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by Sabrina Mellinghoff, Erin Kaye, Eileen Marshall and Marguerite Scotti

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Actual Ancient Roman Recipe book

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- normally eaten after dinner for dessert
- recipe found in an ancient Roman collection of recipes called the Apicius (or Apicii Coelli)

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"Take sufficient milk for the size of the cake pan. Mix the milk with honey just as if you were making milk food. Then put in five eggs to a pint of the honey-milk mixture, or three eggs to half a pint. Dissolve the eggs into the milk so that the resulting mixture is smooth. Strain into a clay vessel and cook over a slow fire. When the custard is firm, sprinkle with pepper and serve." 

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"Take sufficient milk for the size of the cake pan. Mix the milk with honey just as if you were making milk food. Then put in five eggs to a pint of the honey-milk mixture, or three eggs to half a pint. Dissolve the eggs into the milk so that the resulting mixture is smooth. Strain into a clay vessel and cook over a slow fire. When the custard is firm, sprinkle with pepper and serve." 

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(Apicius Book 7, XI-7)

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A popular fish sauce

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Ova Sfongia Ex Lacte (Pancakes W/milk) recipe: Try this Ova Sfongia Ex Lacte (Pancakes W/milk) recipe, or contribute your own.

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Video of Giorgio Locatelli recreating a 2,000 year old recipe for bread based on a carbonised loaf found in the excavations at Pompeii

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Ingredients

400g biga acida (sourdough)
12g yeast
18g gluten
24g salt
532g water
405g spelt flour
405g wholemeal flour

Method

Melt the yeast into the water and add it into the biga. Mix and sieve the flours together with the gluten and add to the water mix. Mix for two minutes, add the salt and keep mixing for another three minutes. Make a round shape with it and leave to rest for one hour.

Put some string around it to keep its shape during cooking. Make some cuts on top before cooking to help the bread rise in the oven and cook for 30–45 minutes at 200 degrees.

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In AD 79, a baker put his loaf of bread into the oven. Nearly 2,000 years later it was found during excavations in Herculaneum. The British Museum asked Giorgio Locatelli to recreate the recipe as part of his culinary investigations for Pompeii Live.

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art and info

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Elite Greeks and Romans reclined to dine, and ordinary people copied them when they could. Although the practice seems strange to us, it must have been both comfortable and convenient, since reclining during meals spread throughout the Mediterranean and survived for over a millennium!

At the Getty Villa we revived Greek and Roman practices of drinking and dining for a recent gallery course, which provided the opportunity to reenact (and, of course, photograph) ancient lounge-drinking practices. I'll talk about Greek customs, moving to the Romans in a follow-up post.

Greek dining couches of the archaic and classical periods were intended for men and, sometimes, their female companions (courtesans or prostitutes-like the woman on the painted vase above-but not elite wives and daughters). The couches were "single beds" that could accommodate an additional person, especially during a symposion (symposium), the after-dinner male drinking party.

From seven to fifteen beds were arranged against the walls of the andron, the male dining room, each bed with its own little table and often a step stool. Rather than actually lying down, the men reclined on their left elbows and used their right hands to eat and drink. They propped themselves up quite high on pillows and kept their balance by bending their right knees and bracing them against the left (and probably by leaning against the wall, when necessary). This pose requires a flexible waist!

After dinner, the drinking party began. Often high-toned symposiasts-Socrates, for example-held educational as well as convivial conversations; other times, the drinkers got down to partying ASAP.

If additional people joined the drinking party, they could be squeezed onto the couches. Since the room was designed for right-handed people, lefties had to accommodate to the layout, or turn and face the wall.

The area in the middle of the Greek dining room was left open for serving food and drink, for entertainment, and for a stand to be placed during kottabos, a drinking game in which the drinker tossed the lees in his wine cup to knock something off the stand. Wine was not filtered and strained as it is today, and the dregs were left in the bottom of the cup. In this video I demo the basics.

The painting on the cup at the top of this post shows a naked slave woman playing kottabos, hooking her forefinger into one handle of her skyphos as she prepares to toss her wine dregs toward the stand in the middle of the room.

There won't be any drinking games, but this Saturday, we're offering another homage to ancient Greek drinking with a lecture and wine tasting celebrating the symposion that combines erudition and wine. Or try kottabos at your next dinner party, recreating the Greek dining couches with benches and lots of pillows.

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Reclining and Dining (and Drinking) in Ancient Greece

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Elite Greeks and Romans reclined to dine, and ordinary people copied them when they could. Although the practice seems strange to us, it must have been both comfortable and convenient, since reclining during meals spread throughout the Mediterranean and survived for over a millennium!

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The Evening Meal - Ancient Rome for Kids

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Patricians would frequently throw elaborate dinner parties. In the early empire period these were separated into men's parties and women's parties. The two did not mix. A dinner might last several hours and usually included some type of entertainment. They still used dining couches and ate with their hands.

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The Romans ate mainly with their fingers. The food in bite size pieces. The slaves washed their family's hands throughout the dinner. Spoons were used, for soup.

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Ancient romans mostly drank different types of wine. For example the poor usually had watered down wine with spices in it to make it taste better. The rich had very nice and pure wine.

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The Poor- vegetables and porridge. Porridge- boiled wheat. add flavorings of relishes, vegetables, herbs. little meats

Rich- several courses, exotic food and wine// dinner parties up to 8 hours// adult lay on couches around a small square table, only small children and slaves were allowed to eat sitting//  meat dishes- boar, venison, wild goat, mutton, lamb, kid, sucking pig, hare and dormice// poultry dishes- birds: chicken, geese, ostriches, cranes, pheasants, pigeons, doves, thrushes, fig-peckers, and- for the rich- peacocks

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Breakfast- bread or wheat pancake with honey and dates

Lunch- light meal, fish, cold meat, bread, vegetables from leftovers from yesterdays dinner.

dinner- main meal,