When Mount Vesuvius Froze Time in the Kitchen
Imagine walking through the charred remains of a kitchen that was busy preparing dinner nearly 2,000 years ago. The bustling city of Pompeii was halted in its tracks in the autumn of 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted, crushing the city under tons of ash and rubble. But here’s the incredible part – many carbonized seeds and fruits have been found in Pompeii, such as figs, plums, dates, olives, walnuts, and almonds. Lentils and beans are there too and were undoubtedly made into soups and stews, perhaps with a piece of bacon for flavor. The volcanic ash that buried the city also preserved one of humanity’s most fascinating culinary time capsules. Every ingredient, every cooking utensil, every half-finished meal tells a story that makes your modern kitchen suddenly feel very ordinary.
The Discovery That Changed Everything We Knew About Roman Food
A stew made from snails, fish and sheep was all the rage in the first century – at least if you were grabbing a bite at this snack stand, or thermopolium, which opened to visitors in 2021. Although Pompeii has 80 similar street-facing restaurants, this site is notable because of its impeccable preservation – including the animal bones and snail shells from which archaeologists hypothesized the stew’s briny ingredients. Think about that for a moment – we know exactly what people ordered for lunch on the day a volcano buried their city. The thermopolium is strikingly similar to a modern salad bar: terracotta jars set into the counter resemble those at a fast-food joint, while intact frescoes showcase familiar menu items like duck. It’s like finding an ancient McDonald’s, but with way better ingredients and much more style.
Streets Filled With the Aroma of Ancient Fast Food
The 150 or so thermopolia believed to have been operating in Pompeii at the time of the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius were mostly patronized by the city’s poorer residents, who often had little access to home kitchen facilities. These snack bars typically served simple fare, such as rustic bread, salt fish, garum, and wine. Picture walking down a Pompeii street and being hit with the smell of grilled fish, warm bread, and fermented fish sauce wafting from every corner. Much as you see in Naples now, these thermopolia occupied the ground floor at the front of the building and opened straight onto the street where people would stand around the bar-like counter in the doorway drinking and snacking. The jars or dolia that can be seen in the pictures above embedded in the counter would have contained dried fruit and nuts (and, indeed, carbonised remains of such have still been found in them), rather than hot food, although this was also cooked and served here.
The Rich Man’s Kitchen: Where Luxury Met Flavor
Cooking and dining at home, however, was largely the preserve of Pompeii’s wealthier classes, the equites. The arrangement in a Roman domus allowed for both outdoor and indoor dining and, if there was anyone in Pompeii enjoying the fabled dormouse and sea urchin diet, then it would have been here. The kitchens were often tucked away at the back of the house and would have an oven in one corner. But here’s something that might make you lose your appetite – the opposite corner was often used as a toilet and rubbish bin, the Romans considering food waste and human waste much the same thing (all good fertilisers for those vineyards), meaning you’d have to use the facilitirs while people cooked around you. Talk about open-concept living taken to extremes.
The Holy Trinity of Roman Cooking
Oil, wine, and fish sauce were fundamental to Roman cuisine, and they were traded in amphorae across the Mediterranean from Spain and Africa. The triad of oil, wine, and fish sauce was used to create simple dressings that were ubiquitous at any Roman meal. These weren’t just condiments – they were the backbone of every dish. 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. Imagine if ketchup, mustard, and mayo had a much classier ancient cousin – that’s what garum (fish sauce) was to the Romans.
Marcus Gavius Apicius: The Original Celebrity Chef
Marcus Gavius Apicius (flourished 1st century ce) was a wealthy Roman merchant and epicure during the reign of Tiberius (14–37 ce), after whom was named one of the earliest cookbooks in recorded history. The book comprises more than 400 recipes, and it is so esteemed that it has been preserved in numerous editions ever since. This guy wasn’t messing around when it came to food. The one mostly referred to is Marcus Gavius Apicius, who lived between 80 BCE and 40 CE. He was an eccentric Roman patrician who spent all his fortune organizing luscious banquettes. When he realized he had no money left, he killed himself, preferring to die instead of lowering the level of his lifestyle. Now that’s what you call being passionate about your craft – though maybe not the healthiest relationship with food.
Decoding Ancient Recipes: Lost in Translation
As for the recipes themselves, well, any attempt to duplicate them will be at best a broad interpretation—a translation from ancient methods of cooking by smell, feel, and custom to the modern way of weights and measures. Consider the following recipe: Ancient Roman recipes were like your grandmother’s cooking instructions – “add a pinch of this” and “cook until it looks right.” Since many ancient recipe are skeletons, the palate is a useful guide. If the first attempt results in a gummy texture or off flavor—something “that might keep you fed, but is not very enjoyable,” Monaco says—she’ll give it another go. “We all have the same tongues, we all have the same reactions to spice and salt,” she explains.
The Bread That Survived 2,000 Years
Today the bread is crisped black as charcoal, and run through with cracks. A baker had kneaded and shaped the squat, round loaf, known as a panis quadratus, and slid it into an oven one day in A.D. 79, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Over the last couple of hundred years, since the ash-shrouded cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered, dozens of these loaves, carbonized by the sudden, searing heat of pyroclastic flows, have turned up. They’re relics of an astounding disaster, but there’s something intimate and familiar about them that collapses time and distance. You can imagine the routine of mixing and rolling the dough, the smell of fermenting starter, the sound of a perfect crust cracking under your thumb. It’s like holding a conversation with a baker from 2,000 years ago through a loaf of bread.
