Food in Pompeii
There have been many disasters in the world, but none that have given so much pleasure to posterity.
Buried under 2.5m of volcanic pumice and ash, Pompeii is a town cruelly frozen in time. It provides a little window into daily life in 79 AD where bakeries, snack bars and dining rooms stand suspended in time, empty but full of echoes from their bustling Roman past.
Bakeries
Bakeries in Pompeii are identified by the presence of stone mills to grind grain, and large wood-burning ovens for baking. The mills were turned by blindfolded donkeys, a diminutive breed still seen today around Naples. Their bones were found where they died, still harnessed to the mills. The large number of bakeries in the town, and the general absence of private ovens in homes, indicates that the inhabitants of Pompeii bought their daily bread from bakeries and stalls around the town rather than baking it themselves at home, much as we do today. A charred loaf of bread on display in The National Archaeological Museum in Naples is one of 80 found in a large bakery belonging to a man called Modestus, on the road to the Porto Ercolano. It gives us a very clear picture of what Pompeian loaves were like – round and marked out into eight portions. Modestus’ large bakery had a shop front where the loaves were sold, but there were temporary bread-stalls and carts that moved around the town. Two graffiti discovered on the precinct wall of the Temple of Apollo are another indication of this system. They read Verecunnus libarius hic and Pudens libarius, which can be roughly translated as ‘Verecunnus and Pudens sell sacrificial bread here’.
Pompeian bread would have been made from sour dough as was typical of the Roman era. The dough was soured with wine. The bread baked from sour dough has more flavour and texture and keeps fresher for longer. There are different ways of doing this. In humid and warm weather simply mix some flour and warm water and wine to make sloppy dough – equal amounts of flour and warm water mixed with warm wine – and leave it on a warm windowsill. It will begin to ferment and the longer you leave it the more sour it becomes, but it may be used after three or four days. Simply incorporate it into your dough with the yeast and water and follow a basic bread recipe. Once the dough has proved, shape it into a round shape and leave it to rise again. Mark it into eight sections before baking it.
Breakfast
Daily meals in ancient Rome were three: jentaculum, prandium, and cena, the last two words being retained in an adapted version in the Italian language. Breakfast [or jentaculum] was a quick meal, usually olives with bread and cheese, or perhaps an olive spread. Cato, in his De Agri Cultura gives a recipe for such a spread, called epityra: “Remove the stones from green, ripe and black olives and proceed as follows: chop the flesh and add oil, vinegar, coriander, cumin, fennel and mint. Put them in an earthenware dish, cover them with oil and serve.” This can very easily be made by blending the ingredients in a food processor.
Lunch at the thermopolio
Prandium, or lunch, was an insignificant meal quickly eaten in a short break from the day’s tasks – usually at a thermopolium, of which there were many in Pompeii. These were the equivalent of today’s fast food restaurants, where warm food could be bought and eaten on the spot or taken away. There were so many of them in Pompeii, and so few kitchens in private homes, that it is easy to surmise how little food was actually cooked in less prosperous houses, and that much of it was bought ready-prepared. The L-shaped counters of these ancient snack bars make them instantly recognisable all along the main roads of Pompeii. Small stone shelves along the counter-front were probably used to display foods, small vessels, or other wares. The counters had a built-in charcoal oven or stove used to keep food warm. During the excavations, carbonized remains were discovered of dates, lentils and other legumes, soups, eggs, vegetables and fruit.
The main meal of the Roman day was cena, which was eaten mid-afternoon, rather than in the late evening as it is today. This fitted in with the way of life then, when people generally went to bed with the sun to save on lighting-fuel. Generally, the cena consisted of a series of courses laid out in the trinclinium, or dining room – at least in those houses prosperous enough to have one. The name of the room came from the couches ranged around three of the sides of a large square table, with the fourth side left free for service by slaves and servants. Guests reclined on the couches padded with cushions and draperies. Examples of wooden couches have been found in several of the excavated houses of Pompeii, and there are also many masonry couches in the gardens, for use in the warmer weather. Dinner-parties could be an opportunity for the rich elite to display their wealth, for example by providing entertainment in the form of dancers, acrobats and singers or by using an expensive dinner service. In one of the wealthiest homes in Pompeii, which has a large garden, there is even a small stage on which performers could entertain their audience.
Pliny the Younger, in a letter to a friend that survives to this day, describes one such dinner party, to which the friend had been invited but did not show up. (Pliny the Younger was an eye witness to the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii, and which killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder.)
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; 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, candour, 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.
Gaius Pliny
Cordially yours,
Pompeii
After Vesuvius’s catastrophic eruption in AD79, Pompeii disappeared so completely that it was only in the middle of the 18th century, when a farmer drilled a well and struck statuary, that the dilettanti began to arrive in Naples to have a closer look. Grand tourists, such as Horace Walpole, were lowered into the still buried ruins and found they could crawl through the time-warped houses. Petty thieves did do the same. But even before the ash that buried the town had stopped falling, looters went to work. An early looting party of seven men was discovered, when the site was excavated 1700 years later, asphyxiated by the fumes, their booty still in their hands, in the gardens of the House of Menander (so called because there was a portrait of the playwright on one of its walls). There are several bakery remains on view, but a wholesale bakery – possibly the largest one in the area – is currently being excavated and there is no public access to it. There are several ovens and also, in the adjacent shuttered stable, the complete skeletons of the donkeys who rotated, blindfolded, the catillus that ground the wheat. The donkeys died where they stood, patient to the end. Pompeii’s interior decorations were imitated by all the best arrivistes, including Joseph Bonaparte, whom his brother, the great Napoleon, had crowned king of Naples. But Pompeii, with no more than 10,000 inhabitants when it was buried under ash, never housed the top people of ancient Rome. The superb wall-paintings that astonish visitors to the museum today, the splendid streets and public buildings, even the large houses with their courtyards and gardens, were those of fairly ordinary people. While the people of Pompeii painted gardens and paradisiacal scenes on their walls, the truly rich and aristocratic, like the Roman billionaire Crassus, disported themselves in the real thing. “After Rome, Africa”, is the common cry of northern Italians. But “after Rome, Greece” was a fairer way of describing the situation in southern Italy when Pompeii had its heyday. Founded in the 7th century BC, Pompeii’s population was a mix of indigenous Samnites, Oscans and, from the sixth century BC onwards, Greeks. Romans were late-comers to those parts. Nothing could save any of them from Vesuvius, which had rumbled for years without causing trouble, except in AD62, 17 years before The End, when the town was badly shaken. Many of the buildings show attempts at patching up where they were cracked at that time. The obliteration of Pompeii would not have been unduly alarming to the people of Rome itself, because apart from Pliny the Elder, who died when fatal curiosity took him too close to the poisonous fumes, the people of Pompeii were provincials. Pompeii was just one more thriving town. To us it is significant only because it has survived virtually intact.
Romans and their table napkins
The table napkin was a Roman invention: since they ate mostly with their hands, frequent hand-washing and wiping was 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 the time or the 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, which can also mean a whole tablecloth - and filled it up before anyone else had had a chance to eat.