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

1. Put the lentils in cold water for a few hours.
2. Wash the lentils under running water and place in a large pot with two quarts of chicken broth and bring to a boil .
3. Wash and finely chop into small squares the leek . Wash the coriander and chop the mop . Peel the carrots and grate .
4. Once the broth boils, add the leek , carrot and chopped coriander and simmer for 10 minutes.
5. Add the smoked sausage and cook for 10 minutes.
6. 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 .
7. 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 :

1. As a whole ham may be too large if cooked for 4-5 people, we recommend that you ask your butcher for the topside.
2. Cook for 2 hours in water with figs and bay leaves.
3. 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.
4. Once the dough is ready, coat the ham and figs.
5. Then preheat the oven to 200 ° C. and bake for an hour until the dough is cooked.
6. 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.