A Taste of Ancient Rome

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A Taste of Ancient Rome

Postby Concordia on Fri May 27, 2005 4:21 pm

Hi all!
Thought you might enjoy this article.

Archeologists give visitors a taste of ancient Rome

ROME -- Sauces made from fermented fish entrails. A quiche-like pastry shell filled with bay leaves and ricotta cheese. For dessert, peaches with aromatic cumin and honey.

Those tastes may not be for everyone's palate, but the specialties of ancient Pompeii are being revived for a month at the site of the ruins by a research project intended to give new insights into how the Romans lived.

The full text can be found here:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-pomp26.html

Nine Blessings!
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Postby Cleopatra Aelia on Sat May 28, 2005 3:12 pm

Salve Concordia,

Very interesting article. As we had discussed at other threads in this forum there are recipes around to cook like the Ancient Romans adopted in some ways to the modern taste. I have a recipe book of Ancient Roman recipes myself and enjoy cooking from that.

As a substitute for the garum I use Vietnamese fish sauce so I don't have to cook fish entrails myself and the neighbors complaining about an unbelievable stench coming out of my apartment.
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Roman Cooking References--Lots of Them!

Postby Aldus Marius on Tue May 01, 2007 8:59 pm

Salvete Romani!

From the [LatinTeach] mailing-list: a bunch of Roman cooking references! These are modern works, and I'm no expert m'self, but some of these sound like they could be excellent. Here ya go...!

( * = in print; + = out-of-print, but may be at the Library. Commentary by Latin instructor M. B. Meyer.)


* Dalby, Andrew & Sally Grainger, The Classical Cookbook, Getty (1996), ISBN: 0892363940. Greek & Roman, with an emphasis on ordinary, everyday foods; excellent summary on garum, only recently supplanted by Grainger's own work with Grocock on Apicius)

* Faas, Patrick & Shaun Whiteside (tr.), Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome, UChicago (2005), ISBN: 0226233472. I lucked into a cheaper imprint of the hardback, Palgrave Macmillan (2003), ISBN: 0312239580 at a Half Price Books in Austin last summer for $9.98. Bilingual recipes (Latin & adaptation to modern kitchen) and lots of information about the dining culture.

* Giacosa, Ilaria Gozzini & Anna Herklotz (tr.), A Taste of Ancient Rome, UChicago (1994), ISBN: 0226290328. Bilingual recipes; a favorite resource of my students.

* Grainger, Sally, Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today, Prospect Books (2006), ISBN: 1903018447. If you want to try took cook something like the weird, imperial stuff from Apicius, this is the book you want. The recipes she adapts are organized by type of dish and there are some great comments about such ingredients as garum and defrutum.

* Grant, Mark, Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens, Serif Publishing (1999), ISBN: 1897959397. On my shelf in HB, but seldom used for some reason; I don't know why they don't use it, they just don't.

* Grocock, Christopher and Sally Grainger, Apicius, a Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation, Prospect Books (2006), ISBN: 1903018137. If you just want to read the weird stuff in Apicius, this is THE book. 120pp of decent introduction, 200pp of bilingual Apicius, 90pp of appendices including a glossary of technical terms, a concordance with previous editions, an index to the appendices, a bibliography, and a 15pp article on garum & liquamen.

* Segan, Francine, The Philosopher's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook, Random House (2004), ISBN: 1400060990, with the prettiest pictures of this stuff you'll ever want to see. Seriously, if you want to see what the presentation CAN be, this is the book you want. If it were just a tad larger, it would be a coffee-table book, but as it is it fits quite nicely in a bookstand on the counter.

+ Solomon, Jon & Julia, Ancient Roman Feasts and Recipes Adapted for Modern Cooking (De Epulis Et Arte Coquinaria Romanorum Antiquorum Explicationem atque Accomodationem Hodiernum Ediderunt Ioannes Iuliaque Solomon), E.A. Seemann (1977), ISBN: 0912458992. A small but wonderful hardback with 50pp of introductory material, 90pp of adapted recipes (sources given in an appendix), and some brief words on staging an ancient feast. This one should really be back in print. Mine is a damaged copy removed from a library collection. Lucky me.

+ Steele, Philip, Food and Feasts in Ancient Rome, Hodder & Stoughton Childrens Division (1994), ISBN: 0750210281. 32pp., and I think it was mainly sold to school libraries, but I may be wrong; mine has gone walkabout.


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