The Ancient Condiments Our Ancestors Used
Flavours of the past and their modern revivals
For many of us today, condiments are an essential part of our meals, but we rarely consider how much of a luxury it is to be able to flavour your food this way. Much in the same way many spices were once prohibitively expensive for a vast portion of society, condiments were sometimes delicacies in and of themselves.
But our ancestors certainly made use of a wide variety of condiments, and many of them are the basis of a lot of our modern ones to this day.
Mustard
There is evidence to suggest that the consumption of mustard seeds goes back as far as 3000BC, though our ancestors ate a far greater variety than we do today, and the earliest mentions come from Ancient Sumerian texts, where they were ground and mixed with unripe grape juice (1). Mustard was also consumed by the Ancient Egyptians, though likely only by elites, and it was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun, who was likely buried sometime in the 1324BC (2).
The Greeks used it as both a spice and medicine, though there’s little evidence to suggest it has any…
