A she-wolf was out enjoying her solitary Thursday morning stroll. It was about 9:37 a.m. She stopped at a stream for a quick drink of water. To her surprise, she found a basket bobbing about in the reeds. Being a curious sort of she-wolf, she retrieved the basket and found twin boys inside. She did not eat them, as other wolves would do, but decided to foster them as her own. Romulus and Remus, the twin boys, grew up, took revenge on the king that had so callously left them to drown in a basket, and founded an empire that would last a thousand years. Well, Romulus founded an empire. Remus was killed by Romulus because they couldn’t agree upon which hill their city should be built.
Roman history, much like Sumerian and Greek histories, can be viewed as one long story or as separate epochs. Rome started as a monarchy in about 753 BCE, became a Republic in 509 BCE, became a dictatorship with the ascent of Julius Caesar in 49 BCE, then spectacularly imploded and became the seat of Christendom under Constantine in 325 CE. Along the way to their eventual decline, the Romans conquered Greece, Turkey, and most of Europe, including Spain, France, Britain, and Belgium. Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt were all under Roman rule. Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Jordan were Roman territories as well. The Roman empire was fanatically interested in land because land meant more farms, more cattle, more fish, more wine, more spices, more tin, more copper, more gold, more riches, more gods, and more people. In return for ever so generously invading sovereign land, the Romans brought peace (albeit at the end of a sword), prosperity (to those willing to sell out their own countrypeople), industry (wall-building was especially popular near Scotland), culture, sophistication, aqueducts, and roads. Well, of course the roads. That goes without saying. Oh!—and they gave us cookbooks too.
Apicius: The First Rockstar Chef
A chap from the first century CE by the name of Marcus Gavius Apicius lived an extraordinary life and had a rather anticlimactic death. In between birth and death, Apicius became a cook. Maybe more accurately, he became the cook of his era. Apicius’s very name became synonymous with the word gourmet. He was the ultimate Roman foodie.
He ate everything in excess. He’s famously known to have sailed to Libya on a whim in search of jumbo prawns. Upon docking, several vendors brought him samples of the prawns. He disliked them so much that he pulled up his anchor and left without ever so much as getting off the ship to pick up a postcard and a souvenir shot glass to remember the trip by.
His cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, which means “the art of cooking,” contained nearly five hundred recipes. It was broken into sections, just like most modern cookbooks, with categories for vegetables, sauces, stocks, meats, and desserts. The cookbook, like the cuneiform tablets from ancient Sumer, assumed that the reader knew how to cook already and had an army of free labor to make the recipes. Now, his book was written three hundred years after his death, which is an incredible feat on his part, when you come to think of it. The published work was based on existing recipes written by Apicius. More accurately, it’s estimated that most of the recipes in the book were created by Apicius, but roughly a third of them were written by other cooks also known as Apicius. You see, he was so popular among the cooking elite that some appended their names with his name. Imagine if I called myself Gwion Escoffier Ramsay Bourdain, or something like that. The use of Apicius’s name conferred a certain level of skill and knowledge, so lots of cooks bolstered their appeal by adding his name to their own.
Well before his death, Apicius was a gazillionaire in Roman terms. But at some point he lost most of his fortune, having spent it on rare foods and the odd trip to Libya for a prawn cocktail. Apicius was reduced to a not-so-humble millionaire, which upset him greatly. Faced with a future of frugality and boring food choices and only being able to afford a lavish nosh-up every other day, he decided he just couldn’t live as a peasant and took his own life.
Super-Quick Bonus Recipe for Apicius’s Libyan Shrimp
Apicius went all the way to Libya for his giant shrimp. You only need go to the grocery store, and you also don’t have to be a billionaire. I use frozen, cooked shrimp for this recipe. I prepare this as an appetizer, but you could easily pair it with jeweled rice or couscous and make a whole meal of it.
