When you consider ancient Roman food, what springs to mind? The odd and the bizarre, such as dormice, and lark’s tongue, and that stinky rotten fish sauce—actually it’s not stinky or rotten. Ideas of greed and gluttony encapsulated by the entirely fictitious “vomitoria'' always come up in conversations about roman food. (“Vomitoria’ were the passageways between seats at amphitheatres that allowed the audience to exit quickly.) Were we to be transported back to the years prior to the day Pompeii was destroyed by the volcano, we would see that the reality of the Roman culinary experience, as reflected in the vast amount of evidence that survives in Pompeii, was a great deal more ordinary than we have been led to believe, but also considerably more appealing and desirable. There is much that seems alien about the Roman world, but in terms of its food it is not so strange, as you shall see.
For many years, historians believed that Roman society was divided into relatively small numbers of elites dining with excessive gluttony, while teeming millions of ordinary Romans subsisted on an enforced vegetarian diet because all meat was appropriated by the elites. This polarized image has been replaced, largely because of the kind of evidence we see in Pompeii, with a far more complex picture.
We now understand that Roman society was considerably diverse and varied in structure, with multiple layers of status in different contexts and immense mobility between the layers. The binary approach always left the middle as a blur. The middle of Roman society was largely dominated by those of “freed” ancestry. Slavery was institutional but provided a constant flow of new citizens as many were able to purchase or acquire their freedom within their own lifetime. The freedman often had the benefit of having acquired skills as a slave that he could use to earn a living, and his sons and daughters were full Roman citizens, and they were often relatively financially stable.
There were many well-off families headed by a former slave who once served in a wealthy household, now living a comfortable life and dining on foods once thought to be out of their reach. Foods that were once thought to be elite and luxury are now understood to be far more widely consumed than previously believed. Pepper was seen as the height of luxury, but in Pompeii the occasional discovery of pepper in modest homes demonstrates that ordinary citizens had access to this spice and many others.
For the vast majority of Roman citizens, their diet was varied and largely consisted of mixed Mediterranean diet which included salted and fresh quadruped meat (beef, lamb, and pork), principally from sacrificial sources; fresh and salted fish and fish sauces; pulses such as lentils and chickpeas; vegetables, dominated by brassicas and allium (cabbage, leeks, onions, and garlic). Fresh fruits were common: plums, apples, dates and figs, and also wild nuts.
The olive and the grape provided the two lubricants of Roman society. Olive oil was the main cooking oil, and Romans also used it to clean their skin, while wine was readily available to many, even the poorest citizens. Oil, wine, and fish sauce were fundamental to Roman cuisine, and they were traded in amphorae across the Mediterranean from Spain and Africa. You will see amphorae with pointed bottoms in the exhibition—they were designed specifically to accommodate these liquids. The triad of oil, wine, and fish sauce was used to create simple dressings that were ubiquitous at any Roman meal. Galen, a Greek doctor writing in the second century, suggests that even the most destitute of Romans were able to mix oil, vinegar, or wine and fish sauce together to pour over their vegetables. These mixtures were similar to vinaigrette as they were used to dress salads and vegetables but they were also used as a dip and poured over cooked food. (A recipe for a Roman vinaigrette appears at the end of this article.)