Roman Meals

How We Know About Their Meals

In addition to art and archaeology, we have information on Roman food from a variety of written sources. This incudes Latin material on agriculture, like the passages from Cato, a Roman cookbook (Apicius), letters, and satire, such as the well-known banquet of Trimalchio. Some of this might lead one to believe the Romans lived to eat or followed the motto eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. However, most couldn't eat like that, and even most rich Romans would have eaten more modestly.

In the modern U.S., the government issues dietary guidelines, with an ever-increasing number of fruits to be added to the meal plan. During the Roman Republic, the government's concern wasn't so much an ever-expanding waistline or other health issues. There were Sumtuariae Leges (sumptuary laws) designed to limit extravagance, including the amount spent on a given meal, which directly impacted how much wealthy Romans could eat at their meals. By the Imperial period, such laws were no longer in force.

What Poor Romans Ate

Regardless of sumptuary laws, poor Romans would eat mostly cereal grain at all meals as porridge or bread, for which the women engaged in a daily grain-to-flour grinding. They placed the hard kernels between a concave stone and a smaller one serving as a roller. This was called a "thrusting mill." Later, they sometimes used a mortar and pestle. Grinding was unnecessary for quicker-cooking porridge.

Basically, the Romans peasants during that time did not eat meat as much like us today. Instead, they generally consume grain, herbs, and grapes such as grapes. Besides, the peasants would collect wild fruits and wild nuts besides eating the grain that they grew at home.

Here are two ancient recipes for porridge from "On Agriculture," written by Cato the Elder (234-149 B.C.) from Lacus Curtius. The first porridge recipe (85) is Phoenician and involves fancier ingredients (honey, eggs, and cheese) than the simple Roman (86) recipe involving grain, water, and milk.

85 Pultem Punicam sic coquito. Libram alicae in aquam indito, facito uti bene madeat. Id infundito in alveum purum, eo casei recentis P. III, mellis P. S, ovum unum, omnia una permisceto bene. Ita insipito in aulam novam.

85 Recipe for Punic porridge: Soak a pound of groats in water until it is quite soft. Pour it into a clean bowl, add 3 pounds of fresh cheese, 1/2 pound of honey, and 1 egg, and mix the whole thoroughly; turn into a new pot.

86 Graneam triticeam sic facito. Selibram tritici puri in mortarium purum indat, lavet bene corticemque deterat bene eluatque bene. Postea in aulam indat et aquam puram cocatque. Ubi coctum erit, lacte addat paulatim usque adeo, donec cremor crassus erit factus.

86 Recipe for wheat pap: Pour 1/2 pound of clean wheat into a clean bowl, wash well, remove the husk thoroughly, and clean well. Pour into a pot with pure water and boil. When done, add milk slowly until it makes a thick cream.
By the late Republic period, it is believed that most people bought their bread from commercial bakeries.

Latin Names of the Meals

The names of meals change over time and in various locations. In the U.S., dinner, lunch, and supper have meant different meals to different groups. The supper meal in the evening was known as vesperna in early Rome. The main meal of the day was known as the cena in the country and in early times in the city. Cena was eaten around midday and was followed by the lighter supper meal. Over time in the city, the heavy meal was pushed later and later, and so the vesperna was omitted. Instead, a light lunch or prandium was introduced between jentaculum and cena. The cena was eaten around sunset.

Breakfast and Lunch Roman Style

The day would begin with a light breakfast of bread and fruit. For those who could afford it, breakfast (jentaculum), eaten very early, would consist of salted bread, milk, or wine, and perhaps dried fruit, eggs, or cheese. It was not always eaten.

The Roman lunch (cibus meridianus or prandium), a quick cold meal eaten around noon, could include salted bread or be more elaborate with fruit, salad, eggs, meat or fish, vegetables, and cheese. Wine and water mixed was drunk with meals, beer being considered a barbarian's drink by the sophisticated Roman.

The Dinner Meal

The main meal at the end of the day was regarded as an important occasion. The family gathered together, often with friends, after a visit to the public baths or their own private bath suite and sat or reclined in the triclinium, a pleasantly decorated room usually with a fine mosaic floor. This was the room where the Roman host would entertain his guests and seek to display his wealth and status.