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Serves 4 |
Prep Time: |
Cooking Time: |
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1 teaspoon red pepper flakes |
1/2 teaspoon salt |
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1 teaspoon ground cumin |
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil |
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2 teaspoons ground coriander |
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar |
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1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric |
1 pound frozen, precooked shrimp, thawed |
Combine the first five ingredients in a small bowl. Drizzle in the olive oil and vinegar, then mix until it forms a paste. Place the thawed shrimp in a large bowl. Pat them dry with a paper towel to remove any excess moisture. Coat them with the spice, oil, and vinegar mixture and let the shrimp marinate for 10 minutes. Grab a large skillet and place it over medium heat for 2 minutes. Add a tablespoon of cooking oil and leave it for a minute. Let it get hot, but not smoky. Add the shrimp in equal batches and cook them until they are hot, about 6 minutes per batch. You’ll want to flip the shrimp over just once, so they cook on each side for about 3 minutes. Remember, the shrimp are already cooked, so you are basically just getting them warmed through and activating the spices here.
When finished, place the shrimp on your favourite serving platter. Pour a glass of crisp pinot grigio and thank Apicius. Maybe just for this afternoon, refer to yourself as Nora Apicius. Or just use your own name and append it with Apicius.
Street Food
Apicius couldn’t bear the thought of eating like an ordinary Roman. So how did the ordinary Roman eat? Well, first we should probably define who the ordinary Romans were. Really, we’re talking about two very different groups of people. First of all, there were the patricians. They were the rich and famous. The patricians were the lauded gentry of their time—the senators, politicians, wealthy landowners, and the like. They ate well, as you might imagine. We’ll spend more time with them later. The second group of people were the plebeians, which just included everyone else—farmers, tradespeople, freed slaves, tavern owners, jugglers, actors, the unemployed, and cooks.
Now the plebeians, or common folk, that lived in Rome were crammed into small homes called insulae. These were the ancient forerunners of apartment buildings. They were often several stories high, single-roomed, and without a proper bathroom or kitchen. This made cooking at home virtually impossible. Can you imagine a modern-day apartment complex with hundreds of people cooking over small open fires without chimneys or proper ventilation? So, what’s an honest plebeian supposed to do for dinner? That’s right! Pop out for a cheap meal at the local restaurant, bar, or street vendor.
Street vendors and tabernae, taverns that served food, were everywhere. In the excavated city of Pompeii, which had a population of only fifteen thousand people, there were one hundred eighteen restaurants and twenty hotels.21 That works out to be nearly one restaurant for every one hundred people. Now the term restaurant is a bit misleading, but funnily enough, if you’ve ever visited your local dive bar, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the average taberna was like. The buildings were as simple as the food they served. They were quite literally holes in the wall, usually nothing more than an alcove with a brick oven that heated huge clay pots of food. Patrons sat at a horseshoe-shaped bar (see, just like every dive bar you’ve been to).
The food served at these restaurants was usually simple, cheap, and plentiful. A thick porridge was common almost everywhere, made from boiled grains. Herbs and vegetables were added for flavour, resulting in a rudimentary risotto-like dish. Lentils and beans were staples of the Roman underclasses and often provided by way of subsidies from the Roman government. Most restaurants only served food, but the oenopodium also served wine. Meat was a rarity, mostly because of the expense, but also because restaurants were forbidden by decree of the emperor to serve meat. The little meat that would have been served was probably pork fat, and that would have been cooked by street vendors, which got around the whole decree nonsense. You see, the Romans had a belief that animals like sheep, goats, and cattle were useful because they produced wool, milk, cheese, and hides. Pigs didn’t do anything for humankind, which was rather unfortunate for the pig. Pork became the most popular meat in Rome, and pork fat was cheap and divvied out to the poor.
If boiled porridge and pork fat isn’t your ideal meal, then maybe we should look at what the wealthy Romans ate. Remember the patricians?
