A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (28 page)

At the average to posh Roman dinner, the first course consisted of tasty, light dishes, say, fritters of sheep’s brains, little liver sausages, poppy seeds in honey, dressed snails,
Lucrine oysters, slices of goose liver, salted sturgeon, asparagus, lettuce, radishes, eggs . . . The ‘carried-on’ course could run to ten dishes. Mucius Lentulus Niger entertained
Julius Caesar and gave him ten starters, ten main courses and endless desserts. Ali Bab cites as crazy, show-off dishes of the greedy and competitive: sows’ nipples in tuna brine;
camels’ heels (said to have been a favourite of Cleopatra); elephants’ trunks; parrots’ heads; ragout of nightingales’ brains; peacocks’ brains; and a
pâté of tiny bird tongues – a pâté which fetched a huge price – not to mention
le pore à la Troyenne farci de becs-figues et
d’huîtres
(Trojan pork with fig-pecker and oyster stuffing).

Although the dinner given by Trimalchio, the Syrian freed-man, is a satire and invented by Petronius (
The Satyricon),
it still remains a perfectly vivid and amusing description of the
form of an excessive Roman dinner:

FERCULA

Foods of the Zodiac served on a round plate (over Aries the Ram, chick-peas; over Taurus the Bull, a beefsteak; on the Heavenly Twins, testicles & kidneys; over Cancer the
Crab, a crown of myrtle; over Leo the Lion, an African fig; over Virgo the Virgin, a young sow’s udder; over Libra the Scales, a balance with a cheesecake in one pan and a pastry in the
other; over Scorpio, a sea scorpion; over Sagittarius the Archer, a sea bream with eyespots; over Capricorn, a lobster; over Aquarius the Water-carrier, a goose; over Pisces the Fishes, two red
mullets).

FALERNIAN

of the Opimian vintage

one hundred years old

Fruits & cakes

Boned, fattened chickens & goose eggs

Pastries stuffed with raisins & nuts

Quince-apples & pork disguised as fowls & fish

Oysters & scallops

Snails

That’s the menu in a list, but one of Petronius’ guest’s description is far less clinical:

Trimalchio arrives, games, swears and shows off, then a tray is brought in with a basket on it:

Another horror was Aulus Vitellius, Emperor for nine mind-boggling months in
AD
69 – he was murdered by his successor Vespasian’s allies. Suetonius has a good
tale:

Caligula constantly sought out the novel and bizarre in his entertainments. He invented new sorts of baths where he could soak in special oils; he also devised weird foods – he was said to
have laid out loaves and meats of gold, and to have drunk pearls melted in vinegar. His settings were novel too – he had wonderful villas throughout Campania and ships
so extravagantly decked out that they boasted baths and fruit trees. (The surviving vessels found at Nemi are proof of such opulence.) Those guests not too keen on sailing could join
one of Caligula’s picnics, which took place in a tree house in the branches of an enormous plane tree, large enough to seat fifteen!

Juvenal, Pliny and Martial were perfectly normal eaters and entertainers, and observed sumptuary laws. Juvenal would content himself by dining simply on ‘a plump kid, tenderest of the
flock’, with ‘more of milk in him than of blood’, some wild asparagus and ‘lordly eggs warm in their wisps of hay together with the hens that laid them’ (perhaps the
most memorable meal I’ve eaten in France lately, at Bardet in Tours, comprised one course of a lightly boiled guinea-fowl egg, served with the finest sea salt; the following course was its
mother, also poached but with truffles. Bardet and Juvenal’s chef share the same inclinations towards simplicity and quality). Ordinary plebeian gatherings, whether among family or friends,
political colleagues or corporations, were pretty frugal and sober affairs because they mostly did not have enough money to entertain on a lavish scale as ingredients were expensive.

Rome itself was a limited space, there was no refrigeration although they knew how to make ice, but who would have got that? The rich. The ordinary people, who lived in highly inflammable and
jerry-built ‘high-rise’ flats, often didn’t dare cook due to fear of fire, the neighbours, smells, maybe even the lack of a burner. Cooking costs money. Hence, the thriving street
food business, as in Asia and the Far East today – hot, tasty and cheap.

Did the Romans have spaghetti? No one can agree. Marco Polo did not bring pasta to the West. Going by eighteenth-century Italian translations of Horace’s
Satires
and Martial’s
Epigrams
one would assume the Romans ate pasta, as
pastillas
was translated as ‘little pastas’; but all translations before the fourteenth century
translate the word as ‘small, round cakes’. Croquettes is another rendering. Marcus Varro, first century
AD
, states in his encyclopedia that a
pastillum
is a bread roll; then, de Cagne, an erudite seventeenth-century Frenchman, came up with the theory that
pastillum
is a pastry stuffed with meat, a ravioli! It’s possible then that the
Romans had the stuffed, malleable, pudgy pastas like ravioli, gnocchi, tortelloni. Long strands of spaghetti would have been hard to eat without forks or chop sticks.

