Potes esurire mecum

"Come Starve with Me" [Martial]

 

 

When we imagine ancient Roman cooking and eating habits, we picture too readily the pagan gorging orgies of imperial times, with their casts of thousands, or of the poisoning of Claudius with his favorite food [which his successor Nero later openly called deorum cibum, Suetonius, Nero, 33]; or we think of the brutality done not only to one another but to the innocent edibles. We take as the rule rather than as the exception the overindulgences satirized by Juvenal, sneered at by Tacitus, the extravagance inveighed against by Seneca, or Trimalchio's outrage to good taste and digestion vivified by Petronius and magnified by Fellini. Rarely, if ever, does the silver screen offer us another view of the togaed people at table than a version of this decadent and indecent gourmandizing. When is the frugal diet [washed down not with Falernian wine, but cabbage water] recommended by Cato brought to our attention, or the simple and healthful meals Pliny and Martial enjoyed with their friends? In fact if we take a look at the actual recipes and procedures, and especially the menus of real dinner parties that have survived from Roman times, we receive the impression of a simple diet and of a culinary art that made use of natural foods, cooked to retain the best flavors, delicately seasoned and naturally colored.

The principal meal of the Roman day, the cena was taken about 3:00 in the afternoon, though it sometimes lasted until the small hours of the morning: we are told by Suetonius [Nero 27] that Nero dined a medio die ad mediam noctem. When we arrive at our host's home we will remove our shoes and have our feet washed. When we have been escorted into the dining hall, we will not sit of course: a recumbent position was considered the only proper posture for a free Roman gentleman at table. Cato of Utica, that austere [if not quite uncompromising] old Republican, made a vow which he kept until the day of his suicide, to eat in a chair for as long as Julius Caesar remained in power. [Plutarch, Cato Minor, 56]

Once we have assumed our positions at table, what we will be served and how we will be entertained will, of course, depend upon the cultural priorities and financial resources of our host. Descriptions of meals in the ancient world abound: from the formulaic feasts of Homer to the Saturnalia of Macrobius, some 1300 years later. The Homeric heroes, we are told, enjoyed a diet of roasted, skewered beef with wine and bread [unlike the Roman legions whose diet was primarily vegetarian, only very hard up epic warriors and wanderers tasted vegetables], after which they would be entertained by songs--oral poetry--about the deeds of heroes like themselves. We are not, however, to think that men and women of the heroic age, nor those of Homer's own time ate no fish and onions and cereal, but rather that a lot of wishful-thinking went on between the bard and his audience.

Meals in the Roman Empire may be divided into two groups: the ideal meal at which the food is simple and the talk sublime and the extravagant meal at which the food is too rich and the company ridiculous. The first type we find described in the letters and poems of invitation to friends for little dinner parties by writers like Pliny the Younger and Martial. The second type is described by the satirists, Horace, Petronius, Juvenal, and Martial too, men whose job it was to mock the foibles and failings of their fellow men. Or we might divide our two types of meals into the meals that we have ["we" being the people of wit, culture, taste, and discretion, naturally] and the meals that they have ["they" are the people to whom the food and service are more important than the guests]. The ideal of the ideal meal was appropriately Plato's Symposium, the pagan world's most magnificent party, intellectually speaking, at which Socrates arrived too late for his supper, but treated his friends to a brilliant discourse on the nature of Love. Pliny, in a note accepting a dinner invitation, asks that the food be simple and the talk Socratic--but, he insists, even that must be kept in moderation. For Pliny did not want to repeat the performance of Socrates and his fellow talkers who drank each other under the table and continued to talk until morning, after which Socrates, a man of prodigious stamina went to his bath and began his daily rounds.

With this ideal meal in mind it is not hard to see that the pleasure of a dinner party is much less in the food than in the company, as Cicero says through the mouth of old Cato in his essay on old age:

I have never measured the enjoyment of those dinner parties by the pleasures of the body more than by the company of friends and the talk. Our ancestors did well to call the "reclining at table of friends" a convivium because it offers a companionship of life: better than the Greeks who call the same thing a sundeipnon or a sumposion, because they seem to approve most what is of least importance.

 

That is, the Greeks named a party either "an eating-together" or a "drinking together" as if the food or drink were more important that the "sharing of life" so aptly expressed in the Latin word convivium.

