Lunch

Apothermum

De Re Coquinaria, 58

The Apothermum, »after the bath » was one of the most common meal in the Roman world. It was consumed after a morning spent at the thermae. We have chosen to offer you the chef Apicius’ version. Some consider this meal as the ancestor of the semolina cake we can still enjoy today.

Ingredients

1/2 liter of milk
50 grams of semolina
3 tablespoons rosemary honey
2 cl of olive oil
1 pinch of ground black pepper
1 dl straw wine
2 tablespoons of sultana grape
3 tablespoons of slivered almonds
2 tablespoons of pine nuts
A hint of fish sauce ( the garum equivalent)

Preparation

Pour into a saucepan : the whole milk, honey, olive oil, sultanas, pine nuts and almonds. Add a turn of pepper mill (or a pinch of ground pepper) and a few drops of nuoc mam (garum). Bring to a boil.
Pour the semolina into the preparation. Cook for 5 minutes stirring constantly. Add the wine and cook 2 more minutes.
Pour into individual ramekins or cups and allow the preparation to rest. Serve cold, eventually decorated with a pinch of pepper.

Archeology of the bread

Pain inventorié 75688 découvert à Herculanum, Ier siècle après J-C.,
URL : http://archeoportfolio.efrome.it/pistrina/accueil_u.htm
Copyright N. Monteix

Since the late prehistory, cereals, savages then domesticated during the Neolithic, constituted one of the basic elements of the Mediterranean society’s diet. As the Etruscans before them, the Romans usually consumed it as porridge or a sort of non-risen pancake made in a domestic context. However, these cereals were as well incorporated in the preparation of cooked ingredients, as bread, which can thus appear in various forms depending on the cereal used.

Recent studies by Nicolas Monteix (Rouen University, France) on Pompeii’s bakeries or pistrinae, showed that the bread took several centuries before establishing itself in the Roman’s daily life. Indeed, even though bakeries dates back to the first half of the Ist century of our era, Latin authors as Plinius the ancient and Plautus mentioned the existence of pistrinae at the end of the IIIrd or the beginning of the IInd century B.-C. Since these literary references only mention Roma and its elite’s life, rather than the ordinary Romans cities as Pompeii where bread took more longer to establish itself as a daily food. In addition, this new consumption leads to important changes, both in the diet and the urban thread since the baking of bread requires access to specific facilities, which will be now considered in this development.

Pompeii, fixed by the Vesuvius’ eruption in 79, is in an excellent state of conservation and was able to show us numerous archeological remains of these facilities used in the production of bread. Researchers were able to restore the steps of bread’s fabrication and the various facilities linked to it. First the fabrication of porridge, a sort of pancake and bread require the preparation of the cereals in flour: the grinding.

Meule manuelle à catillus (meule tournante) et meta (meule dormante), Pompéi (commerce alimentaire VII), Ier siècle après J-C., URL : http://archeoportfolio.efrome.it/pistrina/accueil_b.htm
Copyright : cliché N. Monteix.

Some home had manual millstone for it, then used for domestic purpose. However, areas for grinding were built to host grinders and high capacity mills, carried by men or donkey. These grinders were composed of a fixed part or meta, on which the cereal was grinded under the action of the turning grinder or catillus.

Meule à levier, composée d’un calillus et d’une meta, Pompéi (boulangerie I 12, 1‑2), Ier siècle après J-c.,
URL : http://archeoportfolio.efrome.it/pistrina/accueil_d.htm
Copyright EFR – A. Gailliot

The flour obtained was then place in a mechanic kneader with tepid water, which was most commonly operated by a man. These kneaders were composed of scooped-out lava block in which were placed a metallic element, generally in iron, allowing it to mix the dough. The later was then placed on a board or in a bowl to allow it to rise and then shape the breads. Then comes the key element of the fabrication: the cooking, which left numerous archeological remains. Indeed, Pompeii and Herculanum shows us an important set of perfectly conserved remains, differentiating themselves from the common ovens rummaged trough in the rest of the Roman world. The study of these ovens and their situation showed that the cooking of bread was not reserved to pistrinae, but some large houses had their own bread oven. These ovens are most commonly built in bricks or tiles, even though the areas to put the bread in the oven, the mouth, are constituted of basalt’s planks. The right cooking of the bread is ensured by construction system, a vault of brick keeping the heat and restoring it during the cooking. Concerning the fuel, other than wood, N. Monteix’s studies showed that in Pompeii Olive stones were widely used because it contains a high caloric power.