Dining was an important social occasion. The Romans enjoyed eating and talking in the formal atmosphere of the triclimium. After, perhaps a pleasant stroll around the garden the guests would assemble ready to to enter the dining room (right foot first over the threshold to avert ill luck).

The dinner (cena), the main meal of the day, would be accompanied by wine, usually well-watered. The Latin poet Horace ate a meal of onions, porridge, and pancake. An ordinary upper-class dinner would include meat, vegetables, eggs, and fruit. Comissatio (drinking party) was a final wine course at dinner's end.

Just as today, the salad course may appear in different parts of the meal, so in ancient Rome the lettuce and the egg courses could be served first as the appetizer (gustatio or promulsis or antecoena) or later. Not all eggs were hens' eggs. They could be smaller or sometimes larger, but they were a standard part of the dinner. The list of possible items for the gustatio is long. It includes exotic items like sea urchins, raw oysters, and mussels. Apples, when in season, were a popular dessert (bellaria) item. Other Roman dessert items were figs, dates, nuts, pears, grapes, cakes, cheese, and honey.

Roman Dinner Party

A Roman dinner party ideally comprised nine guests, in honuour of the nine muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences. Arranged around three sides of a square, the fourth side being left open for serving, the guests would recline on large couches, each accommodating three people. Propping themselves on their left forearms, they would use their right hands for stretching for food and drink. Garlands of rose petals were worn on their heads to ward off the effects of too much wine. Sometimes the guests would pluck rose petals from their garlands and drop them into their wine goblets. With forks being unknown and knives and spoons only occasionally used, most people ate with their fingers - a messy arrangement when sticky sauces were part of the meal. Napkins were provided to protect the couches. Guests would also bring their own napkins, and according to contemporary satirists, sometimes stole their neighbours' napkins.

After a suitable offering by the host to the household gods (Lares), the meal would commence.

Food would be served on bronze, pewter or the popular decorated red Samian ware dishes and wine would be drunk from small cups of glass, samian ware or pewter. The meal began with gustatio or hors d'oevre, often an egg dish, vegetables raw and cooked, including asparagus, peas, beans, carrots, lettuce, endive, radishes, and cucumber. Salt fish, oysters, mussels or the specially fattened dormice cooked in a variety of ways. (Cold clams and oysters (bred on a large scale), which were originally dessert dishes, later became starters. After the Republican period (end of period: 27 B.C.E.), light meat dishes were also served as starters.) During the meal mulsum - a mixture of chilled white wine and honey - or course wine mixed with water would be drunk, the more expensive wines, such as Bordeaux, being reserved for serious drinking after the meal. Entertainment such as music on the lyre or cithera, or perhaps poetry reading would be provided during and after the meal.

The meal always started with a drink, either of honeyed wine, mulsum (a mixture of wine and honey rather than a mead), or a conditum (a spiced wine generally using pepper but sometimes also dates and saffron). The modern phrase ‘from soup to nuts’ is mirrored in Rome by the term ‘from eggs to nuts’. Eggs typically formed part of the gustatio,‘first course’, along with numerous small appetizers to stimulate the palate. A banquet menu recorded by Macrobius lists amongst many things for the hors d’œuvre, oyster patina, fish patina and sow’s udder patina,which suggests that the eggs served at the beginning of the meal could be quite elaborate. Salad, olives, bread, tuna, isicia or‘meatballs’, shellfish of all kinds with dipping sauces are all candidates for the gustatio.
-- Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius, 2006

The main course, or primae mensai varied both in the number and elaboration of dishes. Roast and boiled meat, poultry, game or other meat delicacies would be served. No dish was complete without its highly flavoured and seasoned sauce. Contrary to present day preference, the main object seemed to be to disguise the natural taste of food - possibly to conceal doubtful freshness, possibly to demonstrate the variety of costly spices available to the host. Sometimes so many ingredients were used in a sauce it was impossible to single out any one flavour. One Roman cook bitterly complained that some of his fellow cooks 'When they season their dinners they don't use condiments for seasoning, but screech owls, which eat out the intestines of the guests alive'. Apicius wrote at the end of one of his recipes for a particularly flavoursome sauce, 'No one at table will know what he is eating'. These sauces were usually thickened with wheat flour or crumbled pastry. Honey was often incorporated into a 'sweet-sour' dish or sauce.