The point is that we must not underestimate the aesthetic importance of the meal in mankind's growth from savage to civilized. When Enkidu, the companion of Gilgamish, lies dying and he curses the day he ever left his old life in the hills with the wild beasts, he seems to hear the sunbeams saying to him: "Enkidu, not all your life among men has been darkness...you could still be eating grass and sleeping in cold meadows, but not you feed on the fare of kings and lie on a princely couch." What can help us realize the cultural importance of the meal more than a consideration of our own holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover, Easter, all our real holidays center around traditional and even ritualistic meals. Those holidays that have no special foods, neither a cherry pie nor a barbecue nor anything of the kind pass by with barely a nod: Flag day, Veterans' Day, Columbus Day in most households never quite achieve the status of real feast days.

For the ancients as well, meals had a ritual significance: holidays were accompanied by a sacrifice of cattle or pigs to the gods. According to myth, Prometheus taught men how to sacrifice economically: the fat and bones went to the gods and the people got the meat.

For the literary importance of the meal, consider not only the Homeric surrealistic feasts, but the opening of Ibsen's Wild Duck and the thematic relevance of being thirteenth at table that is young Gregers' eternal destiny. Think of Gunther Grass' Wicked Cooks, of Marcel Proust's madelaines, of Don Quixote's stew. "An army marches on its stomach" and this, according to Thucydides, is why it took the Achaians ten years to sack Troy: they never were able to devote themselves fully to the siege, but had to be always scrounging for food. In the Aeneid the harpies prophesy to Aeneas that he and his followers will be so hungry that they will gnaw their tables. This is fulfilled when they spread their bits of food over dry bread and then eat the bread, an incident that has actually inspired several papers published in learned journals on the invention of pizza. What moves Hamlet to think about revenge more than the impropriety of the carousing of his step-father so soon after his father's funeral: the economy of using the funeral meats for the wedding celebration ["thrift, thrift, Horatio"]. What irks Telemachus most about his mother's haughty suitors? Is it not that they are eating him out of house and home? What distinguishes the house of Tantalus from other noble Greek families if not their idiosyncratic table manners and cooking procedures? Where does Orestes slaughter his step-father in Euripides' tragedy of Electra? Where does Oedipus learn that he may not be who he thinks he is? Think of Odysseus at the feast of the Phaeacians:

 

Amid the plenty of Alkinoos' feast, Odysseus is hungry for his home, for the end of his labors, for the real feast that awaits him.

 

But dinners are not made only for the aesthetic senses. Let us consider in detail some actual Roman repasts and their preparations.

The Romans, like us, distinguished three meals: jentaculum, prandium, & cena. Breakfast [or jentaculum] was a simple morning meal. Cheese was a favorite breakfast food. Olives were also eaten for breakfast with bread and cheese [as they are in Turkey and Sicily to this day], either plain or in a spread. Cato, in his de Agri cultura gives a recipe for such a spread, called epityra [a word from Greek that means "on top of the cheese"]. Epityra is made from pitted olives which are chopped and marinated in oil, vinegar, coriander, cumin, fennel and mint.

For such a dish as epityra a man might sell his soul. In the Miles Gloriosus, a comedy of Plautus, one character in the play, a parasite named Artotrogus explains why he has let himself get into the position of having to agree with every boast his master, Pyrgopolinices, the "braggart captain" of the title, makes. A parasite is a stock character in ancient comedy: a hanger-on who devotes his life to a man of greater resources in order to get a free meal. Artotrogus [whose name means "bread muncher"] defends his way of life by saying that one thing only keeps him in the captain's service:

Epityra estur insanum bene: "olive dip is consumed [at his house] with delicious abandon."

The second meal, or prandium, was taken about noon, and it too was a simple meal, usually cold: perhaps a bowl of barley, a slice of cold meat, and a flask of wine. But styles of eating had changed over the years. In Plautus' time [late third to early second c. B.C.] the prandium seems to have been a more elaborate repast: at least in the play Menaechmi [named after its protagonists, a set of identical twins who happen to have the same name and to have been separated for many years] much of the plot revolves around the preparation of a prandium for the local Menaechmus, his mistress, and his parasite: a meal which is tragically consumed by the other Menaechmus in this ancient comedy of errors. In the play [Men. I.iii, 25-30], before setting out to theforum, Menaechmus asks his lady love to have a prandium ready for three, and suggests the following:

a tasty bit of bacon, a slab of ham, a half a head of pig or something of the sort--and make it snappy!

