Unleavened bread, lamb, lettuce, olive oil, olives and red wine that they drank in a single glass made up the menu for the last dinner, in which it is also likely that fish and some vegetable stew were eaten, according to what he told EFE Almudena Villegas, specialist in the history of cooking and author of La cocina hebrea (Almuzara).
Author of more than forty books on gastronomy, cooking and the history of food, Villegas has assured that the Gospels point out how Jesus and his disciples prepared to prepare the paschal dinner – the Jewish Passover does not coincide with Holy Week, but it is also celebrated in spring-, whose central dish is the paschal lamb, a young animal born the previous winter, a tender and quality meat.
As the Jewish Passover commemorates the departure from Egypt and, therefore, the end of slavery, bitter herbs, such as lettuce, were included in the celebration in memory of slavery, since all the foods in the celebration symbolize or represent some milestone in the history of the Jewish people, according to Villegas, a member of the Royal Academy of Gastronomy and the Network of Excellence for Researchers of the European Institute of Food History.
According to the historian, at the table of the last supper there must also have been olives and olive oil which, present on all the tables of the time, was used both to dip the bread and to season the food, and it was also “the most common “some legume stew, probably lentils, the most common.
Red wine is mentioned in the Gospels, as well as that all those attending the last supper drank it from the same glass, while the fish, also probably because some of the disciples were fishermen, surely they drank it from a common source serving it on the bread, since plates were not used unless the food was liquid, in which case an individual container was used, according to Villegas.
The dessert must have been dates and dried figs, with the possibility of eating them with honey, since the apple, fig and date-based dough that became customary among the Jews is much more modern.
Villegas dedicates Hebrew cuisine to the cuisine of antiquity, from the apple of Eden, which he says was more likely to be a fig than an apple, a fruit from the East that took a long time to acclimatize in the Middle East, until the time of Jesus, with allusions to the banquets of Kings David and Solomon, which impressed the Queen of Sheba herself with their wealth.
The most common dishes of the ancient Jews were soft cakes made of non-fermented bread, since this bread was very versatile and served as a plate and even as a spoon, and dairy products and cheeses, according to the historian, who has pointed out that If the first thing that determines a diet is the territory and the climate, culture and spiritual elements also influence, hence why humans “reject food for a way of thinking”, and Jews do not accept pork.
The Bible is a basic historical source for the study of food because, although the biblical accounts may exaggerate about battles and enemies, they do not do so about food, considered a mere source of survival, according to Villegas, who it has the National Award for Research in Gastronomy, the National Gastronomy Award for the best publication and the International Academy of Gastronomy Award, among others.
The historian, for whom myths and legends in many cases are made up of a good part of reality, has pointed out that manna is more than likely not just a metaphor, and has cited a desert plant that generates seeds very light that the wind takes away, that are edible and that cannot be preserved because they are very fragile.
