He takes the usual elements and ingredients and refashions them into dishes unrecognisable to the average taverna-goer. Just out in paperback, his Real Greek Food has recipes ranging from staples such as taramasalata and octopus in red wine to Kyriakou’s more elaborate interpretations of his homeland’s cooking: salad of green peppers and peaches, and squab pigeon with chestnuts and tagliatelle.. I recently witnessed a Danish dining-club demolish 33 courses at a sitting with every affectation of heroism. The menu included defiantly indigestible dishes: zebra marchand aux vins, crocodile with banana and coconut in red-curried cream and coconut milk, goose confit with foie gras in pinot-gris jelly, blood sausage in cinnamon syrup The theme was savagery civilised by sauces. The experience alerted me to the deepest purpose of feasting: this was a battle of man against the rest of nature, invoking all the battlefield-virtues of comradeship.
Gargantuan appetites are not unrelievedly gross: they are part of the civilising urge which makes human communities dominate the environments they inhabit.Now feasts are the fodder of scholarship. Archaeologists pick over prehistoric middens to identify humans’ earliest collective over-eating: current thinking puts it back in the Ice Age, among the people who created the cave art of Altamira. Paleo-historians debate the links between the multiplication of feasts in the mesolithic era and the transition from chieftaincy to kingship. Historians of antiquity contemplate the gigantic meals consumed by heroes when big meals were like big victories and big monuments  evidence of the ruler’s legitimacy and justice, means of recycling food from the leader’s table among his subjects.
Anthropologists explore such fascinating problems as why, in some cultures, classes are distinguished by the amount of food they consume, while in others it is a matter of selection, preparation and presentation. Even the sociologists are fascinated by feasts: at the University of Arizona a well-funded project is devoted to sifting through trash-cans in Tucson  much as the archaeologists scrutinise middens  to determine the celebratory food-habits of middle America. The results are disappointingly rich in Coke cans and empty potato chip packets.None of this interests Roy Strong. His “history of grand eating” only concerns the western ?te and is frustratingly focused on England, France and Italy, with an obligatory glance at classical Greece.