In Latin this menu sounds rather more grand:

 

Pork was by far the Romans' favorite meat: to them paradise was where the pigs ran around already roasted. Many delicious pork recipes have come down to us in the cookbook of Apicius; among the best is pork fricassee with apricots.

The main meal of the Roman day was the cena, which was eaten in mid-afternoon. The Romans knocked off work about 1:00; then they would go for a stroll or take some exercise and then go to the baths. The typical Roman gentleman worked at most 6 to 7 hours a day and took frequent holidays: there were 159 holidays in the Roman calendar. After the business or professional day was done, the rest of the day could be spent in relaxation.

The Roman dining room was called the triclinium, from its three couches, which were arranged around the three sides of a large square table, with the fourth side left open for service by the slaves. Several people, usually three, would recline lengthwise on each couch with their heads toward the table. The couches, which were spread with mattresses, coverings and cushions, sloped upward so that the edges were a bit above the level of the table. The guests used their left hands to support their heads, resting their left elbows on cushions, leaving their right hands free for feeding their faces. The guests were seated in something of a hierarchy: the couch of honor was the central one opposite the empty side [lectus medius] and the top spot on it was the right side [called the locus consularis]: here the guest of honor would recline, a consul or exconsul would hold this place. To the left of the central couch was the lectus summus which was the second most honorable position, and finally the lectus imus, the lowest and least desirable place. At Roman parties, unlike Greek ones, women, even severe Roman matrons, were permitted to dine with the men, but they--the matrons at least--used chairs.

Pliny once attended a party at which the guests were not only seated according to social status, but were even fed in ranks. Delicacies were served to a few important people and hash to the others. Three types of wine were served, but not so that guests would have a choice: the host kept the fine vintage for himself and a few favored personages and served rot-gut to the lesser guests. Pliny, even though he was a favored guest was horrified by this procedure. He even excuses himself by saying that he hardly knew his host. And he assures his friend that when he throws a party he does not invite his friends to a demotion ceremony.

The table napkin was a Roman invention: since they ate mostly with their hands, frequent hand washings and wipings were in order between courses. The Greeks ate with their hands too, but wiped them on pieces of bread which were thrown to the hounds at the end of the meal. A Roman often brought his own napkin with him--in this way he could carry home--as in a doggie bag--any morsels that he had not had time or inclination to finish. Often the host would provide a treat specifically meant to be taken away in the linteum. One could of course overdo the napkin trick: the poet Martial complains of a guest who brought a rather large napkin--a mappa in fact, which can also mean a whole tablecloth--and filled it up before anyone else had had a chance to eat:

Whatever is served [--writes Martial--] you sweep away from the whole table, whether it's sow's udder or pork chops, or a game hen meant for two, half a mullet or a whole bass, the side of a lamprey or a chicken drumstick, or a dove dripping with gravy--when you have spirited these off into your sopping napkin, you slip them to your slave to carry home, while we are lying down at table, a carefree company: if you have any shame, give us back our supper. Caecilianus, I did not invite you for tomorrow too. [11.37]

In another poem, the poet complains of a guest who not only fills his napkin from the table, but from the floor as well, stealing the scraps left for the dogs. He carries a flask with him which he fills with table wine. The next day he sells the loot and starts once more to work up an invitation to another grand dinner party. Everybody needs a job...

But there was another misdemeanor at table far worse than filling one's napkin with goodies to take home, as Catullus warns in this poem:

Marrucinus Asinius you don't use your left hand in a nice way amidst the festivities and carousing. You take people's napkins behind their backs. Do you think that is smart. You are wrong, you ninny. It is ever so nasty and in such bad taste.... Well, either expect 300 satirical verses about your table manners, or give me back my napkin.

No Roman banquet is complete without perfume. The water poured for the diners' hands and arms was scented. We are told in the Historia Augusta that the late [and decadent] emperor Elagabalus [3rd c. A.D.] used to shower his guests with blossoms, enough in fact to suffocate a few ill-starred diners. Elagabalus' brilliant career lasted for three short, but gluttonous years, until he was murdered in a latrine and thrown into the Tiber.

