A really extravagant host might serve his guests flamingo tongue or ostrich stew.Īfter the cena was taken away, slaves would bring in the secunda mensa (dessert). A simple main course might involve chicken cooked in wine, or a pig’s stomach cooked with nuts and vegetables. This could be almost anything, and the richer you were the more dramatic you wanted your cena to be.
Guards were posted to prevent gate-crashers ( parasiti ), who often managed to sneak in anyway.īanquets would begin with the gustatio (appetizers), usually small savory foods like sausages, eggs, or honey-dipped rodents, and then continue on to the cena (main course). Dozens, even hundreds of guests might be invited, and they would come wearing special, colorful dining clothes called cenatoria. Image by Kolforn on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC-BY-3.0 CenaĪ banquet ( cena recta ) was a major social event. The recipes are very different in format from the ones we use today-there are almost no measurements, temperatures, or times, so modern chefs who recreate ancient dishes have to use a lot of guesswork. Most of what we know about cooking in ancient Rome comes from a cookbook called Apicius, containing hundreds of recipes, which was probably first written in the 1st century AD and then added to over the centuries. Many salty sauces today-Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, Thai fish sauce-are made by letting the ingredients rot a little bit. And even though that description sounds really gross, liquamen was probably delicious. The Romans couldn’t get enough of the stuff. When it was good and stinky, the liquamen would be strained, bottled, and sold. Liquamen was made by pouring heaps of salt over fish guts, then leaving the mixture out in the sun for days to rot. While we’re on the subject, I really can’t leave out their favorite seasoning, a sauce known as garum or liquamen. (They were also big fans of garlic one recipe for ancient pesto calls for 20 cloves of garlic. These three ingredients were used in ways you might find unpleasant today-like cabbage cooked in a boiled honey-vinegar mix-but the Romans loved these flavors. Salt was used to bring out flavors, just like today, but instead of sugar, honey was used to provide sweetness (sugar was only known as an Indian medicine during Roman times). If you aren’t a fan of honey, salt, or vinegar, then I sincerely hope you never fall into a time warp back to ancient Rome! Those three ingredients were in almost every Roman dish. Everything was eaten by hand, so slaves would provide bowls of water for washing-up before the meal.
There were no utensils and no personal plates. The hosts would lie on the lectus imus (left-hand couch) the least important guests would lie on the lectus summus (right-hand couch) and the guests of honor would lie on the lectus medius (middle couch), with the most important guest on the far left side of the lectus medius, in the place called the locus consularis. Three people would lie on each couch-cozy!-and seating arrangements were based on status. Diners would prop themselves on their elbows to reach the food. These couches were arranged in groups of three (hence the tri clinium ), in a horseshoe pattern, with the food on tables in the middle of the horseshoe. This was because Romans and Greeks didn’t sit down to eat as we do, but would instead lie down on couches. The dining room in a Roman mansion was called the triclinium, from the Greek words for three ( tris ) and lean ( clinein ). Image by Mentnafunangann on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0
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