A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (29 page)

Juvenal says foie gras was served hot. ‘Before the master is put a huge goose’s liver, a capon as big as a goose, and a boar, piping hot.’

At the same dinner, given by the social climber Marcus Varro, the host amused himself by giving his guests of humble origin a paltry menu, while he had the above, followed by truffles! Lucullus
loved truffles. Truffles had a special fragrance, grew in a mysterious way, and were therefore highly attractive to the Romans in their quest for expensive, rare, maybe aphrodisiac, and delicious
delicacies. The Greeks and Romans didn’t agree on the nature of truffles. Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, thought they were born of autumn claps of thunder and especially lightning;
Nicander, 100 years later, thought they were silt modified by internal heat, and Plutarch thought they were mud cooked by lightning.

No one has successfully to this day managed to grow such truffles; experiments are being carried out in the Limousin, in the Périgord, and an Israeli in California thinks he has nearly
cracked the problem . . . Martial lets the truffles talk: ‘We truffles that burst through the nurturing soil with our soft heads are of earth’s apples second to mushrooms.’ Galen
prescribed truffles to his patients, amongst them admittedly Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, ‘for the truffle is very
nourishing, and causes general excitation, conducive
to sensual pleasure’. Maybe the truffles of antiquity were not the same as the pungent black truffles of the Périgord and Strasbourg, or the distinctive white truffles of Italy
familiar to us, because Pliny describes them as reddish, black or white (the Italian variety?) and Martial’s come bursting through the ground like mushrooms.

The elusiveness of truffles surely lies in the fact that they spore and grow haphazardly underground and have to be sniffed out by pigs or dogs. The Romans probably enjoyed some real truffles
–
tubera
– and also used the word
tuber
to cover truffles, pungent mushrooms of tubercular shape which sprout up from under the ground and are found around the
Mediterranean.

Boletus mushrooms were highly esteemed. Martial again:

Pliny, who in his
Natural History
gives precise descriptions of edible and poisonous mushrooms, writes rather bossily:

The mushroom Agrippina gave Claudius was the ‘fly agaric’,
which looks like the most prized mushroom of classical times, the ‘royal
agaric’; the fly agaric is now commonly known as Caesar’s Mushroom.

Millions of oyster shells litter Roman sites; the Romans imported them from Gaul, England having already started her own beds. The expert was Mucianus, an oyster taster, quoted
by Pliny as being able to differentiate between the ten different sorts available in the fish forum – from the Sea of Marmora to the Armorican coast, including Tripolitan, Aeolian, Istrian,
Latian and Asturian. Catiline’s grandfather was famous for his fish ponds,
piscinae,
and he raised his gilthead bream from Lake Lucrino on oysters, opened for them day and night, which
he bred in the elaborate oyster beds he had constructed. His oysters were chosen from Tarentum or Brindisi. He sold the surplus and made a fortune. The fish ponds constructed by medieval monks
after the barbarian invasions were basedon Roman design; it could not be beaten.

Soon after the conquest of Gaul 58–52
BC
, oyster farming became one of the biggest industries. Natural oyster beds from all Gaulish coasts provided excellent specimens.
The Greeks had appreciated the Gaulish oysters long before the Romans arrived. The Greek, Strabo, praises the oysters of the Etang de Berre, near Marseilles. Pliny talks about the oysters of the
Médoc, then, in the fourth century, Ausonius provides fascinating oyster information. Whereas Caesar had divided Gaul into three nations, Ausonius, the prefect-poet, divides the country
geographically according to the quality of its oysters! First comes the Médoc, whence the author, who came originally from Lyons and was of Greek descent, his family having been in Gaul
before the Romans. Next comes Provence, including Marseilles, the Etang de Berre and Port-Vendres, whose oysters he considered on a par with
those from Baiae near Naples and
Lake Lucrino; still in the second category came the Saintogne and Calvados areas. Third, came Armorican oysters from the country of the Picts, La Vendée, and then Scotland and, a long way
behind, Byzantium!

