“There is more history in a bowl of pasta than in the Colosseum or in any other historical building.”
The Roman empire owed its beginnings not to kings, generals or emperors. Its foundation was much more mundane: it was built on wheat.
Rome was 29 km from the sea in an area which is neither rich nor productive. It therefore had to develop a trading system which grew in reach and sophistication as time went by.
Romans engaged on widespread and intensive agriculture in conquered territories - England, for example, became for a while the most important source of grain for the northern part of the empire. It couldn’t last, of course. In 68 BC, the city of Ostia was laid waste by pirates and the grain supply for hundreds of thousands of Romans was in danger. This attack has been compared to the Twin Towers event and had similar consequences: an increasingly authoritarian state and eventually the end of the Roman republic.
The importance of olive oil can hardly be overemphasized. Near Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori is Monte Testaccio, 40 meters in height and covering 2 hectares, rivalling the Colosseum in size. In places caves have been dug and used as workshops, nightclubs or restaurants.
This mound is entirely made of fragments of broken Roman pottery, mostly amphorae used to transport olive oil.
According to Viestad, food cultures can be divided according to the type of fat they use in their cooking: olive oil in the southern parts of Europe, butter in the more northern regions. About two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Strabo wrote about the “curious folk” of a distant country who used butter as “their very own oil” while Pliny the elder described butter as “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.”
Being worth your salt is a Roman saying dating from times when soldiers were paid a wage to buy salt. This compound has become somewhat of a scapegoat, because it is not responsible for all the ills ascribed to it. Whatever the case may be, I can hardly imagine cooking without salt at hand. Pasta is probably the best-known Italian food; rightly described it as the heart of that country’s food culture. The Academia Italiana della Cucina is a sort of gastronomic version of the World Wildlife Fund, protecting the abuse and corruption of their traditional dishes, such as pizza with… pineapple. Marco Polo did not bring pasta from China, as legend will have it. In fact, Romans and Greeks ate a version of this dish 2 000 years ago, as did the Arabs.
Viestad claims that, was it not for pasta, Italy would not have become a unified nation: when the citizens of the various kingdoms on the peninsula, with their different customs and languages, started eating more or less the same dishes, a feeling of unity began to develop.
Garum, the ancient Romans’ universal sauce, made of fermented fish guts, leaned heavily on pepper – and no wonder, because pepper is used in almost everything.
We are often told that pepper was expensive and used in large quantities to mask the smell and taste of food that had gone “off.”
No amount of pepper will mask the smell or taste of half-rotten food, and no one in his right mind will use an expensive commodity on rotten food.
No meal is complete without at least one glass of good wine. Some people, of course, will say that two glasses are necessary, and they may well be right – the supposedly ridiculous recommendations by Health Canada notwithstanding.
Winemaking is almost as old as humankind. Nobody knows when humans started cultivating grapes or fermenting the berries, but wine is frequently mentioned by ancient historians such as Herodotus. In Godin Tepe, an archaeological site in ancient Mesopotamia, a clay pot was found with remnants of tannins and tartaric acid inside – a sure sign of winemaking 8 000 years ago.
An interesting fact (only one of many in the book) mentioned by Viestad is that the Iran of the 1970’s had more area under vine that New Zealand, Australia and South Africa together. Who would’ve thunk?
Meat has an interesting if somewhat gruesome chapter: the Campo de’ Fiori was given a fountain in the sixteenth century. Almost immediately it was put to use as a slaughtering place for livestock, becoming clogged up with wool, off-cuts, blood clots and offal – not to mention the smells. The fountain was moved in 1899 to make way for a statue of Giordano Bruno. I'm sure the surrounding inhabitants were grateful.
A much-overlooked aspect of animal husbandry was the use of animal excrement as fertilizer – India seems to be a good example.
Is it possible to prepare good food without using lemons? This fruit wasn’t initially grown for its juice, but for the essential oils in its peel. Depictions of these trees are present in Pompeii, but they were merely decorative shrubs – the first lemons to be used in the culinary arts were imported to Europe about a thousand years later by Arab traders who found that Sicily had the ideal climate. By the middle of the 1800’s, lemons had become this island’s major export – and that caught the attention of the fledgling Mafia. Viestad weaves an interesting story around this particular piece of history.
Snow or ice was stored in caves and Nero, among others, served his guests what must have been the first examples of lemon sorbet – something I still find an extremely tasty palate cleanser between courses.
This book is a pleasure to read, having an interest in either cooking or history is not necessary.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
