08/31/2018
Residents of Ancient Pompeii Enjoyed Their Honey.
Breakfast (jentaculum) was traditionally bread with honey, a ricotta-like cheese and olives.
Image: A fresco of a dinner, found in Pompeii
"Breakfast (jentaculum) Bread with honey, a ricotta-like cheese and olives. Lunch (prandium) Some bread and meat at home or a meal from a thermopolium (snack bar): sausages, game birds, black pudding or whitebait, with plenty of fine white bread. Dinner (cena) Six or seven courses, ranging from antipasti to rich fish and meat dishes, concluding with honey cakes, sweetmeats and fruit, all washed down with plenty of wine."
Pompeii exhibition: the food and drink of the ancient Roman cities
The new British Museum exhibition in London, 'Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum', gives an extraordinary insight into the diet of the ancient Romans who lived under the volcano, writes Bee Wilson
The loaf is round and plump, like a cake, and divided into eight wedges. But it is unmistakably bread, and rather appetising, too. Which is extraordinary, considering that it was put in the oven to bake one morning in Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years ago. The baker left his stamp. His name was “Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus”.
Clearly, he wanted his name and his bread to be remembered. He could scarcely have dreamed, though, that it would prove such a memorable loaf that its carbonised remains would one day go on display in far-off Londinium.
Different cities have different ideas about what daily bread should be like. For Paris, it is the baguette. For Moscow, a heavy boule of rye. For the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, situated in the wonderfully fertile grain producing land of Campania, it was this circle of bread, made from sifted white flour.
For all the distance of years, the food of Pompeii seems sunny and alive. We know that these ancients ate broad beans, olives, peaches, dates, almonds, sour cherries, crab apples, pears and walnuts. Let’s not spoil this picture of Carluccio-ish plenty by mentioning the dormice that were fattened up by cooks in little terracotta jars.
Consider fish, instead. A mosaic found in Pompeii depicts a huge range of octopus, squid, lobster, prawn, eel, bass, red mullet, dogfish, ray, and some kind of snail-like mollusc: quite a plateau de fruits de mer. Pompeians were also excessively fond of a salty fish sauce called garum, similar to Thai fish sauce.
It was an important luxury trade, for which Pompeii was particularly famous. The poet Martial writes of “lordly garum, a costly gift, made from the first blood of a still-gasping mackerel”.
Apart from ingredients, the other notable thing is the equipment. Much cooking was done over portable terracotta barbecues, but well-off houses had stone cooking benches – the equivalent of our hob – with heat generated from underneath by a charcoal fire. Some of the surviving implements look good enough for the John Lewis kitchenware department: a blue hexagonal glass bottle, a range of earthenware cooking pots, a six-hole cake tin.
If the banqueting frescoes from dining-room walls are anything to go by, the rich knew how to enjoy themselves at the table. One painting of a private dinner shows a couple sitting on a couch, both naked from the waist up and draped in rich fabrics below.
Another fresco shows a bigger party of men, again sitting on couches, drinking wine. One of the guests has staggered to his feet and is so sloshed he is having to be propped up by a slave. Doubtless not all dinner parties were quite so decadent or sumptuous as those in the paintings, any more than the clientele of Caffè Nero today look anything like the beaming photos of café life on the walls. The actual stone dinner couches at Pompeii are far more cramped and awkward than those in the pictures.
To dine like this was a preserve of the rich. For poorer Pompeians, many meals would have been taken on the hoof from one of the city’s 150 fast-food joints or thermopolia. Humbler dwellings lacked chimneys, making cooking at home a limited affair.
How well nourished were they? A third of the population was anaemic, judging from analysis of 139 skeletons in Herculaneum. The poor seem to have eaten virtually no meat, leaving their bones depleted in zinc. Skeletons from all classes also show signs of lead poisoning – possibly because the local wine was dosed with lead to make it keep better. For the most part, however, their strong teeth and bones indicate people who were better fed and taller than the equivalent population in modern Naples. All those fruits, nuts, fish and olive oil must have done them some good.
The sad thing is the thought of this way of life being cut short so suddenly. Theirs was a culture – more honest than ours – which explicitly recognised that death was the counterpart of feasting. They knew that every banquet has to come to an end. One mosaic shows a jaunty skeleton holding two wine jugs. He adorned the centre of one of Pompeii’s many dining-rooms. His message to the diners was memento mori: remember you must die. With every meal, they reminded themselves it was coming.
THE DIET OF A WEALTHY FAMILY
Breakfast (jentaculum) Bread with honey, a ricotta-like cheese and olives. Lunch (prandium) Some bread and meat at home or a meal from a thermopolium (snack bar): sausages, game birds, black pudding or whitebait, with plenty of fine white bread. Dinner (cena) Six or seven courses, ranging from antipasti to rich fish and meat dishes, concluding with honey cakes, sweetmeats and fruit, all washed down with plenty of wine.
THE DIET OF A POOR FAMILY
Breakfast Either nothing or a simple porridge of barley, millet or emmer wheat, mixed with morsels of whatever was to hand: vegetables, fish, olives or yesterday’s leftovers. Lunch A snack taken from one of the many thermopolia. Maybe some coarse bread with salted fish, or a soup of lentils or chickpeas. Dinner More cereal made into a porridge or soup, served with foods that did not need cooking (to get around the limited kitchen facilities in poor dwellings). A hunk of cheese, raw beans, some whole-wheat bread, a few figs and olive oil.
Source:
Pompeii exhibition: the food and drink of the ancient Roman cities.
By Bee Wilson
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/pompeii/9850077/Pompeii-exhibition-the-food-and-drink-of-the-ancient-Roman-cities.html
