Home -> Articoli -> Roma - Alimentazione e banchetti

News about Roman alimentation

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

A great variety of way of living existed in the ancient world. Populations of those times were divided in many nations and even in a myriad of little state-towns. Of course every one of them had its own customs, and also their ways to prepare a banquet and how they cooked it were different. Then little by little with the extension of the Roman domination everything became more flattened. It was inevitable: From the end of the republic, the great town became a veritable races melting pot. In Rome one could meet men coming from any part of the world, people who, attracted by its growing power and wealth, came there in masses. Apart of them in Rome lived all those who, brought there as slaves from distant countries, became tutors, pedagogues, cooks, cup-bearers and ended by spreading in everyday life all their customs included also their special recipes. In Rome in conclusion all the cultures, the fashions and the gastronomies of the rest of the world melted together and the town absorbed those influxes but choosed among them. Thus Rome said the last word on everything and everybody accepted it.
We find all the news about what the Romans ate, what they liked and how they cooked in the literary sources, starting from the ancient treaties on agriculture. The one that gives us more facts is also the oldest of them - Cato the Censor’s one - a very extensive work composed between the III and the II century B.C, a book where, apart of giving us all the notions on farming and raising livestock, he adds also some simple and very good cooking recipes, for which , with great accuracy, he specifies the ingredients, the doses and the cooking methods, and he does it in such a way that it is easy for us to confection them. Other news we also find in many other authors.
Among them we have many who very accurately described the convivial life of their times: simple dinners among little groups of friends; luxurious banquets offered by the emperors; festive and noisy orgies and so on. Thus, in a novel – the Satiricon -Petronius, the elegant patrician who, for his misfortune, was Nero’s contemporary describes at length a banquet offered by Trimalchio’s, and depicts the simpleton, but very rich host, while, with his court of freemen, he tries to imitate the luxury and the refinement of the emperor and his retinue.
Juvenal, for his part, tell us the tale of a gigantic turbot that a fisherman gave – against his will, we must say – to Diocletianus, the Emperor, a gift that, as there was no cooking pan large enough to cook it, produced a lot of turmoil and even a plenary Senate’s reunion. As a matter of fact the cruel Emperor, unable to decide what to do, summoned with urgency all the Senators ordering them to come to his Villa Albana. They came, but trembling and with a lot of apprehension fearing that, for some unknown reason, this sudden injunction could only mean displeasure and even death for anyone of them. But it was only the problem to cook a gigantic turbot. Then, after many discussions, one of them solved the problem: fashion immediately a pan large enough to contain the fish and, to confront similar occurrences, he also advised the emperor to have always potters travelling with him.
Lots of other news about banqueting and delicatessen flows as a torrent from the Latin literature. Pliny the Older cover all the field from bread to fruits. Varro and Columella tell everything there is to tell about raising livestock among which very interesting are the fishponds owned by the immensely wealthy “piscinarii”, as, at those time, these rich men were called. Varro, it is true, doesn’t miss to signal the folly of his patrician friends, many of whom, instead of eating or selling their fishes, considered their fishponds as protected sanctuaries and their fishes as cherished pets on which they lavished all the love that now we use for cats and dogs. Hortensius, the great orator was prone to cry for weeks for the death of one of his mullets, While Antonia, Tiberius’ granddaughter, adorned her favourite moray eel with golden earrings. However this particular gift was only a precaution: evidently the princess did not want that an absent minded cook could serve her cherished moray eel for dinner: a pair of golden earrings were sure to be noticed. However it also is sure that the poor little beast must not have liked this particular distinction, apart of everything else large earrings made difficult for it to get into the narrow holes that this fish considered its home.
In their texts also historians give us other pieces of new and from them we succeed to know which were the food preferred by the most important personage of the Roman Empire. Thus Aelius Spartianus tells us that the Emperor Hadrian relished a special concoction called Tetrapharmacus, which consisted of a kind of a sweet puff pastry wrapping meats of pheasant, hare and boar, a kind of entree very suitable to a great hunter as Hadrian was.
From his part Pliny the Older present to us a very frugal Tiberius, a man with very simple taste and so fond of cucumbers, that, to get the largest quantity of sun and thus be able to produce cucumbers all year long, his gardeners had fashioned hot houses covered by panes of glass and set on wheels. Moreover other news confirm Tiberius’s as a man of simple tastes, and present him as someone who, like his august mother, preferred vegetable and roots, to any costly dishes. All the chronicles report this and we know that, apart from cucumbers, the other thing he liked very much was the wild parsnips, the best of which was grown in Germany, and it was from there that he received it. Thus it is understandable if he became very angry with his son, Drusus, who, pushed by Apicius, refused to eat those cabbage’s sprouts that were served as a luxury at the stern imperial dinner. But this Apicius, Drusus’ friend, was a renowned and very rich gastronome who squandered all his money in feasts and dinners. One can understand that a man with those tastes could just hate cabbage’s sprouts.
Apicius, this refined bon vivant, was always in search of the best food one could get around the world. Once he had even been capable to fit out a vessel and sail the dangerous Mediterranean sea to find prawns larger than the normal ones: really exceptional prawns, people said, prawns that could only be found in Libya. The information was soon found groundless. As a matter of fact Apicius arrived in Africa and all the fishermen met him with boats full of prawns, but when the rich patrician saw that those crustaceans were not larger that the ones he could find at Formia, he immediately changed his course and went back to Italy without even set foot on the arid coasts.
As a consequence of all his follies his estate was soon reduced to a sum that, also if it could have been considered princely for many people, was by him considered inadequate to his life’s standard. Then he decided to held a memorable banquet and, at the end of it, having put poison in a last wine cup, he closed his life in his most congenial scenery: a tricliniar couch. This cup of wine was declared by Martial to be the most gluttonous act of all Apicius’ life.
However much was said and written about Apicius and he became a legend. To him even a cooking book was ascribed, “The De Re Coquinaria” but what is absolutely sure is that it was not written by him. We can’t of course exclude that during his life he had never treated such an argument, nor that in the “De re coquinaria” there could not have been inserted some recipes favoured by him, but the book is written in late and not very good Latin and must belong to the IV cent. Anno Domini. Once analyzed the cookbook show that the many recipes were collected in different texts. Very probably many have been copied by all those works written by Greek and Latins authors that have been lost and of which we only know the titles; there are also other recipes that were clearly taken by medicine treaties. However that is the only coockbook that has arrived until us and it is the only one from which we can learn what really was the ancient cooking.
It is not a book that can be easily understood, because it is directed to professional cooks, people to whom were entrusted the meals’s preparations. For this reason the recipes are only quick notes, long lists of suggested ingredients, but without specifying the doses. Some time not even the system to cook the plates are indicated. However one thing we must say in favour of “De re coquinaria”: if the good Middle Ages’ Friars, who saved such a large part of the Latin culture, felt the necessity to copy it and to copy only this book, this means that it was the better one among all the others. Also the notes that we find written in the margin and that after were included in the late copies, had been certainly added by those friars that were in charge of the refectory, and this prove that the “De re coquinaria” was used for many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire.


Bibliography

Preso da un mio dossier su Archeo
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Cibi, cucine e triclini in L'alimentazione nel mondo antico. I Romani: etá imperiale, Rome 1987. pp. 70-140

Books
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'arte del convito nella Roma antica, Editrice L'Erma di Bretschneider - I edizioneRoma1983
II edizione 1993
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Le ricette romane di Pompei
Editrice L'Erma di Bretschneider I edizione 1993
II edizione 2000
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI,Dining as a Roman Emperor, L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome, Iª Edizione Emission 1995. IIª Emission 1999, Many reprints.