Favourite foods of the Roman gourmet included snails fattened on milk until they could no longer retreat into their shells; dormice fattened on nuts in special earthenware jars - "battery dormice"; pigeons immobilized by having their wings clipped or legs broken, then fattened; oysters in plenty and other shellfish; ham and suckling pig; peacocks, pheasant and goose; and chicken cooked in a variety of ways, one of which required the bird to be drowned in red wine. Several dishes would be placed on the table for each person to help himself. Servants kept the guests supplied with small hot rolls - a useful means of cleaning the plate of a tasty sauce still practiced by the French today - and their glasses replenished with wine.

“Menus written on tablets were known in ancient Greece and Rome, but far more common at feasts was the custom of someone -- either the host or a specially instructed slave -- pointing out the different dishes, explaining on occasion what each contained and how it had been made, and informing guests of the provenance, the freshness, the age of the foods and wines. The need for written menus at modern feasts is the result of an important change in the way for more formal meals were constructed, which spread to Europe and America from about the mid-nineteenth century.” From Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

The most common main dishes were:

There were no side dishes or accompaniments in today's sense, although bread was consumed by all classes following the introduction of wheat.

The mensae primae, ‘first tables’ (because the tables were brought in already laid), comprised the impressive main courses. Roasted joints of meat and poultry, whole stuffed piglet, lamb or kid, whole baked fish, more patinae, minutal or ‘stews’, moray eel, hare, the list is endless. . .

The best way to imagine a Roman banquet is to think in terms of a Chinese meal. There was a vast array of dishes served in bowls and platters and, we think, the guest often had a small dish or platter to eat from. Food moved from the large communal serving dish to individual dishes and then was eaten with the fingers. Softer foods were eaten with spoons and the guests could also have a knife to cut their own meat from the joint if slave-carvers were not present. Each person would have a relatively small amount of each item on his plate at any one time and the process of consumption was slow and steady, rather than the hurried meal we are used to. In fact, the meal itself could take many hours to complete. The position of the various items on the table seems to be very important, as is the position of the guest on the couch. We even hear of some less important guests, freedmen or hangers-on at the lower end of the couch, failing to get the most desirable foods because they could not reach them. Bearing this in mind, a Roman meal should not resemble the meat and two veg. of modern dining. There should be at least four or more individual hors d’œuvre served in separate bowls, with small dishes or plates for each guest to eat off so that they can take from the communal dishes. This is equally true of the main course. The whole roast beast with elaborate decoration would be carved into small pieces by a slave so that each guest only picks up what he needs and dips the meat into the accompanying sauces, served in little bowls.
-- Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius, 2006

Desserts or mensae secundae, though not considered an important course, would consist of sweetmeats, pastries, dried or fresh fruit and nuts. Cakes, made of wheat and usually soaked in honey, played a big part.

The mensae secundae,‘second tables’ or dessert, comprises fairly simple items such as fruit, nuts and sometimes honey cheesecakes. In Apicius there are few dessert recipes, and this has largely been explained by the fact that baked goods tended to be dealt with in a separate literary form. Apicius is a cook’s collection rather than a literary cook book, and this separation of sweet and savoury shouldn’t necessarily apply. Recorded menus that have come down to us that give examples of dessert do suggest that single uncooked or unprepared items were the norm. This may be a better explanation of the absence of more complex sweet dishes from Apicius. I have sampled all of the cooked desserts in Apicius and you will find most of them in this book. Serve one with a selection of fruit and nuts to finish your meal.
-- Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius, 2006

Among fruits, grapes were the most preferred. The Romans distinguished between grapes for wine-making and grapes as food. Raisins were also produced. After grapes, figs and dates played a major part and pomegranates were eaten in many varieties. Quinces, figs, dates, grapes, pomegranates, various types of apples, apricots, peaches, cherries, pears, plums, currants, strawberries, blackberries, medlars, elderberries, mulberries, azaroles, citron, raspberries, and melons were grown. Lemons were known from the 1st century AD, but not cultivated extensively. The Romans ate walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, chestnuts and pine nuts. Roman bakers were famous for the many varieties of breads, rolls, fruit tarts, sweet buns and cakes.

