[HN Gopher] What did the ancient Romans eat?
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What did the ancient Romans eat?
Author : clouddrover
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-07-24 01:17 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| The original Latin text of Apicius is here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200214163251/http://users.ipa....
|
| Regarding the "toxic recipe" (Absinthium Romanum), I've made and
| drunk this several times and have survived to tell the tale. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_absinthium#Toxicity for
| more information.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Max Miller on youtube says he knows how to make Garum - the fish
| sauce that is often referenced.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE Now sure if that is
| genuine, i previously read that the recipe for this stuff has
| been lost (but the Author says his receipe is based on Byzantine
| sources) More about the author here:
| https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Tasting_History_with_Max_Mil...
| it says his historical cookbook will be published next year, in
| 2022.
| ingas wrote:
| I always thought that garum is the same as fish sauces in South
| Eastern Asia.
|
| Differences must be same as differences between
| Thai/Vietnamese/Japanese sorts.
|
| You just leave salted fish to ferment under sun and then
| collect liquid. Add other ingredients you like but they are not
| essential.
| Niksko wrote:
| The idea that you can't make garrum at home in the traditional
| way (salt, fish, time) is false. I've done it, yes there's a
| smell, but it isn't as bad as people suggest, and the result is
| worth it. Traditional garrum making is also practiced by lots
| of fermentation focused restaurants, as well as more modern
| techniques that use koji as an enzymatic source.
|
| The quick garrum presented in that video is really just a salty
| fish stock, and I suspect would lack the protein breakdown
| products that make garrum so special.
|
| You can however make garrum quickly, with the protein breakdown
| products, albeit lacking a little complexity from the extended
| ageing (primarily maillard reaction products, but probably
| other lactic fermentation and more complex breakdown chains).
|
| Preston Landers has created a technique [1] that uses dietary
| supplements as a source of very high enzyme concentrations.
| I've done this method, and it's pretty easy to accomplish, and
| produces really great results, in about 3 hours.
|
| [1]: https://www.culinarycrush.biz/all/3-hour-garum-recipe
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| In Russia they have salted fish - Balyk and Vobla. Never
| salted it myself, but I didn't find the result too offputting
| either; it goes well with beer.
| krisoft wrote:
| The russian salted fish appears to be very different from
| garum.
|
| With Balyk you salt the fish-flesh to make it dry out and
| to conserve it. Then you eat the dry fish. Do i see that
| right?
|
| With garum you salt the fish to drive a fishy liquid out of
| it then you ferment this liquid. The end product is the
| fermented fish-juice which is used as a condiment.
|
| Both involves fish and salt but they appear to be very
| different beasts.
|
| About how offputing garum is: obviously it wasn't
| offputting for the romans. They consumed huge ammounts of
| it. That doesn't necessarily means that the production
| wasn't offputting. After all it is basically letting a pile
| of fish rot in a controlled manner. By all accounts i have
| read they produced it at industrial scale outside of the
| cities not in people's homes.
|
| The other problem one might run into is that the exact art
| of the process needs reverse engineering. Imagine if all
| you would read about cheese making is a few paragraphs.
| Further imagine that you have never eaten cheese nor you
| know anyone who has ever did. Good luck figuring out where
| to start making chesse, let alone if what you got at the
| end is good cheese. This means that while real garum was
| definietly not offputting to romans, the process of
| experimenting with producing it now might be. And at the
| end you might end up with something weird and you won't
| know if you just haven't acquired a taste for it, or if
| perhaps it went off so badly that not even a roman would
| consume it.
| rwmj wrote:
| How different is it from anchovy-based fish sauces like nam
| pla? The method of making it (fermenting whole fish for a
| long time) seems fairly similar.
| Niksko wrote:
| Very similar I'd say. Temperature, fish variety, small
| changes in method or salt content, all of these likely
| change the end product. But it's fundamentally the same set
| of reactions.
| bitcurious wrote:
| > The idea that you can't make garrum at home in the
| traditional way (salt, fish, time) is false.
|
| When I researched this question maybe 8 years ago, the
| technique was well understood. The outstanding question was
| which fish was used for this historically, and back then
| there were a few contenders. Has this since been settled or
| did you just pick one?
