Fish, Fowl, Game

Getty Villa Studies Food in Ancient Rome

Ancient Roman foods relied on five liquids: oil, wine, vineger, honey and fermented fish sauce, with attention to harmony, balancing the sweet with the bitter. But it wasn’t always so. In fact, had it not been for the advantages of conquest, Romans could have easily remained ‘porridge-eating barbarians,’ before they discovered Greek food toward the end of the tird century B.C.   According to Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, who described the culinary pleasures of the Roman Empire in a recent lecture and tasting at the Getty Villa, Eastern (Greek) cooks, some of them prisoners of war, introduced the Roman elite to the new seasoning and flavors of the eastern Mediterranean. Romans took to this nouvelle cuisine of 2 B.C. and thus found one more way to display their wealth. The Getty, in its study of the ancient world, includes food and wine in its purview and is home to an extensive collection of Greek and Roman cooking utensils, wine vessels and festival accoutment. As with all societies, classical social life revolves around food and drink, and what we know of foodstuffs, preparation, recipes and social groups comes from ancient texts and archaeological evidence. In their book, ‘The Classical Cookbook’ (J. Paul Getty Museum), Dalby and Grainger explore the cuisine of the Mediterranean in ancient times, from 70 B.C. to A.D. 50, beginning with the ‘Odyssey’ (circa 70 B.C.) and drawing heavily from the recipes of the Roman culinary text ‘Apicius,’ which codified the cookery of the later Roman Empire by uniting Greek and Roman traditions. Dalby has written for numerous food history and classics journals and is the author of a book on food in ancient Greece. Grainger, a professional chef with a degree in ancient history, regularly organizes Roman banquets.   For the poor, bread was and remained the staple’barley for the Greeks, wheat for the Romans. For wealthy Greeks, the menu reflected the bounty of the land and sea. At a men’s dinner party, always absent wives and children, guests reclined on couches, each with a small table. As in Greece, Roman houses had a special dining room, the triclinium (‘three couches’). The couches, each large enough for three diners, were arranged in a U-shape surrounding a central table. ‘The dining room often afforded a view of both the inner and outer peristyles, as well as an opportunity for the owner of the villa to display his wealth,’ according to Getty Education Specialist Ann Steinsapir. The food was prepared by male slaves, who served a sequence of dishes. According to Ginger, dips were very popular and the easiest method to eat for Romans who were accustomed to reclining on one arm and eating with their fingers. The meal would begin with appetizers, followed by a sweet aperitif, mulsum, a mixture of honey and wine. Gringer and Daby cite a religious dinner attended by Julius Caesar, at which 16 hors d’oeuvres ranged from sea urchin and clams to vnison and wild boar. These appetizers could be more varied and costly than the main course, though not bulky. The main courses were accompanied by bread and wine and delivered and removed by servants, who also supplied perfumed water for the participants to rinse their fingers. In both Greek and Roman households, the tables were then cleared away and clean tables took their place for the dessert course, known as ‘second tables,’ consisting of cakes, sweetmeats, cheese, dried fruits and nuts, and a variety of fine wines. At this point, the dinner party in Plato’s time became a symposion, a drinking party, where men discussed philosophy, literature and mythology, while slowly dissolving into drunken debauchery. Women of the household would be out of sight, though dancers and flute girls, hired for the occasion, might be often seen in the dining room.   While wine was a key ingredient in the social life, the Greeks always mixed it with water, because it was considered bad manners to get drunk too quickly, according to Karol Wight, the Getty Museum’s senior curator of antiquities. Greek wine was fashionable in Roman Italy, just as Greek comedies swept the Roman stage and Greek customs became more natural than homegrown customs. In Cato’s manual on running a farm (De Agri Cultura or ‘On Farming’), which includes sidelights on country life in the second century B.C., he offers practical instructions for the wine from a particular harvest or crop. The marvelous year for Italian wines was 21 B.C., Grainger and Dalby quip. In researching the variety of Greek and Roman life and food, Grainger has been able to recreate ancient food, noting the called-for ingredients and offering the best guess as to how they were combined. ‘Cooking is an instinctive art that could never be an absolute science bound by precise quantities times and temperatures,’ Grainger writes. ‘Fortunately, Greek and Latin poets and agricultural writers occasionally provide clues as to how a dish looked or tasted and the manner in which ingredients were prepared and stored. These are invaluable aids to interpreting ancient recipes.’ For us in Los Angeles, where so many of the herbs and spices are familiar, a couple of surprises are worth mentioning. The first, fish sauce (garum) is not dissimilar to the more familiar Thai bottled nam pla, which can easily be substituted by those cooks who prefer not to salt a whole fish and let it ferment for up to three months! Two remarkable spices that were known to Greeks and Romans and used for medicinal purposes as well as seasonings are unknown in today’s kitchen. Silphium was grown only in what is today Libya, and was so highly prized that the Roman state treasury stored it with gold and silver. A victim of overgrazing, silphium became extinct. In its place, a relative of fennel called asafoetida was substituted and recognized in the West as an ingredient in Indian cookery (it is often listed as an ingredient in ready-made poppadoms and nans)’and rumored to be one of the secret ingredients in Worcestershire sauce. Finally, two erbs, lovage and rue, while easily grown in temperate climates, are not as familiar in today’s recipes. Romans used lovage at least as commonly as a modern cook might use parsley. It had a bitter sharp flavor that was useful in everyday cooking and especially good in fish and legume dishes, the authors suggest. Its flavor is fundamental to authentic Roman food. Rue is another culinary herb that was once quite popular, but is now used rarely. Its unusual bitter flavor is still valuable in the kitchen, and it has had a great reputation as a medicinal herb, Ginger says. Spices and herbs, staples in gardens of ancient Roman homes and grown for religious ceremonies, cooking and medicines, are cultivated in the herb garden at the Getty Vila. Fruit trees bearing plums, apricots, figs and peaches are arranged on the south end of the garden, along with a range of plants from catmint and spearmint to sage and chamomile, and a grape arbor. For those eager to learn more about how food and wine were prepared, stored and served, a 30-minute video tour focuses on food-related objects in the Getty Center museum’s permanent collection.