The early Eucharist has usually been seen as sacramental eating of token bread and wine in careful or even slavish imitation of Jesus and his earliest disciples. In fact, the evidence suggests great diversity in conduct, including the use of foods, in the first few hundred years. This study describes and discusses these practices fully for the first time, and provides important new insights into the liturgical and social history of early Christianity.

"This study of the variety of food and drink practices in early Christian ritual meals is a fascinating contribution to the study of Eucharistic developments....The author...expands the horizon of traditional liturgical history....It is a useful catalogue of a wide range of early Christian and collateral material....this resource for taking a new and more differentiated look at early Eucharistic development makes an important contribution."

"McGowan argues that there was no single and unified tradition of a bread and wine Eucharist in the first through fourth centuries. Rather, the literary evidence reveals that Christians ate a variety of foods very early on in Eucharistic meals."

Andrew McGowan, Lecturer in New Testament and Early Christianity, University of Notre Dame, and Canon of St George's Cathedral