Peinture murale pompéienne représentant un candidat électoral distribuant du pain, Pompéi, Ier siècle après J-C., conservée au Musée archéologique de Naples.
URL : http://archeoportfolio.efrome.it/pistrina/accueil_dd.htm
Copyright Musée archéologique national de Naples – cliché N. Monteix

Therefore, it can be seen that bread knows a rather long development, and leads to the construction of numerous facilities. In Pompeii, bread seems to be an new element since a political candidate used a representation of distribution as an argument to be elected (see photo).

Bibliography

An Anthropology of bread
« Bread and circuses »

Peinture murale représentant un plate de bouillie et un pain rond, Pompéi; Ier siècle après J-C.,
Copyright Soprintendenza Speciale Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia.

It is said that Julius Caesar ate garlic bread for breakfast … Cereals were indeed the base of the Roman’s diet. Besides millet, sesame, oat, rye or barley, there was wheat,which flour was used to prepare bread .

Before the introduction of refined wheat (Triticum) in Rome, during the fifth century BC, rather than bread, roman citizens ate a kind of spelt porridge (Triticum spelta). The spelt, also called » Gallic’s wheat », is a cereal, which grain’s protective husk was kept. This meal earned the Romans the nickname « porridge eaters » by the Greeks, far ahead in bakery.
The naked wheat Triticum allowed the Romans to manufacture a thinner flour and hence bread, which rapidly supplanted the older preparations derived from Triticum spelta . However, this new Roman bread was not exactly the same bread as ours and had a significantly higher caloric intake.

The production of bread could be done directly from home, regarding the Villae, where ovens can systematically be found, while in the cities the bread was prepared and sold by bakers ( pistor triticarius ). Flours of different particle sizes were used (fine flour or Siligo, the medium-sized Simila and the wholemeal cibarium) along with various sorts of cereals in order to obtain a variety of breads: white or black bread, leavened or unleavened bread, spiced bread, poppy seeds’ bread et caetera. You could even find it in the shape of long run conservation dry biscuits intended for sailors. With the custom of the feast, the bread could be found in all kind of shapes: poetic such as lyres or birds, but also bawdy shapes. However, the most common bread remained the loaf of barley bread, cheap and consistent, it was consumed by the gladiators.

Indeed, from the second century until Aurelian, the citizens of Rome, favored by social laws of distribution of certain food (frumentariae leges), received grains, bread and olive oil. These were the same laws that the satirical poet Juvenal judged demagogic and denounced by the famous expression “panem et circuses”, « bread and circuses ». Caesar and Augustus did not dare to remove these laws, however they reduced the number of beneficiaries.

Bibliography

Breakfast

Apicius’ honeyed bread

De Re Coquinaria, VII-296

Rucher en terre cuite , Villa Imgiebah, Malte, Ier siècle
URL : http://www.encyclopedie-universelle.com/abeille1/imgiebah-xemxija-malte-ile-rucher-rome-interieur-ruches.jpg
Copyright Département du Tourisme de Malte

Ingredients

Milk
Cooking Oil (preferably Olive)
Honey (preferably from rosemary)
4 slices of staled bread loaf cut in squares

Preparations

Use the slices of staled bread loaf or brioche bread, and cut it in four. Soak the squares of bread in a bowl containing a little bit of milk. The bread must only be lightly soaked and not gorged with milk and too soft. Then heat oil in a pan and fry the bread in it until it turns golden and crusty. Finally coat the fried squares generously with the Rosemary’s honey.

Bibliography

Apicius, De Re Coquinaria.
Robbins D., Roman times, 1995.

