Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is an additional post, about a chapter that isn’t part of the reading list, and is about Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History.
“What did these Romans eat and drink? … Their daily fodder was much more likely to be polenta (a corn porridge, either hot and gloppy or, when congealed, refried in slices), beans, and bitter herbs, with meat (preferably pork) as a rarity, and eggs and an occasional chicken. Most working-class Romans subsisted largely on pulses and bread. A lot of cheese was eaten, and there cannot have been much difference between the pecorinos or sheep’s-milk cheeses consumed today and those fo Roman times. Vegetables, of course, made an appearance … There would also have been fish, though without refridgeration it cannot often have been fresh. … The universal stimulant of appetite was garum, a decoction of rotting fish guts, which seems to have resembled a very smelly and salty ancestor of Worchestershire sauce.”
– except from Chapter 3: Later Empire of Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
It’s always interesting to me to read about what people ate in historical times. Food plays such a large part in culture, the most common ritual of daily life, of social life, is sitting down to eat a meal. The basis of economics starts from food production, from someone producing more food than they need and trading the excess to someone else for tools, supplies, or luxuries.
While in that passage Hughes is talking about the actual daily diet of the Roman people, in the pages before he talks about some of the extreme excesses that were recorded in history. What he doesn’t talk about is the actual ritual surrounding the meals, at least in any part of the book I have read through so far.
From ancient and medievel historty classes that I’ve taken, I know that in Greek and earlier times the men and women would be segregated at meal times, or that the women would only eat after the men had finished eating, or that the women would never be present at a meal if someone not of the immediate family was present. But I don’t know how many of the cultures and traditions existed in Roman culture, or when they changed. Vestiges of it remained until pretty late in history (think about after dinner lounges in Victorian times, the men in one room and the ladies in another) but I am curious if there are set points in time, set figures in history, whose actions or behavior set a change like that in motion (similar to how JFK killed the hat for men, by having great hair and never really wearing one).