Certain fish were greatly revered, among them the red mullet, especially for the brains. One weighing four and a half pounds was auctioned by Tiberius; the bidding between Apicius and another
rich, greedy fellow was competitive and in the end the greedy fellow won and paid 30,000
sesterces
(about £4,000 today!). Domitian’s turbot was so enormous that the Senate was
convened to deliberate the best way to serve it. Gaius Hirrius was the first to invent separate fish ponds for rearing morays. He contributed 6,000 morays to the banquets at which Julius Caesar
celebrated his Triumphs, but as a loan, since he was unwilling to exchange them for a price or indeed for any other kind of payment. When he sold his smallish country seat, he received 4,000,000
sesterces
, largely on the strength of his fish ponds. It was after this that a passion for individual fish began to seize certain people. At Bacolo, in the district of Baiae, the orator
Hortensius kept a fish pond in which there was a moray he so prized that it is widely believed he shed tears at its death. In the same country house, Antonia, the wife of Drusus, put earrings on a
moray she loved, and some people longed to see Bacolo because of its famous fish.

Tuna, grey mullet and the abundant fish of the Mediterranean were beaten like game into the lagoon of Berre by dolphins. River fish especially from Gaul, sea anemones, still a Niçoise
favourite, and salmon from the northern rivers were not to be sneezed at.

Snails and dormice were enthusiastically collected, bred and fed. It was Fulvius Lippinus who began breeding snails
in the district of Tarquinii (Trachina) around 50
BC
. He sorted them into four batches and gave them each their own
vivarium
– the white snails from Reate, the Illyrian snails famed for their size, the African
snails known for fertility and the African sun snails known simply for quality. Lippinus fattened them with must and spelt; Apicius has a recipe for milk-fed snails. Indeed, Marcus Varro wrote that
snail rearing became such a mania that a banquet snail shell could contain twenty pints.

Dormice, our fieldmice, were bred in hutches for some eighteen centuries from the Greeks to the Middle Ages. The Romans also kept them in jars and fed them on acorns, figs, walnuts and
chestnuts, and when they were
à point
they cooked these delectable titbits in honey.

In
AD
162 the Lex Faunia forbade the fattening of hens, to save grain, but the Romans got around this snag by castrating cockerels, thus inventing the capon – they
grew to twice their size and put on a lot of weight like a eunuch. Spayed hens became fattened pullets.

The Romans, who were good at central heating and plumbing, also had steam-heated incubators for eggs. Hens were not just for consumption but for sacrifice too. The chicken, a relation of the
Asian mound-bird, only reached Greece in the fifth century
BC
, wending its way from Malaysia to domestication in the valley of the Indus, then to Persia and thence to King
Croesus in Greece. Horace thought a fowl drowned to death in wine had a particularly good taste. The Romans ate all domestic fowl we eat (save turkey, it hadn’t arrived), and birds we
don’t – swans, ostriches, crane, bittern, stork, robins, sparrows, fig-peckers and thrushes (
vide
Trimalcio’s feast), oriole, even seagulls and pelicans . . .

The only cookbook of any length extant is a fourth-century compilation, purportedly the recipes of one Apicius,
a first-century gourmet, who committed suicide because he
estimated he did not have enough money left to keep his gastronomic life alive.
This
Apicius was a contemporary of Tiberius. But there could have been four Apiciuses, each from a different
century; let’s assume the book,
De Re Coquinaria
, is from the first-century
AD
Apicius undoubtedly with bits added along the way. And it’s only from these
or other miscellaneous recipes that we can make a stab at guessing what Roman food tasted like and what sort of texture it had.

As Rome began its earliest days as a salt crossroads, they knew salt was crucial to life – Roman soldiers were partly paid in salt, hence ‘salary’. There being no
refrigeration, any meats or fish if not eaten fresh were salted. Spices imported from the East were inordinately precious and it seems that the more spice, herbs and pickle you could possibly stuff
into a single dish the happier the host and more impressed the guests.