Honey’s archaeological and historical aspects

In the most common breakfast recipe of Roman Antiquity (see above) the main ingredients are milk and honey. It must not be forgotten that until the Arabic Conquest of Spain in the IX century, honey was the most common sweetener in the West. Then, honey was disregarded during the consecration of sugar until the XVIII century. During this period, it was used in the fabrication of medical drugs. From the XIX century until now it retakes its place of cooking sweetener in various cuisines. Nonetheless, honey’s production is endangered more each and every year by the environmental pollution and the global warming. This is why more and more beekeepers decided to go back to biological and traditional production techniques. Sometimes the techniques are not far from different than those used by the Romans. But how was the honey produced during Antiquity?

First of all it is interesting to note that the first traces of the use of honey dates back to the IX millennium B.-C. in Spain. On that subject, it is strange that nowadays some “honey hunters” in India are using pre historical techniques: they take the honey directly from the tree after having weakened the bees with the smoke from a torch. It is not until 2400 B.-C. that bee breeding can be found for the first time by Egyptians. From this period and until Rome’s origins honey was considered the God’s food by excellence. Even Aristotle was interested by honey’s origins and production’s techniques. From the III century B.-C. a rapid expansion of handbooks on beekeeping can be observed, in particular the work of Columelle in De Re Rustica. In this precious handbook of agronomy, the author informs us on the words used for “hive” in Greek and Latin: μελιττῶνες, « melittones » in Greek and alvarius in Latin. In Latin other words than alvearius can as well be found, such as alvearia, which appears in the Georgic of Virgil. Thanks to the “edict of Maximum” of Diocletian we know that the average price of honey was the same as the one of an amphora of wine of a very good quality.

Rucher en pierre , Villa Imgiebah, Malte, Ier siècle après J-C,
URL : http://www.encyclopedie-universelle.com/abeille1/imgiebah-xemxija-malte-ile-rucher-rome.jpg
Copyright Département Tourisme de Malte.

Until the XIX century, beekeepers used the same techniques of production as in the Antiquity. Near the Mediterranean

Sea the most common process consisted on realising cylindrical hives in ceramic and stones (see picture), which were placed in the middle of the wood or at the border of an agricultural field.

Bibliography

Columelle, De Re Rustica.
Pline l’Ancien, Histoire Naturelle.
Virgile, Géorgiques.

http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/erudits/varron/agriculture3.htm http://www.sito.regione.campania.it/agricoltura/pubblicazioni/pdf/apicoltura.pdf http://sphakia.classics.ox.ac.uk/beeconf/francis.html

Breakfast’s anthropology

As we do nowadays, when Caesar woke up at dawn over 2000 year’s ago after a long night sleep, he was hungry, and took his first meal of the day: the jentaculum. Nevertheless, most Romans only rapidly ate a little bit of bread or a sort of pancake with water. On the contrary, the wealthy, the patricians (as Caesar), had the possibility to taste to a different and copious breakfast everyday. Good eating was for them a way to show off everyone their social success. The etymology of the first meal of the day in various languages shows the different conceptions of this important moment of the day. In the northern countries (such as France, United Kingdom, or Germany) they call it “break-fast” or in French “petit déjeuner » (which means « small meal »). Thus, it is a rather short moment of time and which, few centuries ago, was similar to the Roman one: a little bit of bread with some water or wine.

In Spain the word used is “desayuno”, etymologically close to the French word “déjeuner” (lunch); which show the idea of a meal rather copious and rich. Nonetheless, in Latin the word collatio, is deriving from the verb confero (« contribute »). From the origins it was a family or friend’s meal during which everyone brought something to eat. In addition, in Latin there is a similar term used: colatio, meaning « soup ». This allows us to guess that Romans ate their breakfast with seemingly a drink (based on water or milk) with some solid elements such as bread or a sort of pancake, or a kind of porridge. However, there were numerous differences between breakfasts within the Empire. In North Africa they consumed more honey than in every other provinces, and the population was within the main producers of honey. In Germany they ate darker bread because other flour were used with wheat flour, in particular cereals in its husk.