From Republican times we have a famous poem of Catullus, in which the poet invites his friend Fabullus to as dinner at which the main attraction is an exquisite perfume; if Fabullus wants to eat and not just smell, he will have to bring his own:

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me...

You will dine well at my place, Fabullus, in a few days, if the gods take care of you--if you bring with you a nice big dinner, and don't forget a pretty girl, wine and wit and laughter. If you bring these, my dear friend, you will dine well. For Catullus' wallet is full of cob-webs. But you will receive in return my unmixed affection and something sweeter and more elegant [if that is possible]: I will give you perfume, which Venus and the Loves gave to my girl: and when you take a whiff of it, you will pray to the gods, Fabullus, to make you all nose!

Apparently Fabullus already had a monumental nose, even for a Roman. But the later poet Martial did not care much for such jejune sniffing parties, a little too low budget even for his taste. Addressing Fabullus, he writes the following retort:

I will admit that you gave your guests a good perfume yesterday; but you did not carve a thing! Is it smart to smell sweet and to starve? Fabullus, if someone does not dine and yet is anointed with scents, I really think he has been embalmed!

 

But perhaps the perfumes were necessary, considering garum or liquamen which was the Romans' favorite sauce, and which must have let off a powerful aroma. The sauce, liquamen, made from aged fish, was manufactured in factories and sold under various brand names. It was used in nearly all the recipes except those for sweets. It was used in place of salt and is necessary [if not altogether desireable] for giving an authentic flavor to foods prepared in the Roman fashion.

Although it was probably uncommon to make up a batch of garum from scratch, several recipes for its preparation survive. There is even a recipe for instant garum.

Take large or small sprats or anchovies or mackerel; make a mixture of all and put into a baking trough. Take 2 pints of salt to the peck of fish and mix well to impregnate all the fish with the salt. Leave it for one night, then put it into an earthenware vessel which you place open in the sun for two to three months, stirring with a stick at intervals, then cover it with a lid and store it away. Some people add old wine, two pints to the pint of fish.

Several wine preparations were also used in cooking: instead of adding the cooking wine to the dish and cooking it down, the Roman cooks used wine that was reduced beforehand: this was called defrutum or caroenum according to the degree of reduction: defrutum was reduced to a thick consistency about one third of its original volume, and caroenum to about two thirds. Both were used for sweetening and for color. Passum was another sweet wine additive, even sweeter than defrutum and could be used as a honey substitute.

Let us look in now on some Romans reclining at table to see what they were eating and how they were enjoying themselves. One of the Younger Pliny's letters, freely translated here, describes a little party at his home to a delinquent guest, whom Pliny scolds in the hope of making his naughty friend rue his absence:

My Dear Septicius Clarus,

Look here, you accepted my invitation to dinner and then did not show up. You will be assessed for the costs, to the last penny, and they are not small. You will have to foot the bill for all these preparations: lettuce, one head per head; snails, three apiece; eggs, two each; pasta [to wit: spelt grits]; all the above served with mulsum and snow--yes, you will pay the tab for the snow too, in fact especially for the snow, because it died on the dish as a result of your negligence; then olives, boiled beets, gourds, onions, and one thousand other items no less elegantly prepared.

You would have heard comic skits, or a reader, or a musician, or--considering my generosity--all three. But you preferred oysters, stuffed sow's womb, sea urchins, and Spanish bombshells, at whose home, I for one cannot imagine. But you will pay your debt.... You have acted with malice aforethought, maybe not to yourself, but certainly to me, but yes, to yourself as well. How much fun we would have had, how we would have laughed, how serious we would have been too. You can dine at many homes with more pomp and circumstance, but nowhere with more fun, candor, and openness. In short: come to my next party, and unless you prefer to make your excuses to others in future, make your excuse to me forever.

Cordially yours,

Gaius Pliny

 

A similar party is described more colorfully by Martial:

If you are worried about a gloomy dinner at home, Toranius, you can come starve with me. If you are in the habit of having hors d'oeuvres with your cocktails, you will get cheap Cappadocian lettuce and pungent leeks, and a tuna salad buried under sliced eggs.