Pop Round to My Place Later for a Convivium
If the Greeks were responsible for standardizing three meals a day, then the Romans must be credited with segmenting cena, dinner, into three courses. Of course, the ever-opulent upper classes of Rome then divided each course of the cena into several smaller courses, especially when they were entertaining, perfecting the seven-course meal. The three-course meal was typical for family dinners, but the seven-course meal was reserved for the convivium. The convivium, which translates roughly to an obscenely huge, great big banquet, was a social gathering like no other.
A convivium wasn’t just a meal of food though, it was a veritable feast for the senses. Along with the food, there were entertainers, musicians, orators, poets, and parasites. That last group might need a little explaining. Don’t worry, parasites weren’t microbial beings infecting the food. It’s much worse than that. Parasites were fully formed human beings infecting dinner parties. A parasite was a class of entertainer also known as a professional flatterer. They would attach themselves to a wealthy patrician in hopes of being invited to a convivium and getting a free meal. In return for a good nosh-up, they were expected to be good conversationalists, speaking about current events of the day with ease, avoiding the vulgar subjects of gossip, politics, and sex, and of course, saying very complimentary things about the host. If they didn’t procure an invite, you’d find them with the plebeians at the taberna, eating porridge.
The convivium took place in the host’s dining room. The dining room was bedecked with wall paintings, textiles, sculptures, and portable furniture. The seating was arranged in a horseshoe design with a low, flat table in the middle. This is the classic picture you have of a Roman dinner party: wealthy Romans reclining on sofas, being fed. There were strict rules about who got to recline where. Portable tables would be brought in with each course. Food was eaten on plates with spoons or with fingers (forks wouldn’t be invented until the fourth century CE).22 The meal would last for hours and end with a carousal, which entailed much drinking until the wee hours of the morning.
The Lares and Penates
The Romans were Pagan. Well, the Romans wouldn’t have called themselves that, but to our way of thinking they were Pagan. Polytheists is really a better term, because the Romans had more than a few gods to choose from. There were gods and goddesses for absolutely everything and each one had their own holy day, usually accompanied by a feast. At one point there were no fewer than one hundred sixty different festivals celebrating the gods throughout the year. That’s nearly one every other day! No wonder Julius Caesar added three months to the calendar in 45 BCE. Romans needed some time off.
Officially, until Theodosius came along in 383 CE and named Christianity as the religion of the land, there really wasn’t an official Roman state religion as such. At various times in the lifespan of the Roman empire, allegiance to Caesar, a living deity, needed to be publicly sworn. Generally speaking though, Romans were free to worship and venerate pretty much any deities they wanted to. Public festivals, offerings, devotions, and sacrifices were made to the gods and goddesses for the health of the empire or republic, or to celebrate an abundant harvest, or for continued peace or victory. Roman state religious practices had more to do with propitiating and appeasing the gods rather than, say, forming a personal spiritual relationship with Mercury or Minerva.
While public religion and religious rites were largely ceremonial, even governmental, in their scope and application, the average Roman did have what we might refer to today as a personal practice. Each household, each family had their own familiar deities, known as the Lares and the Penates. The Lares might be compared to the spirits of place, those beings that inhabit an area and watch over all that happens there. You might consider them to be the tutelary gods of a particular place or the spirits of the ancestors that once walked here.
Think about where you live for a moment. If you live by a large body of water or a forest or even a bustling metropolis, there’s an energy, a flavour, a particular feel that imbues the landscape because of the physical features present. That feeling you get that you’re not alone in those places is the call of the Lares of that place. You might have your own Lares of the backyard or the Lares of the workshop where your great uncle Jack would sit for hours winding copper armatures.