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There are two recipes for garum/liquamen, which I put
| translations of, on my old (1997 onwards) Apicius page here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060717021437/http://web.onetel...
|
| As someone has already pointed out, it's very similar to
| colatura/nuoc mam/nam pla though the Romans added some herbs.
| hellcow wrote:
| If this article interests you, give Tasting History on YouTube a
| look.[0] The host recreates historical recipes and ties in
| primary-source research along the way. He did a series on Roman
| food -- what the legions ate, etc.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ
| user3939382 wrote:
| Artichokes! I think about that whenever I eat them.
| doc_gunthrop wrote:
| The YT channel Invicta made an excellent video covering in detail
| this very topic with regard to the military units, titled
| "Everyday Moments in History - A Roman Soldier Prepares Dinner".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-l_EbXE3LU
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I am surprised to see so many distinct ingredients. Roman food
| markets must have been interesting.
| dTal wrote:
| Rome can be considered an early attempt at a "globalized"
| society - while not strictly global it did bring many different
| regions and cultures over a very wide area under one
| administrative umbrella, and opened the doors of trade. Among
| other things, that lets you do things like regularly consume
| dishes that use geographically distant ingredients. You could
| probably go down to the store and buy all kinds of spices
| pretty much anywhere in the Roman Empire.
| ingas wrote:
| > Among other things, that lets you do things like regularly
| consume dishes that use geographically distant ingredients.
|
| I think that you idealizing ancient Rome.
|
| Ice was a delicacy.
|
| "Dishes for geographically distant ingredients"?
|
| No meat, no fruits, no milk products.
|
| So it's only cereals could be imported from long distances.
| dTal wrote:
| Ah yes, the four food groups. /s
|
| I think you're underestimating what could be done with
| preservation technology such as salting, curing, drying,
| pickling, fermenting etc. Meats were in fact frequently
| traded. Salted pork was a staple food. Cheese even more so.
|
| And what of liquids? You're surely aware of ancient wrecks
| filled with amphoras? What was in them? Surely not cereals.
| Oils, wines, vinegars, acidic sauces such as the famed
| "garum" - all travel well.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Salted or dry meat, dry fruit, cheese.
| hackermailman wrote:
| There's a winery in France that makes wine as close to the
| ancient Roman method too http://tourelles.com/
| throw0101a wrote:
| Perhaps see the book _Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians
| and Their Food_ by John Dickie:
|
| > _In this "revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to
| today" (Publishers Weekly), the fascinating story of how one vast
| country comprised of uniquely distinct regions came to produce
| some of the most delicious and beloved foods of all time is
| expertly revealed._
|
| * https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Delizia!/John-Dickie/...
|
| (He also wrote _Cosa Nostra_ , about the Sicilian mafia, and
| _Blood brotherhoods: a history of Italy 's three mafias_.)
| lipanski wrote:
| My YT recommendation on the topic is the hilarious but very well
| docummented BBC series "Supersizers Eat" [1]
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8D56E0F6438B4CE6
| esrh wrote:
| "tomatoes didn't come to Italy until the 1500s, when Cortes
| brought them back from the Americas."
|
| Shocking! Somehow whenever i think of "italian food" the first
| few images that come into my mind usually involve tomatoes
| somehow...
| klipt wrote:
| Now imagine Indian food without chilis (also from the New
| World).
| nsenifty wrote:
| Many, particularly South Indian dishes are cooked without
| chili peppers still.
| frutiger wrote:
| And European food without potatoes.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i was wondering, there is a lot of evidence of pre Columbian
| contact; the Vikings were in America, the Phoenicians were
| probably there, the Chinese too, but noone thought of bringing
| back any tomato seeds. i mean without Columbus, we Europeans
| would still be eating garum with meat, and that without potato
| chips, without salad.
| moksly wrote:
| Scandinavians were in America during the viking period, but
| there isn't any evidence that suggest they returned.
|
| You have to realise that a lot of the people who went that
| route weren't "vikings" as such. Going viking was something
| you did, but 90% of Scandinavians were just farmers. In fact
| the reason we are such a homogeneous people here is largely
| because most farmers even had little contact with the sea-
| sized settlements that did go Viking. The Scandinavian
| explorers who headed north from Iceland and eventually ended
| up in America were likely farmers who had lost their lands
| for whatever reason, and as such were likely settlers rather
| than warriors. Many who would have had no intention of ever
| going back, even if they hadn't perished.
|
| I'm not a big expert on ecology, but I also think that the
| climate they landed in was basically worse than what they
| came from. So there probably wasn't a whole lot of exotic
| foods to trade, even if they had wanted to.