Nowadays everything is mixed, in any restaurant or hotel the continental breakfast can be found, which is composed of a drink (coffee, cappuccino, milk, tea, hot chocolate, fruit juice, yogurts), with sweets (cake, crepes, jam, pastries), fruits, or even salted products such as cheese and delicatessen. Even if sometimes the local traditions are present, it can be noted that there is a side to the globalisation through the diffusion of the same ingredients all over the world. However, even if what we eat can rapidly change because of the way we live or other constraints, the most difficult thing to change is the way we are eating this meal. The breakfast is not only the first meal of the day, but also it represents a ancient cultural method allowing us to better understand the customs of our ancestors in various civilizations.

Bibliography

DE CASTRO J.M. The time of day of food intake influences overall intake in humans, 2004.

Dinner

Reconstitution de cuisine romaine à l’époque impériale, Museo Civico Archeologico di Norma,
URL: http://www.culturalazio.it/musei/civicoarcheologiconorma/argomento1.php?id=8&vms=6&page=1
Copyright Museo Civico Archeologico di Norma

For the diner, we choose to present two different recipes : a fairly simple dish, a Sausage with lentils, which was often consumed by the major part of the population, the plebs; and an other recipe, a Ham with honey and figs, more complicated, which was presumably kept for the patrician’s elite or for the richer plebeian.

Sausage with lentils

This course was one of the typical dinner of a legionary. Furthermore it seems that this dish was of Gallic origin. Indeed, the main ingredients, sausage and vegetables, were widespread throughout the Gallic territory.

ingredients

250 grams of lentils;
1 sausage (possibly smoke) up to 500 grams;
2 liters of chicken broth;
100 g of green part of leek;
200 g of carrots;
A little fresh cilantro;
1 tablespoon of honey;
4 tablespoons of wine vinegar;
10 cl of wine « defrutum » (or modern porto or malaga);
4 tablespoons of olive oil;
fine salt and ground pepper.

Preparation

Put the lentils in cold water for a few hours.
Wash the lentils under running water and place in a large pot with two quarts of chicken broth and bring to a boil .
Wash and finely chop into small squares the leek . Wash the coriander and chop the mop . Peel the carrots and grate .
Once the broth boils, add the leek , carrot and chopped coriander and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add the smoked sausage and cook for 10 minutes.
In a small saucepan, heat the honey until it bubbles and then add vinegar, » defrutum » , coriander , mint, 2 pinches of salt , a few turns of pepper and cook over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes .
Finally, cut the sausage into slices about 1 cm thick ; on the lentils pour honey and mulled wine sauce. Arrange the slices of sausage on lentil, drizzle with olive oil and chop some fresh cilantro over the dish and serve warm .

Ham with honey and figs

Here’s the French version of a Latin recipe translated by Jacques André :
» After cooking ham in water with lots of figs and three bay leaves, remove the rind and make squares incisions to be filled with honey. Coat the ham with a paste of flour and oil , making it a skin. When the dough is cooked, remove from oven and serve as it is. «
Ingredients

Ham, topside 1 Kg,
250g of Dried,
3 of bay leaves
500 g of flour
3 tablespoons of Olive oil
Three spoonfulls of honey

Preparation

From Apicius indications we adapted the recipe to our time :

As a whole ham may be too large if cooked for 4-5 people, we recommend that you ask your butcher for the topside.
Cook for 2 hours in water with figs and bay leaves.
Prepare a paste with flour and water. This paste is intended to keep the flavor of the ham so it may remain a little mealy.
Once the dough is ready, coat the ham and figs.
Then preheat the oven to 200 ° C. and bake for an hour until the dough is cooked.
Cut into slices. The ham can be served warm or cold.

Archeology : a tabernae study

When visiting the archaeological remains of Rome, Ostia and Pompeii there is a building that we encounter all the time along the ancient viae : the tabernae. This structure has a similar function with that of nowadays’ restaurants. It normally occupies single vaulted room, rather large.

Tabernarum d’Herculanum, Ier siècle après J-C.,
URL : http://www.pompeiisites.org/Sezione.jsp?titolo=Mediagallery&idSezione=98,
Copyright Soprintendenza Speciale Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia.

A characteristic archaeological evidence allowing today its identification is the long stone table projected towards the street and which hosted food for sale, take away or on site.