Garum: The Ketchup of Ancient Rome
Most of the recipes in the book—even sweet dishes that in the 21st century would be considered desserts—included a sauce made with garum, a fermented fish sauce similar to Asian fish sauce and thought to be an early predecessor of Worcestershire sauce. If you think putting hot sauce on everything is a modern obsession, think again. The Romans put fish sauce on desserts. Liquamen: a salty fish sauce. Most of the time you can replace it by salt. But that’s like saying you can replace chocolate with brown sugar – technically true, but you’re missing the whole point.
When Dinner Was a Performance Art
Apicius certainly excels in the preparation of vegetable dishes (cf. his cabbage and asparagus) and in the utilization of parts of food materials that are today considered inferior. As How Stuff Works puts it, “cooks then were revered if they could disguise a common food item so that diners had no idea what they were eating.” Roman chefs weren’t just cooking – they were basically ancient food magicians. Although a lot of them would be delicious to eat, the most interesting ones to me are things like porpoise or ostrich. I’m also interesting in the obvious ancestors of modern dishes. Imagine the dinner party conversation: “Guess what you just ate!” followed by horrified gasps and nervous laughter.
The Menu That Made Mouths Water (And Sometimes Stomachs Turn)
From the documentary and archaeological records, we know that the following foods were present in Pompeian diets: naked grains such as wheat; hulled grains such as farro, barley and millet; pulses such as beans and lentils; fruit such as grapes, figs, pears, dates, apples, berries, pomegranates; vegetables such as olives, leeks, lovage, cabbages, leafy greens, chards and chicories; eggs; goat, sheep and cow cheeses; nuts This sounds surprisingly modern and healthy, right? But then you discover recipes like the Roman cookbook Apicius contains recipes for brain sausages, brain-stuffed squash fritters and rose patina (patina de rosis), a baked dish of scrambled brain and eggs, flavored with roses. Rose-flavored brain and eggs – because apparently regular scrambled eggs were too boring for ancient Romans.
Wine That Doubled as Medicine
MAKE ROSE WINE IN THIS MANNER: ROSE PETALS, THE LOWER WHITE PART REMOVED, SEWED INTO A LINEN BAG AND IMMERSED IN WINE FOR SEVEN DAYS. THEREUPON ADD A SACK OF NEW PETALS WHICH ALLOW TO DRAW FOR ANOTHER SEVEN DAYS. AGAIN REMOVE THE OLD PETALS AND REPLACE THEM BY FRESH ONES FOR ANOTHER WEEK; THEN STRAIN THE WINE THROUGH THE COLANDER. BEFORE SERVING, ADD HONEY SWEETENING TO TASTE. This concoction, Vehling tells us in a helpful footnote, doubles as a laxative. The Romans really knew how to multitask with their beverages – get drunk and solve digestive issues at the same time. Talk about efficiency.
Daily Bread: The Rhythm of Roman Meals
The main meal of the day was the cena, which occurred towards the end of the afternoon after the worst of the heat. Earlier meals such as the ientaculum breakfast and prandium kind of lunch tended to be created from foods such as bread with cheese spreads or sausage. Even the ancient Romans didn’t seem to enjoy eating a large meal in the midday heat. So the Romans invented the concept of avoiding heavy meals during hot weather – something we’re still trying to figure out today. Bread is also central to the wall fresco depicting a candidate running for election giving away fresh bread to the well-to-do electorate in exchange for their vote. The two loaves of bread are similar in shape, but the bread used as a bribe was undoubtedly made with finer white flour. Even Roman politicians knew that the way to voters’ hearts was through their stomachs.
Recent Discoveries: The Kitchen Keeps Giving Up Its Secrets
Archaeologists also found traces of an extensive field system under the thick layers of pumice from the Vesuvian eruption in AD 79. The field system has evidence of ancient furrows and pits in a N-S direction, which supplied the markets and households of Roman Pompeii with fresh produce. Organic remains and pollen are currently being analysed to identify the vegetables that were grown. However, the root systems and distribution indicate that perennial artichokes were likely cultivated in the area. Even in 2024, Pompeii keeps revealing new food secrets. The city was basically sitting on top of an ancient farm-to-table operation that would make modern foodies weep with envy.
The Recipe Collection That Refuses to Die
Manuscripts, books written by hand, of Apicius’s cookbook were copied over and over again through the centuries, from roughly 100 B.C., during the reigns of Augustus Caesar and Tiberius Caesar, to the late 1400s. In the late 1400s, the only surviving cookbook from the Ancient Roman era was printed using the newly invented printing press. It has been in print ever since. While not the first European cookbook to be printed on a press, which was Platina’s cookbook in 1474, Apicius’s is the oldest European cookery book in existence, and its early printed editions are rare and highly valued. This cookbook has literally survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, and every food trend since – that’s staying power.
When archaeologists brush volcanic ash off a 2,000-year-old kitchen counter and find the exact ingredients for what someone was cooking for dinner, it makes you wonder what future archaeologists might think of your own kitchen someday. Will they be fascinated by your microwave meals, or puzzled by your coffee machine? What would you want them to know about how you lived through your leftover takeout containers?