After the remains of the meal had been cleared away, the guests continued to recline and toast each other with wine, the entertainment continuing in as elaborate a form as the host could afford. Important banquets would often end with clowns or jugglers performing or even gladiator fights.

Such a meal would entail a great deal of preparation and we can imagine the scene of frenzied activity in the kitchen beforehand, as cooks and slaves busied themselves under the supervision of the lady of the house. Pots and pans simmered and bubbled over burning charcoal on the stove, ingredients for sauces were pounded and mixed in mortaria, while the cooks made good use of the wine and oil stored in their amphorae, together with herbs and costly spices; all to ensure that the guests would be suitably impressed with their meal.

Formal banquets would be given to celebrate special occasions in all parts of the Roman Empire. Distinguished and wealthy hosts would go to enormous lengths to surprise and delight their guests. In his golden palace the Emperor Nero possessed a spectacular dining room in which was a revolving ceiling which turned day and night, in time with the sky. Other dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let hundreds of flowers or perfume from hidden sprinklers, shower upon the guests.

Often grains of gold, pearls, and amber and other precious jewels would be hidden among various dishes and their contents. No doubt some pockets would have been bulging by the end of the meal!

At these elaborate feasts it was customary to have a particularly important delicacy, such as a sturgeon, borne into the room accompanied by a procession of slaves playing flutes, while others danced in time to the music.

A vivid description of a Roman banquet at its most luxuriant is given by the contemporary writer Petronius. This was the famous Trimalchio's feast, where guests were offered 'A hare tricked out with wings to look like a Pegasus, a wild sow with its belly full of live thrushes, quinces stuck with thorns to look like sea urchins, and roast pork carved into models of fish, song birds and a goose'. The Emperor Vitellius dedicated to the goddess Minerva a mixture of pike liver, pheasants' brains, peacocks' brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey roe, after rejecting the flesh of several rare and expensive delicacies 'collected in every corner of the Empire from the Parthian frontier to the Straits of Gibraltar'.

Dinners and Dining

A dinner party would usually begin in the early evening. The guests would remove their sandals at the door and have their feet washed by a slave. They were then announced by an usher and shown to their places. Their hands were then washed with perfumed water. Washing their hands was an important ritual as Romans usually ate with their fingers.

It is believed that during the Roman Republic, most women and the poor ate sitting on chairs, while upper-class males reclined on their sides on couches along three sides of a cloth-covered table (mensa). The three-sided arrangement is called the triclinium. Banquets might last for hours, eating and watching or listening to entertainers, so being able to stretch out without shoes and relax must have enhanced the experience.

Since there were no forks, diners would not have had to worry about coordinating eating utensils in each hand. People ate straight from serving dishes as opposed to using plates, and between courses slaves washed the guests' hands with more perfumed water. Sometimes they held a plate in their left hand and used their right hand to take food. Polite Romans lifted their food with three fingers so as not to dirty their ring finger and pinkie. Spoons did exist, for dishes too liquid even to pick up with a piece of bread. Those had a sharp point at the other end, designed to pick snails out of their shells. Knives had no place on the Roman table: if necessary, food was cut up in front of the guests by a slave.

Summaries of napkin history often say that the ancient Greeks used bread to wipe their hands. This is suggested by a passage in one of Alciphron's letters (3:44), and some remarks by the sausage seller in Aristophanes' play, The Knights. The bread in both texts is referred to as apomagdalia which simply means bread from inside the crust known as the crumb and not special "napkin bread". Napkins were also used in ancient Roman times. In Roman antiquity, napkins known as sudaria and mappae were made in both small and large lengths. The sudarium, Latin for 'handkerchief,' was a pocket-size fabric earned to blot the brow during meals taken in the warm Mediterranean climate. The mappa was a larger cloth spread over the edge of the couch as protection from food taken in a reclining position. The fabric was also used to blot the lips. Although each guest supplied his own mappa, on departure mappae were filled with delicacies leftover from the feast, a custom that continues today in restaurant ‘doggy bags’.