Sfougata

This was served as part of the second course at the Ymir 2025 feast.

What, Where, When

• A baked savory egg dish with feta, green onions, and herbs — a conjectural reading of the Byzantine sphoungaton tradition.
• Drawn from three thinly-connected source layers: a Roman recipe for fluffy egg cookery, scattered Byzantine literary attestations of an “omelette” form, and a modern Greek dish that carries the same name.

Discussion

The Byzantine word sphoungaton appears in Andrew Dalby’s glossary as “omelette,” attested in the 12th-century Prodromic Poems both as sphoungaton and in the variant dipla sphoungata (“omelettes folded over”). A later passage from the post-Byzantine writer Damascenus Studites describes the form a little more concretely: “eggs beaten and pan-fried with onions and other aromatics.” These are the closest period attestations of a savory egg-and-aromatic dish in the Byzantine culinary vocabulary. They establish the form’s existence and its general shape — eggs, alliums, herbs, fried — but they do not give a recipe.

Behind sphoungaton sits an older technique. Apicius’s Roman recipe collection includes ova sphongia ex lacte — “spongy eggs with milk” — which uses a fluffy whipped egg-and-milk preparation pan-fried in oil. The Apicius dish is sweet, finished with honey and pepper, and bears no other resemblance to what I made; it is not the recipe ancestor. What it does establish is that the technique of producing a light, airy egg preparation in a pan was a recognized Roman culinary form, and that the etymological line from sphongia to sphoungaton represents real continuity in the underlying form even as the specific dishes diverged.

The third layer, and the one that most closely guided what I actually cooked, is the modern Greek dish, sfougata. These are made in several regional variations across Greece, including a zucchini-and-feta version associated with Chios. My interpretation borrows the modern Greek savory-egg-with-cheese-and-herbs pattern and dresses it in ingredients that are at least plausibly Byzantine in combination — feta-style brined sheep cheese, green onions, dill, mint, and parsley. None of these specific ingredient choices are documented in the Byzantine sources I have; they are filled in from the Mediterranean culinary continuum that runs through and past Byzantium.

This is, by far the most conjectural dish on the menu. The chain runs: a Roman fluffy-egg technique → a Byzantine word for “omelette” with no surviving recipe → a modern Greek dish with the same name → ingredient choices made by analogy to the broader Eastern Mediterranean palette. Each link is plausible; none is solid. I baked rather than fried for logistical reasons (a 9×13 pan in the oven is much more practical at feast scale than a stove full of skillets).

Sources

Apicius, De re coquinaria, recipe 302 — Ova Sphongia ex Lacte (Vehling translation)

FOUR EGGS IN HALF A PINT OF MILK AND AN OUNCE OF OIL WELL BEATEN, TO MAKE A FLUFFY MIXTURE; IN A PAN PUT A LITTLE OIL, AND CAREFULLY ADD THE EGG PREPARATION, WITHOUT LETTING IT BOIL HOWEVER. [Place it in the oven to let it rise] AND WHEN ONE SIDE IS DONE, TURN IT OUT INTO A SERVICE PLATTER [fold it] POUR OVER HONEY, SPRINKLE WITH PEPPER AND SERVE.

Dalby, Tastes of Byzantium, glossary entries (pp. 230-231)

Sphoungaton, omelette: Prodromic Poems 4.62. Dipla sphoungata, omelettes folded over: Prodromic Poems 3.54. Eggs beaten and pan-fried with onions and other aromatics: Damascenus Studites, Sermons I.4.

Bibliography