| progre wrote:
| Well, there are the Vinland sagas, and while the events in
| those are pretty wild, the mere existence of those suggests
| that some actualy did return. They where recorded sometime
| between 1220 and 1280 so even though this was well after
| the fact (about 200 years) it's still before the age of
| exploration.
|
| Edit: As for the tomato question, the sagas suggests that
| no or very little friendly interaction with the natives
| took place, so no real trade or exchange of knowledge.
| These where not full on atlantic voyages but mostly near
| coastal areas of Greenland and what is now northen Canada.
| I kinda doubt that the natives would be growing tomatoes
| that far north anyway. Though, they did claim to find
| grapes, which suggests that they ventured a fair bit south
| as well...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _the Phoenicians were probably there_
|
| No they were not:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discover
| y...
|
| A list of other supposed contacts:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
| oceanic_co...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There really isn't a lot of evidence of pre-columbian
| contact. Outside the Bering strait region, the only firmly
| established contacts are that of the Norse. Polynesian
| contacts may have occurred, but aren't considered definitive.
| Nothing else is considered remotely plausible. That means
| there weren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to get
| American plants back to Europe prior to Columbus.
| legutierr wrote:
| The evidence (both linguistic and genetic) currently seems
| to tilt in favor of the idea that Polynesian contact did
| occur, as evidenced by the presence of pre-Columbian sweet
| potato cultivation in Polynesia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato_cultivation_in_P
| o...
|
| Although natural dispersal of Sweet Potato is a possible
| explanation, the evidence for natural dispersal is weaker
| than the evidence for pre-Columbian contact (for instance,
| the similarity of the Quechua word for sweet potato,
| "kumar", and the Maori "kumara").
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The evidence bar for contacts is very high. My personal
| position is favorable towards limited (but existing)
| contacts, but it'd be a lie to say that it's definitively
| established.
| userulluipeste wrote:
| _" there weren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to get
| American plants back to Europe prior to Columbus"_
|
| Thinking about this myself a while ago, I wondered - even
| if someone went there and back, and even brought something
| along, how could we tell? That Norse saga had a mythical
| status at most, and even with that it isn't necessarily
| clear for a casual listener that it may be about reaching
| another previously unknown continent. Other groups along
| the history may have also pulled it off, but then their
| contemporaries, in order to consemnate the event, had to
| take their word for it? Even with some seeds as evidence,
| the world was less connected untill very recently and there
| were plenty of isolated places, yet relatively close, for
| strange seeds to be found. After thousand of years, it's
| hard to tell if an annual plant was brought at some point
| in time by intercontinental explorers, or migrated by some
| other non-human related way, or has been local since before
| continents went appart. Then it was hard to discern the
| magnitude of a discovery. Even the Norsemen, like the later
| Spaniard colonists, couldn't tell how big their found body
| of land was, if the Vinland they reached was an island they
| haven't yet circumnavigated yet or happened to be a
| continent spanning south down to well into southern
| hemisphere. No, for a discovery like this to stick, with
| clear compiled inventories of imported plants, it had to be
| done by a government-like entity, that could afford the
| high risks of loss that an exploration program on the
| limits of available technology pose, and with enough
| logistics and cultural development to pursue a wide range
| of interests (as opposed to small groups, for which keeping
| track of traffiked plants may be of lesser concern).
| selimthegrim wrote:
| _Datura metei_ is probably the biggest pre-Columbian
| botanical mystery.
| bbarnett wrote:
| A few of thoughts here.
|
| First, we have proof of Viking settlements, but they just
| seemed to die off completely. It may be that before they
| really got settled, they were just killed by natives.
|
| We don't have actual proof, it seems, of anyone else being
| here earlier.
|
| Outside of that, the tomato, potato, and a lot of other
| things, aren't native to Canada, or even the US. It's native
| to Central and South America, which is 4000 or so km in a
| direct line, and 7000 or 8000km "hugging the coast" travel
| from where a viking settlement was found on the coast of
| Canada.
|
| So just being in the "new world", won't even remotely put you
| in contact with everything.
|
| On the farming side, no one really understood much about soil
| management, conditions, crop rotation, fertilizing, drainage,
| fungus, "growing zones" etc, etc until the 20th century.
|
| Often, attempts to transplant crops would fail miserably, by:
|
| * placing them in the wrong location (some plants die with
| too much sun, others with too little)
|
| * same as above, but "requires a more southern climate" or
| "northern climate". Some plants literally cannot grow with
| short/long day cycles like the far North or South has.