Green cabbage--hot enough to burn your fingers when you pick it up, but fresh from the cool garden--will be served on a black plate, and a sausage lying heavily on a white porridge, and pasty beans with red bacon.

And if you want some dessert, you will be offered grapes in the latter stages of decay, and a type of pears called Syrian, and chestnuts roasted in a slow fire, raised in learned Naples: the wine you will make good by drinking it.

If after all this, Bacchus stimulates your appetite as he usually does, noble olives will come to your aid, and roasted chick peas and hot lupins. My little feast is meager [who can deny it?], but you will not have to put on airs, nor will any be put on for you: you can relax and just be yourself...

Martial, v.79

These are simple, frugal, natural meals at which the food is upstaged by the good company and these were no doubt more the rule than the guzzling and gorging so commonly associated with imperial Roman dining. But there is another famous dinner party more like so-and-so's of Pliny's letter, only more extravagant in every way than your average tasteless display: this is the "Cena Trimalchionis" from Petronius' Satyricon, from which I will read a few selections shortly.

The Roman cena was divided into three distinct parts: first the gustum or gustation [hors d'oeuvres or antipasto] which was served with mulsum, wine sweetened with honey. This works very well and as Cato points out [in one of his household hints] can make cheap wine taste expensive. It is best to start with a dry red wine, heat a small amount of the wine with honey so that it will mix easily and then stir the honey mixture back into the wine. The ancients drank a sweeter, thicker wine than we do: it was made from riper grapes which were then dried. Only boorish people drank it straight. It was usually mixed with water in a krater [a word from Greek that means "mixing bowl"]. It could be chilled with snow, as Pliny did.

With the mulsum Pliny served small heads of lettuce, snails, eggs, and alica, a cereal dish; Martial also promises lettuce as well as leeks and a bit of tuna with sliced eggs. Lettuce was recognized by the ancients as a refreshing summer dish that was good for the digestion and for promoting the appetite. From Columella we have a basic salad recipe:

savory, onion, rue, coriander, parsley, chives or green onion, lettuce, colewort, thyme or catnip, and green fleabane.

Among the salad vegetables favored by the Romans were watercress, cucumbers, and if not full-fledged artichokes, at east a variety of thistle. Some types of thistle commanded a high price and Pliny the Elder comments that "even the monstrosities of the earth are turned to purposes of gluttony" and adds sarcastically that by preserving them in vinegar and honey we need not let a day go by without having thistles on the table.

A recipe for cooked lettuce is found in Apicius, a famous gourmet who lived in the first century A.D. He is said to have killed himself when he discovered that he had spent all his money on food and rather than face the prospect of eating like other men, he ended his life. A Roman Cookbook has come down to us under Apicius' name, which is almost certainly a later compilation, but some at least of the recipes may date from his time. In its ten books of recipes, the work is a fund of information about the Roman culinary art. The recipes only list the ingredients and tell as laconically as possible what to do with them. Only very rarely are any measurements or proportions given. His recipe for patina of lettuce [--a patina is something like an omelet--] is "pound lettuce stalks with pepper, liquamen, sweet wine, water, oil. Cook; bind with eggs, sprinkle with pepper, and serve."

This is a typical recipe and the sort of thing Pliny or Martial might serve. A famous recipe is the one for flamingo with dates and caraway:

Pluck, wash, truss the flamingo. Put it in a pan. Add water, salt, dill, and a dash of vinegar. When it is half cooked, add a bouquet of leek, coriander and let it cook. When it is almost done add defrutum for colloring. Pound pepper, cumin, coriander, root of laser, mint, rue; moisten with vinegar. Add dates; pour some of the stock [from the flamingo] over it. Put in the pan with the bird, thicken with flour. Pour the sauce over the bird.

idem facies et in psittaco: You can use the same recipe for parrot too.

