Mithaecus was a cook

Cook (profession)

A cook is a person who prepares food for consumption. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Canada this profession requires government approval ....

 and cookbook author of the late 5th century BC. A Greek-speaking native of Sicily

Sicily

Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

 at a time when the island was rich and highly civilized, Mithaecus is credited with having brought knowledge of Sicilian gastronomy

Gastronomy

Gastronomy is the art or science of food eating. Also, it can be defined as the study of food and culture, with a particular focus on gourmet cuisine...

 to Greece. Specifically, according to sources of varying reliability, he worked in Sparta

Sparta

Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...

, from which he was expelled as a bad influence, and in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

. He earned an unfavourable mention in Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's dialogue Gorgias

Gorgias

Gorgias ,Greek sophist, pre-socratic philosopher and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger...

.

Mithaecus's cookbook was the first in Greek; he is the earliest cookbook author in any language whose name is known. One recipe survives from it, thanks to a quotation in the Deipnosophistae

Deipnosophistae

The Deipnosophistae may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers...

of Athenaeus

Athenaeus

Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...

. It is in the Doric

Doric Greek

Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...

 dialect of Greek (appropriate both to Greek Sicily and to Sparta) and describes, in one line, how to deal with the fish Cepola macrophthalma

Cepola macrophthalma

Cepola macrophthalma is a fish of the of the bandfish family Cepolidae. It is found in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean from Senegal north to Norway...

:

Tainia: gut, discard the head, rinse, slice; add cheese and [olive] oil.

The ribbon-like fish here called tainia is known in Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 as cepola and in modern Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 as kordella. The addition of cheese seems to have been a controversial matter; Archestratus

Archestratus

Archestratus was an Ancient Greek poet of Gela or Syracuse, in Sicily, who wrote some time in the mid 4th century BCE. His humorous didactic poem Hedypatheia , written in hexameters, advises a gastronomic reader on where to find the best food in the Mediterranean world...

 is quoted as warning his readers that Syracusan cooks spoil good fish by adding cheese.