The Lares held a special place in the lives of average Romans. In upper class villas, special alcoves were created in the main family area, or atrium. Statues, often two statues, of the household Lares were placed there. Offerings were made to the Lares at each meal. Important rites of passage—weddings, births, big family announcements—were made in the presence of the Lares. The Lares were, after all, the protectors and watchers and advocates for the family in the unseen world. Even poorer Romans had a place in their homes for the Lares. Something as simple as a tile molded into the wall to form a small shelf was perfectly acceptable. A rustic statue, a memento connected to the local spirits of place or ancestors was placed on the tile.
The Penates were similar to the Lares, but more specific to an idea than an actual ancestor or spirit. For instance, one might have a Penates of the pantry or a Penates of the hearth. Imagine that your home has its own heart, its own soul—that’s what the Penates were. Although they were the heart and soul of the house, they were sort of portable. If a Roman businessperson was off trading far from home and became homesick, they could bring the Penates of their house along with them on the journey, set up a temporary shrine, and make offerings to them. The blessings of the Penates were greatly appreciated; they offered comfort and could keep an eye on the homefront to make sure the family was safe.
Now you might be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with food?” The offerings given to the Lares and Penates were most often food. Food that accidentally ended up on the floor was considered an offering to the Lares. The goddess Vesta, the Romanized version of Hestia, was the goddess of the hearth, and the Penates were closely associated with her as protectors of the hearth. A first bite of bread might be thrown into the fire or hearth as a sign of respect for the Penates. The hearth, the kitchen, the open flame, or the street vendor’s pot full of Carthaginian porridge, was the domain of Hestia and the Penates. In short, they were everywhere, pervasive, and frequently called upon.
Inviting the Lares and
Penates to Your Home
As the primary cook for my family, the kitchen and the tools in my kitchen are sacred. The food that comes out of my kitchen nourishes my friends and family. The spice cabinet, the pantry, the fridge, the freezer, the potato barrel, the bread box, and the salt cellar are sacred spaces, and I’d like to think that there I have my own Lares and Penates looking out for the health and well-being of my household. If your home, current residence, apartment, yurt, or tent is sacred to you, perhaps honouring your local deities and spirits of place appeals to you. Here’s a simple ritual that you can do over and over again in devotion to those unseen ones that are there with you.
Choose a place where you’d like to welcome and honour your Lares and Penates. If you have a fireplace and consider it your home’s hearth, sweep it out. Clean it up in a way that is meaningful for you. If the stovetop, oven, or entire kitchen feels like your hearth, spend time cleaning it. And I do mean cleaning it, like with soap and water and a broom and paper towels. Next, find or make two figures to represent your house spirits. The figures could be statues you already have. You might elect to carve them from sticks or branches from the land you live on. If there’s a stream nearby, perhaps you’ll find a couple of nice big stones that you can draw on. Get creative.
Set your Lares and Penates figures on the mantelpiece, the windowsill, or on your dining room table as a centerpiece. You could even hide them in the back of your food cabinets if circumstances dictate that they’re not visible to just anyone. Gather a small bowl filled with salt, a vessel for liquid, and another container to put food offerings in. Set these in front of, next to, or around your two hearth deities and say:
Lares and Penates.
Spirits of this place.
Deities of this house and hearth.
Accept these offerings.
Here is salt, a gift from the earth that sustains life.
Here is water [or whiskey, or wine, or whatever liquid you
deem important], a gift that quenches your thirst.
Here is food, a gift to nourish and delight you.
Stay here with us. Watch over this house. Protect all that dwell here.
Best-case scenario, every time you eat or cook, but at least every time you remember to, place more food in the offering bowl, replenish the liquid, add to the salt, clean the space, and talk with the Lares and Penates. Conspire with them when you’re having a dinner party. Invite them to attend the special meal you’re cooking for loved ones. Mark a date on the calendar that signifies a festival day for your Lares and Penates. On that day, make a big deal about cleaning their space and create devotions to them. By the time the anniversary rolls around, you may have discovered they have favourite meals and offerings they want you to prepare. For years there’s been a tiny glass pot on my kitchen windowsill that’s filled with honey, for just this purpose.