From the lettuces to the leeks the dishes served by Pliny and Martial are plain. Here's the first course at Trimalchio's dinner:

A little donkey made of Corinthian bronze was set on the sideboard with little saddle bags containing olives, white on one side, black on the other. Two dishes covered the donkey, on their edges was inscribed Trimalchio's name and the weight of the silver. Little bridges soldered on to the dishes were supporting dormice dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seed. There were also hot sausages on a silver grill and under it Syrian plums and pomegranite seeds. [31]

Dormice--which for us have an effect opposite to that of an appetizer--were a great favorite and were first domesticated for culinary use in Roman times. Gliraria, enclosures for raising dormice [glires in Latin], were constructed to simulate the rodents' natural habitat in order to make sure of a constant supply. They were fattened on a diet of walnuts, acorns and chestnuts. Apicius has a recipe for dormice stuffed with pork, pepper, pinenuts, laser and the inevitable liquamen, and roasted on a tile in the oven.

After these tasty tidbits came the mensae primae [or main course]. Pliny mentions only vegetables, but Martial gives us a better idea of the average person's low-budget meal; he offered cabbages, porridge with sausage, and beans with bacon. But a more elaborate feast would have a roast or two, or several as Trimalchio served to his guests:

The next dish was not nearly as large as we expected, but its originality made it the center of attention. For it was a round dish with the twelve signs of the zodiac arranged in order, over each symbol was set a food appropriate to it: over Aries, ramshead chickpeas; over Taurus, a slice of beef; over Gemini, prairie oysters and kidneys and so on...

Then the top of the dish is removed and inside: fat fowls and sow's bellies and a hare decked out with wings like Pegasus. Four figures of Marsyas sprinkle sauce over fishes in the corners of the dish. A little later a huge boar is brought in with buckets of dates hanging from the tusks, and surrounded by confections in the shape of piglets, which were for the guests to take home in their napkins. When the side of the boar was pierced, thrushes flew out, only to be caught at once by fowlers. Next an enormous pig is brought in, which when cut open poured out sausages and black puddings. Now comes a boiled calf, dressed up in a helmet, to be attacked by one latter-day Ajax gone mad. Each dish, as the narrator tells us, had to be accompanied by some gross pretense or other. And now come chickens, one for each guest and goose eggs. Within this outlandish dinner another dinner is described by one of the guests, compounding the gluttony.

After an interval, more food. In these dishes, the chef's art reached its perfection.:

thrushes made of flour, stuffed with raisins and nuts, quinces stuck all over with thorns to look like sea-urchins.

and finally the most fantastic dish of all: what appeared to be a fat goose with fish and all kinds of birds around it, but turned out to be made all of pork. Trimalchio goes on to rave about his cook, dubbed Daedalus: "There could not be a finer fellow, if you want it, he will make you a fish out of a sow's belly, a wood pigeon out of bacon, a turtle dove out of ham, and a chicken out of a knuckle of pork."

This is Roman cooking at its most baroque. Of such orgies of gluttony Seneca penned his famous line, vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant. Old Seneca's warnings had no effect on his pupil Nero, who--we are told--feasted from noon till midnight and often dined in public in the Campus Martius or Circus Maximus, rivaling the more bloodthirsty public spectacles.

At the end of the Roman meal was the Secundae Mensae [or dessert], usually fruit or sweets. At the Cena Trimalchionis oysters, mussels, and snails were part of one of the desserts. But his most elaborate dessert will not be described in detail, for Trimalchio had an X-rated pastry chef. Aside from the explicit sculpted confection, "all the cakes and all the fruits, when touched ever so slightly, began to squirt out saffron..." and the guests thinking it was a sacred dish all stood up and shouted:

But Trimalchio's feast was far from typical. The cooking tradition to be inferred from Apicius' cookbook would not displease even the most health conscious among us. The total disguise of foods which gives Trimalchio such pride is not emphasized. Possibly Apicius' recipe for "anchovy paste without anchovy" is a possible, but pale, candidate.

The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote:

Hellenism is a cooking pot, oven tongs, an earthenware jug of milk, household utensils, dishes, all the things that surround a human body; Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth recognized as something holy; it is any possession that connects a man with some part of the world outside himself...Hellenism is a man deliberately surrounded with utensils instead of indifferent objects, the turning of indifferent objects into utensils, humanizing the surrounding world...Hellenism is the system...which a man sets up around himself. [Stone ]

If Hellenism is a cooking pot, what is Romanitas? It is not to be found at Trimalchio's hearth, but perhaps in Martial's tenement apartment near the bookseller's stalls where the supper is small, but a friend need not put on airs nor fear that he will be treated to entertainments either too lofty or too low.

© C. A. E. Luschnig