What's Actually in Circe's Stew in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, According to Food Historians

It should go without saying: Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of The Odyssey is filled with striking imagery.But if you’re finding that your dreams are haunted by the filmmaker’s eerie depiction of Circe’s feast, you’re not alone. The reaction online has been intense. Put more specifically: Everyone agrees the feast scene is pretty much the most disgusting part of the movie.If you haven’t found the nearly three hours to watch Nolan’s The Odyssey, allow me to give you some context here. As Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men attempt to return to Ithaca from the Trojan War aboard their ship, one of their many (many!) stops is the island of Aeaea, where, starving, the men stumble upon a woman living alone. That woman is Circe the sorceress (depicted by Samantha Morton); the crew ask her for food and she obliges, serving them—at least in this movie version—some kind of fucked-up stew.The men slurp. They chew vigorously. Wide-eyed, they shovel this disgustingly stringy stew into their mouths, their eyes wide. It’s madness! It’s gross! “All the food looks horrible,” as translator Emily Wilson succinctly put it in her review. Spoiler alert (given that it’s a centuries-old epic): Circe turns the men into pigs. Or maybe, the men already were pigs and she simply revealed their true nature! Gasp! Cinema!In the text as translated by Samuel Butler, Circe is said to make a feast of “cheese, honey, meal, and Pramnian wine.” In the film it’s unclear exactly what the stew is made of, but as the men hurriedly slurp it up, it looks protein-heavy, like strips of perhaps intestine or long slices of meat. How accurate might this have been to the Greek diet of antiquity?According to food historian Cathy Kaufman, an assistant professor in The New School’s department of food studies and chair emerita of the Culinary Historians of New York, ancient island-dwelling Greeks probably weren’t eating entrail stew with any regularity. Instead, she says, they’d be roasting goat and sheep, and eating a lot of fish all of which would be accompanied by a dense barley-based bread.Greek culinary historian Mariana Kavroulaki pointed out that rather than making stews, characters in The Odyssey were mostly spit-roasting their proteins, though that’s something of an anachronism in the text. While spit-roasting meat was a poetic throw to masculinity and hunting rituals in the source material, Greeks at the time The Odyssey takes place were indeed stewing meats, suggesting the film may be a tad more accurate than we give it credit.But the film’s depiction of a millennia-old mythology isn’t meant to be historically accurate—though the accuracy debate rages on. Circe’s big scene is no different: we’re meant to see the men consuming their stew greedily in order to note their avarice. The stew is meant to look (and sound… yeesh) revolting—a reflection of the men and their crude taste.This is all part of Circe’s spell, which eventually turns them into the pigs they truly are.Fittingly, at least in the film version, it’s not until Odysseus meets Circe’s trickery with compassion, refusing the stew, that she transforms his men back into humans. A lesson in empathy if there ever was one.