This table was divided into five or six parts and each hosted a container carved in stone filled with drinks and hot food. The kitchens were hidden beyond the room where meals were eaten.

One of the most famous and best preserved examples is the markets of Trajan near the Forum Boarium in Roma, which was built from a project of Apollodorus of Damascus. It was normally attended by workers and artisans, who often had their studios right across the street or on the upper floor. In those places they could eat the dish of the day and drink wine. Prices were really low. Moreover you could buy bread and other food to cook at home. Although the taberna had its heyday in Roman times it was the Greeks who created them from the 5th BC. Then, with the colonization of Magna Grecia and after the Roman conquest, tabernae were built in Pompeii,Rome and across the empire. As explained by Crook, Andrew Linott and Elizabeth Rawson of the University of Cambridge, there were two types of tabernae :

The private tabernae buildings,
The tabernae installed in public buildings.

At street level there were shops and therefore tabernae, on the first floor notables or rich « liberti« , whereas the upper floors, dirty and dangerous, were left to the poorest. Within public buildings there are two main examples: in thermal complex and markets.

Indeed, starting from the imperial era, the baths were not only a place one went to wash oneself and workout, but also a political and cultural center of important trade and meetings. For instance, some philosophers held courses in thethermae’s bathrooms and they needed a place where they could taste food during the day. Therefore the architects of the time had the idea to install libraries and tabernae. Most recipes that Apicius left us and all those we have proposed were available in these tabernae at any time of the day. This was the basic unit of Roman economy and trade because in any place of the Roman Empire, citizens had the possibility to demonstrate their « Romanity » through food and goods for sale. In sum, taberna is also a metaphor for the romanization through food culture and globalization of trade.

Bibliography

J.A. CROOK, A. LINOTT, E. RAWSON, The Last Age of the Roman Republic 146-43 B.C., Cambridge, 1994.

Anthropology : differences between people tastes

Man does not consume the same food across the world or across time, and that in spite of globalization, which tends to standardize the culinary customs in some parts of the globe. How is it that some flavors are an integral part of the culinary landscape in some parts of the world, while elsewhere their consumption would be regarded as an heresy ?

Claude Lévi-Strauss said that : « Responding to the demands of the body, determined in each of its modes by the way here and there, Man into the universe, thus placed between nature and culture, kitchen rather provides them necessary articulation. It falls within the two areas and reflects this duality in each of its manifestations. « . These differences are therefore the results of crossings between cultural factors as well as geographical, climatic and economic criteria, the availability of food , their distribution within the population and current practices at a given time; whether they are religious or health issues. Medieval cuisine can suffer a bad reputation these days, especially because of the use of spices in large quantities in order to disguise the taste of spoiled meat at the elite’s table. The truth is more complex and even though the use of spices was indeed a convenient way to overcome the problems related to the difficulties of conservation and slow transport, food and medicine were closely linked and the use of spices was predominantly dietary. With the evolution of knowledge in the medical field, some of these rules became obsolete and are now received warily.

In her review of the book Medieval cuisine for today table by Jeanne Bourrin, Françoise Sabban evokes rightfully the complex combination process or « culinary grammar » governing medieval regimes. As for semiotics or linguistics, this process applies regardless of any culture.

With industrialized societies, and probably for the first time in history, most men do not participate in the production of food and leave it to others to make their own subsistence. In traditional societies , almost all men are involved in the production of food, the vast majority of them are farmers, and / or practicing hunting and fishing. Therefore, the direct control which then operated on what we ate no longer exists. Man has become much more cultural, and the pursuit of profit in the production of food can then cause the havoc that we know in the modern diet ( fast food, genetically or chemically modified products , etc …) .

Bibliography

Bourin J., Sabban F., Les recettes de Mathilde Brunei, Cuisine médiévale pour table d’aujourd’hui, Médiévales, 1984, vol. 3, n° 7, pp. 113-118.
Glick Th., Livesey S.,Wallis F. (editors), Medieval science, sechnology, and sedecine, an encyclopedia, p. 61-64
Lévi-Strauss C., Mythologiques III. L’origine des manières de table, Paris, Plon, 1968.