Once the Empire was nicely under way, territories enlarged and under control, the show offs showing off, it’s interesting to pinpoint the spices, condiments, relishes and, to us,
untasteable mixtures the Romans most cared for. The only point of view we can get is the Romans’ – they knew what they wanted and thought they knew what to do with it in a sophisticated
manner. The range at their disposal was vast – the Romans had the run of Gaul and they learned much from the Gauls, although Roman writers invariably cite the Gauls as noisy, rough marauders.
It was probably merely one tribe, the Arvernii, ancestors of the people of the present-day Auvergne, who lived up to his uncouth, roistering image. The Gauls introduced the Romans to foie gras,
oysters, barrels, mattresses (good for lolling on, having over-eaten) and shored up the wine supply at reasonable prices.

Gaulish influence coupled with that of the northern Germanic tribes was considerable – ‘Westphalian’ ham, sausages and, perhaps, black bread. The Romans liked smoking pork, the
Greeks never liked this method of cooking/preserving, they simply boiled. And it was the people of north and central Europe who were essentially hunters, and not fancy cooks, with plenty of
spindly-legged wild pigs and abundant
forests, who must have invented the practical and tasty method of smoking which continues to this day especially in Germany and all
countries north. Selling smoked, salted hams to the Romans also made the Germanic tribesmen a fortune. After all, ‘jambon de Bayonne’, ‘Westphalische Schinken’,
‘prosciutto crudo’, etc., are all expensive today. Whether hams came from the north, Gaul or Spain, Martial, Cato and others extolled their deliciousness and noticed that the secret
ingredient was acorns. Spanish and Corsican hams are still loved for their acorny flavour. The Romans didn’t much care for beef. It was pork, in all guises, they liked. Galen says it tasted
like human flesh. A recommendation? Well, no associations seemed abhorrent to the Roman palate.

A real delicacy of a posh patrician dinner was any dish made of sows’ vulvas and teats. Arguments arose as to whether the vulva of a sow who had aborted her first litter was the tops
(Pliny), or whether it was those of a virgin sow. Or, were the teats of a sterile sow better than those of the sow who had just given birth and suckled her young . . . the dotty Emperor
Heliogabalus could eat a dish of tits ten days running.

Sausages were popular. The Romans made their own and introduced different kinds from Gaul to extend the charcutiers’ range, and sausage-making hasn’t, it seems, changed much either
in Italy or in France for 2,000 years. They had
circelli tomacinae
and
incisia
– small chipolata-type sausages;
pendulus,
a large slicing sausage using the end of the
large intestine, or caecum;
hillae,
a very thin sausage, like today’s dry mountain sausage;
tuccettae
, a speciality of Cisalpine Gaul, long and a mixture of pork and beef.
Faliscan sausage was like mortadella and the Gauls made something like
andouillettes
which might be smoked black puddings with milk and blood – a delicacy of the
canabae,
the
settlements of Aeduan charcutiers who set up shop near Roman settlements.

Tripe,
omasum,
a completely Celtic dish, was a Roman favourite, and was made with onions and garlic, both vegetables exported in large quantities from Gaul. The
Gallo-Romans and Romans at home in Rome must have liked offal: pigs’ heads, strings of sausages, black puddings and the Gaulish charcutier, the
lardarius,
at work are depicted on
bas-reliefs found in Narbonne, Bordeaux, Cologne and Reims.

Fatted goose- and duck-liver has been going for a long, long time. The ancient Egyptians were the first to notice the phenomenon, and appreciate the taste and, above all, texture. The Egyptians
sent Agesilaus, King of Sparta, fat geese around 400
BC
. Athenaeus writing in the third century
BC
quotes the famous cook Archestratus on foie gras:
‘A liver, or rather the soul of a goose’.

The Greeks were good at cramming geese and the Romans copied. Cato, in the second century
BC
, explains: ‘To cram hens or geese: shut up young hens beginning to lay,
make pellets of moist flour or barley meal, soak in water, and put into the mouth . . . cram twice a day, and give water at noon, but do not place water before them for more than one hour. Feed a
goose the same way, except that you let it drink first, and give food and water twice a day’. Columella gives the same advice in the first century
AD
, and Palladius,
in the fourth century
AD
, says they should be fed on a vegetarian diet and in the warmth and dark till fat and then on rolled, pounded figs for another fifty days.

Pliny agrees that the Romans liked foie gras, the liver of the Gaulish geese (Gaul again), that arrived ‘on foot all the way to Rome from Morini (Picardy); the geese that get tired are
advanced to the front rank, and so all the rest drive them on by instinctively pressing forward in their rear’. Pliny goes on about foie gras. ‘Stuffing the bird makes the liver grow to
a great size, and also once it has been removed it is made
larger by being soaked in milk sweetened with honey.’ Horace thought the ‘enormous liver’, as
Juvenal called it, should definitely come from a white, female goose . . .

Figs would have made a poor goose very sick; foie gras is in fact the liver of a severely diabetic bird. The Romans prized
iecur ficatum,
‘fig liver’, above all other foie
gras, and the Gauls, who loved it then as they do now, forgot about the liver bit,
iecur,
and went on with the
ficatum.
In the eighth century this became
figido,
then
fedie
et feie
in the twelfth century, ending up as foie.