A lecture about dining practices in the time of Caesar and a sumptuous dinner inspired by ancient Roman recipes will take place on Thursday, July 14, and Friday, July 15, from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Getty Villa. The evening will begin with food historian Andrew Dalby exploring the nature of ‘power dining’ in antiquity with a talk entitled ‘Dining with Caesar: Food and Power in Ancient Rome.’ He will identify great wines, local produce and luxuries’including exotic spices from India and beyond’that made up a fashionable dinner 2,000 years ago’and will illustrate how invitations and place settings at the table were calculated to impress, persuade or seduce. Dalby also examines how Gaius Julius Caesar, as a relatively unknown politician, built up the influence that made him a dictator and gave birth to a new political structure. Caesar understood better than any of his rivals that food could serve as a means of persuasion, and Dalby shares examples from Caesar’s feasts and entertainments to shed fresh light on this pivotal period of Roman history. Following the talk, guests will move into the inner peristyle of the Getty Villa to enjoy a seated, four-course dinner prepared under the direction of Chef Sally Grainger. Many of the dishes are based on Grainger’s extensive research of ‘Apicius,’ the only surviving ancient Roman recipe book. The menu will feature dishes typical of a celebratory feast, including oysters delicately flavored with a special sauce called oenogarum, and calf’s kidney stuffed with fennel and coriander as a first course. The pi’ce de r’sistance will be a whole boned and stuffed suckling pig known as porcellum hortolanum (garden-style piglet). ’At the Roman Table: A Culinary Adventure at the Getty Villa’ is $75 per person (wine is included). Seating is limited. Reservations are available at getty.edu or (310) 440-7300. Dalby, an historian and linguist with a special interest in food history, collaborated with Sally Grainger on ‘The Classical Cookbook’ (Getty Publications, 1995). He studied classics and linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and now lives in France. Grainger trained as a chef in her native Coventry, England, before developing an interest in the ancient world and earning a degree in ancient history from the University of London. Combining her professional skills with her expertise in the culinary heritage of the Greek and Roman world, she now pursues a career as a food historian, consultant and experimental archaeologist. With her husband, Christopher Grocock, Grainger recently published a new translation of the Roman recipe book ‘Apicius’ for Prospect Books and a companion volume of recipes. A fish plate from the Greek states in southern Italy depicts red mullet, sea bass, bream and cuttlefish.
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