|
| * placing a plant in too wet, or too dry soil for its growth
| requirements. One plant may rot in a certain type of soil
| (clay/wet/whatever), another thrive
|
| Well, there are many points like this. Farmers often knew
| their specific plants, but it was all guesswork compared to
| scientifically derived knowledge in the early 20th.
|
| So even if a handful of seeds somehow made it back to Europe
| earlier than Spain getting to the new world and back, there's
| no promise it would thrive on a first-try.
|
| Especially if it was just fishermen, not even interacting
| with the natives (maybe, earlier contact as you suggest).
|
| But beyond all _that_ , superstition! When the tomato was
| first introduced, it was actually seen as a 'sign of the
| devil'. It was considered evil, and dangerous to eat.
|
| And if you look at corn, for a long time the Brits and much
| of Europe considered it only suitable as 'pig food'. Most
| humans wouldn't touch it, and likely this had also to do with
| taste, for the rural town I grew up had 'cow corn', which is
| corn hardier, quicker to grow, but not as succulent, or even
| very tasty (too starchy).
|
| Early farmed corn was like this, starchy, and it took
| centuries to get the human palatable breeds we have now.
| Natives in the new world used it just for flour, basically,
| not as a grain to eat on its own.
|
| And to speak to _that_ , natives had to process corn in a
| special way:
|
| https://www.spiceography.com/corn-flour/
|
| Otherwise, it severely lacked in nutrition. Yet, Europeans
| may have just thought it was "tradition" to prepare corn this
| way...
|
| I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, there's a lot of
| nuance here. Just taking a few seeds won't guarantee growth,
| or adoption.
|
| Erm, another thought:
|
| https://storytellergarden.co.uk/vegetables/when-potatoes-
| wer...
|
| Potatoes were seen as deadly in some places and illegal, were
| seen as horrible in other places (and, people had to trick
| the commoners into eating them:
|
| https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/28/prussian-and-
| the-p... )
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| They had Cannabis in the middle kingdom of Egypt, so they
| must have received the seeds from America, somehow.
| https://canex.co.uk/cannabis-use-in-ancient-world-ancient-
| eg...
| 1_player wrote:
| Cannabis is native to India and Central Asia.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The failure of the Greenland settlements on the west coast
| has been documented: the settlers insisted on raising crops
| and animals that were not suited to the climate, and
| eventually they starved or moved east again.
|
| They refused to learn from the Inuit residents of
| Greenland, who were adapted to those conditions and
| survived just fine. Why? We can't be certain but probably
| religious and/or racial prejudice did play some role in
| that.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _When the tomato was first introduced, it was actually
| seen as a 'sign of the devil'. It was considered evil, and
| dangerous to eat._
|
| Not superstition. Pewter plates and acidic tomato juice
| makes lovely tasty heavy metal poisoning.
| dghughes wrote:
| Or pasta/noodles for Italy as well.
|
| Or if you think of Ireland you think of potatoes.
|
| Many types of plant from the Americas (the continent not "USA!
| USA!") and make up what people eat all over the world;
| potatoes, peppers, corn, tomatoes, chocolate, peanuts, vanilla.
| hnhamdani2 wrote:
| pepper is from present-day south east asia. I think you meant
| Chilli
| duskwuff wrote:
| A little broader than that. The entire Capsicum family --
| from bell peppers to chili peppers -- was introduced to the
| Old World during the Columbian exchange.
|
| Black pepper is an entirely separate species, and is indeed
| native to southeast Asia.
| whoaisme wrote:
| It's funny how even with such a harmless comment people feel
| the need to get in a pointless dig against poor white
| uneducated Americans (the superpower, not the continent), as
| if you really had to explain you are talking about the
| continents and not the ignorant rabble you're so superior to.
| justnotworthit wrote:
| Think about it too when people (reflexively) tell you not to
| plant "non-natives". Resources:
|
| The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will be Nature's Salvation
| by Fred Pearce
|
| Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to
| Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| heavy use of tomatoes is more typical of Italian-American
| dishes, although Italy has many differing cuisine traditions
| and its hard to generalize, they more typically rely on seafood
| and rice in the south, and butter, cream, cheese and potatoes
| in the north than they do tomatoes (although pasta and olive
| oil are unquestionably universals in Italian cooking).