Pepper was the king spice. Most of Apicius’ sauce recipes begin with a liberal dose of pepper. A sweet sauce for eels might consist of ground pepper, lovage, oregano, mint, onion, honey,
boiled wine and fish stock. Pepper was also sprinkled or poached with pears, apples and quinces, and this was still a common practice in the Middle Ages; we sometimes pepper strawberries, and a
Moroccan
tajine
of lamb, prunes and cinnamon is heavily peppered – reminiscent of Roman sweet-sour dishes which would suggest many dishes were adopted from the Far and Middle East and
Greece. Pepper gives piquancy, a sensation, but not an aromatic or exotic taste or smell; nevertheless and despite its price it was used willy-nilly, and was quite indispensable to Roman
gastronomy.

To get an idea of its price: in
AD
390 Diocletian, in an edict, fixed the price of whole long pepper in the Roman Empire
at fifteen
denarii
a
pound (roughly £40), shelled pepper (round pepper?) at four
denarii
(say £14) and white pepper at seven
denarii
(£24). What a huge chunk of a medium
household’s income! The
honestiores,
people who didn’t need state aid, certified to the
municipia,
the authorities, that they were in possession of 5,000
sesterces’
capital, and one Jerome Carcopino (
A Rome à l’apogée de l’Empire,
Hachette, 1939), worked out that the average middle-class family with enough
slaves needed 20,000
sesterces
a year to live on! No wonder, if pepper was so expensive, and a Roman pound weight was less than ours.

Foreign monarchs who owed allegiance to the imperial city gave pepper to consuls, senators, generals and indeed any officials. When, in
AD
408, Alaric, King of the
Visigoths, captured Rome, he demanded 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. They just couldn’t have eaten it all, pepper goes mouldy. Pepper was a status
symbol – mouldering gold.

If pepper came first to the cook’s hand, then cinammon, cardamom and nutmeg were bracketed together as condiments used in almost every dish, rather like salt and pepper today. This mixture
was used in the preparation of food and also sprinkled over cooked dishes just before they went to the table. Ginger, Indian spikenard, cloves and Indian costum were high on the list of imported
spices. An indication of the Roman fever for spices by the first century
AD
is the fact that they accounted for forty-four out of the eighty-six classifications of goods
imported from Asia and the eastern coast of Africa to the Mediterranean. (The others included elephant trainers and eunuchs, parrots and palm oil, cottons and cooks.)

Besides spices the Romans used lots of herbs and fish pickles, many of which we never use and hardly ever see today. Lovage, a green herbal plant that grows anywhere and
to
quite a size, crops up often and has a taste stronger and more cloying than its cousin, celery. Rue has probably, and not surprisingly, fallen from modern grace; it’s bitter and smells oddly
of sicky cheese (a taste they strove for,
vide
garum below). Its main use nowadays is as an insect-repellent. Brillat Savarin, in his
Psychologie du goût,
reckons that many of
Apicius’ recipes were disgusting to eighteenth-century palates; almost a joke, as they surely are to us, were dishes like ‘stuffed wombs and udders, dormice and boiled ostriches,
capons’ testicles with asafoetida, and all stuffed with rue, endless rue’.

Other ‘European’ herbs used by the Romans, in descending order of importance (somebody reckons to have worked it out), are: coriander, cumin, oregano, celery seed, parsley seed, bay
leaf, aniseed, fennel, mint, caraway, mustard seed, wormwood, chervil, colewort (rocket), saxifrage (sweet cicely), thyme, sage, pennyroyal, pellitory, elecampane, saffron and mastic . . .

But the oddest condiments are liquamen (garum) and the herb silphium or laser – strong, nasty and expensive and totally craved. Some say that garum shared responsibility for the Roman
conquest of Gaul, as its manufacturing and marketing made an appreciable contribution to the prosperity of the trading posts which proliferated, from the time Greek colonists first landed on the
shores of Gaul, until a whole chain had sprung up along the Ligurian (Provençal), Volcaen (Languedocian) and Iberian coastlines. The Greeks had a sauce made of fermented shrimps called
‘garon’
(Greek for shrimp), and the Romans, in all walks of life, had an insatiable mania for it. Some Roman
amphoras
were recovered from shipwrecks in the
Golfe de
Lion
containing crystallized deposits of the sauce and bearing the manufacturers’ seals, showing there was a garum trade as early as the fifth century
BC
.