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 ncient Rome gave western civilization the foundations of sophisticated cuisine. Yet, while building their empire, the Romans gathered as many culinary secrets as they propagated. Other Mediterranean peoples-including Etruscans and early Italians whose achievements are rarely acknowledged-already knew the skills of milling cereals and leavening flour for bread, crushing olives for oil, converting milk to cheese and grapes to wine and vinegar.
The diets of some contemporaries were more appetizing than the fare of the early Romans, who subsisted mainly on millet or spelt porridge called puls, ewe's milk whey cheeses, primitive wines and what they could scavenge from woods, fields and streams. The Greeks ate and drank so well in their southern Italian colonies of Magna Gręcia that Archestratus became known as the father of gastronomy for his ode to the foods of Sicily in the third century B.C. |
| Over time, though, Romans elevated agriculture from a rudimentary craft to a science, while advancing methods of preparing, preserving and shipping provisions. They developed a thriving trade in wine, grains, and salt, so valued as a flavoring and agent for curing foods (especially pork as salume) that soldiers were paid salaries with it. What the Romans lacked, they imported, introducing exotic varieties of poultry, fruits, vegetables, grains and spices that eventually became standard Italian fare.
The culinary heritage of Imperial Rome was documented by Apicius (who may have been more than one person) in "De Re Coquinaria", the original cookbook. It described a remarkable range of vegetable, meat and seafood dishes, uses of mushrooms, truffles, fruits, nuts, cheeses, breads, cakes and wines. Recipes revealed a fondness for herbs and spices, heavy use of a potent sauce called garum based on rancid fish entrails and a taste for sweet-sour, which, in the absence of refined sugar relied in part on honey and grape juice cooked down as syrup.
Memories of Romans as sybarites and gluttons can be blamed on the extravagant feasts of certain rulers and the collective excesses of the bourgeoisie of a declining empire. Through most of their long history, however, Romans exercised moderation in a diet based on simple and wholesome Mediterranean foods. |
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