| masklinn wrote:
| > potatoes
|
| Also an american import.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same applies to most spicy food we now eat in Europe, until the
| discovery age there were no chilli peppers around, even the
| African ones came from Americas.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| We did have had horseradish and mustard, so not completely
| devoid of spicyness, but certainly not as pervasive as today.
| ginko wrote:
| Don't forget pepper.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the region, Portuguese mustard to this day is
| quite harmless in comparison with its German cousin.
|
| But yeah, there were some flavours still.
| sologoub wrote:
| Seems the further east the spicer mustard gets - Russian
| mustard seems to be quite similar to what I tried in
| Chinese restaurants in US (but a lot thicker, the stuff
| in Chinese restaurants is runny).
|
| By comparison German stuff is much sweater. Horseradish
| sauces are another matter though!
| Aengeuad wrote:
| The east/west distinction probably isn't useful here
| beyond the observation that black mustard seeds are the
| hottest followed by brown and then yellow mustard seeds,
| and that western mustards tend to use yellow only or
| yellow and brown seeds. Something like English mustard is
| notoriously hot for instance.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Most "traditional" things in Europe stem from late 19th, early
| 20th century.
| graeme wrote:
| Most buildings too for that matter! In the "old" European
| town centers.
|
| There's much older things about, but the bulk of building was
| done during the population and tramway explosion circa
| 1880-1920.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Also mind industrialisation, which created work in
| industrial towns and made it possible to process food in
| ways which can feed a town.
| baxtr wrote:
| Side note: really difficult to read the site on mobile with all
| the ads popping up
| donatzsky wrote:
| If you're on Android, just use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I
| don't know if I could live with Chrome, since it doesn't have
| extensions.
| perihelions wrote:
| " _To recreate this 2,000-year-old dish, Magnanimi started with a
| recipe from the 1st-Century AD Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria,
| the only surviving recipe book from ancient Rome, which is
| attributed to Apicius, a wealthy gourmand once described by Pliny
| the Elder as "the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts"._"
|
| I could have sworn I learned about Apicus from an ancient HN
| thread... but apparently it's never been linked on here before?
| Did moths eat the thread?
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm
| [English, 1936]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
|
| related: _" Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in
| Pompeii"_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25543742
|
| semi-related: _" The mystery of silphium, a lost Roman herb
| (2017)"_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229666
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197503
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I think you misspelt it in your search:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| perihelions wrote:
| Oh, that was it.
| wise0wl wrote:
| If you enjoyed this, check out Tasting History on YouTube. He
| had a whole slew of ancient Roman recipes that he faithfully
| reproduced.
| dbcooper wrote:
| Historical Italian Cooking is a good channel on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsDUyQI88LLvpu9RCevwQEA
| ekianjo wrote:
| > the ancient romans
|
| If a civilization lasted for several hundred years, there's no
| single answer for that kind of topic. Food is fashion, and is
| ever changing over time. It's like asking "What did ancient
| Americans eat between 1600 and 2000?" years in the future, and
| the answer will vary widely for each century (and regardless of
| technical progress).
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > What did ancient Americans eat between 1600 and 2000?
|
| Corn syrup, of course.
| eyko wrote:
| The evolution of cuisines in recent history bares no
| resemblance to the evolution of cuisines in the late bronze Age
| to the late antiquity. For one, information was slow to travel,
| and influences were much further away, and besides that, most
| agriculture was subsistence farming: families owned land just
| about enough to feed themselves and sell a bit of surplus, if
| nothing went wrong). Recipes were passed down generations
| before any changes would be made by the introduction of new
| ingredients to the local agriculture. Most families lived on
| the same ingredients for their entire lives so things were a
| bit more stagnant than you'd imagine if you're taking recent
| history as your benchmark.
| ewams wrote:
| Good point. And different in different regions such as Texas vs
| NY. Upstate NY vs New York (the city). Even in the same cities
| within different cultural areas just blocks away from each
| other!
| ekianjo wrote:
| Now imagine there's only one cookbook left from the 20th
| century, and then "historians" of the year 3000 will proudly
| write a publication about "What North Americans Ate During
| the Middle-Ages (1600-2000)" based on that.
|
| Survivor bias, well known fallacy that Historians are hardly
| familiar enough with.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I saw this post in my hotel room this morning in downtown Rome
| and decided to make this restaurant the park around the Appian
| Way our early afternoon plans. Fantastic meal. Thanks for
| sharing.
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(page generated 2021-07-24 23:02 UTC)