey

Fruit and some other foods were placed in honey in ancient Mediterranean kitchens. The honey's concentrated sugar does the preserving, and wet ingredients weaken it.

Mediterranean
Fruit
Photograph of Vinegar-pickled foods.

Vinegar-pickled foods

Food placed in an already acidic liquid, vinegar, so that acidity comes from the vinegar rather than from microbes; Roman texts document the practice, and later household books extended it to vegetables, fruit, fish and meat.

Mediterranean · Traditional method
· Vegetables
Illustrative fish escabeche: cooked fish covered with a vinegar-based preparation. Escabeche varies by region; this image is not a tested preservation method.

Escabeche

Fried or cooked food covered in a vinegar-based preparation, the heat and the externally supplied acid working together; a family of methods whose early form is a Roman instruction for treating fried fish with hot vinegar.

Mediterranean · Traditional method
· Fish and seafood
Finished green lye-cured olives in a plain ceramic bowl, with a jar of the same brined olives behind it; original editorial reconstruction.
Elevated risk

Green olives lye-treated

Green olives debittered in a sodium hydroxide solution, then rinsed repeatedly and held in brine, by the University of California's published home-pickling method.

Mediterranean · Traditional method
· Vegetables