Together with shelter and clothing, food is traditionally seen as one of humankind’s essential requirements. While the consumption of food is a common theme in almost all ancient literary genres, its preparation is less fully described. Even lengthy accounts of extravagant banquets inevitably ignore the elaborate preparations that took place ahead of time, and in any case, they reflect the experience of only the upper social strata. Petronius’ wonderful description of Trimalchio’s dinner (Petronius, Satyricon 26–78) bears no closer relationship to the average Roman’s evening meal than Apicius’ recipe for stuffed flamingo. So we must be especially careful in making generalizations about diet and culinary technology from the imbalanced evidence we are given by the ancients themselves.
Between its harvesting in the countryside and its appearance on a table in Athens or Rome, most food had passed through many hands. Almost all the agricultural products described in the previous chapter were subjected to further processing to make them edible. Three of the most important foods of antiquity—flour, olive oil, and wine—all needed fairly complicated preparatory treatment, for which ever more efficient and specialized machines were developed, so that originally simple tasks of processing food once undertaken at home or on the farm gradually came to be assumed by skilled professionals.
In early times, for example, grain was either pounded into flour by a mortar and pestle (4.1), or ground in a simple saddle-quern, both of which could be managed by any householder. Even the superior efficiency of the rotary quern—originally a pair of circular stones, the upper with a vertical handle for turning it (4.2)—benefited the domestic baker, until it was improved and enlarged into the enormous “hourglass” design of rotary mills powered by donkeys or slaves and familiar from Roman sites throughout the Mediterranean (4.3). The great quantity of flour produced from these machines was then made into a gruel, the staple of many ancient diets, or baked into bread (4.4–9) to feed the urban dwellers who were as ignorant as modern consumers about the origin and treatment of their food.
Similar machines were developed for extracting the liquid from olives and grapes. Beginning with simple devices like a flat stone rotated over a trough full of olives, the technology for crushing and pressing evolved into one of the most mechanically advanced in antiquity, imaginatively employing the principles of rotary motion, the lever, the wedge, and the screw to make the tasks easier and more efficient with olive mills like the trapetum and beam-presses whose force was exerted by windlasses or screws (4.11–13, 18–20).
Other food products, too, underwent preliminary processing: combs into honey (3.73), milk into cheese (4.23), grain into beer (4.21), wine into sauces (4.25). It all seems, in fact, quite contemporary, except for the problem of preserving food: here, lacking modern techniques of refrigeration and canning, the ancients relied where they could on the simple techniques of smoking and salting, though we can assume that, like contemporary societies without rapid transport links to warmer climates, they depended much more on seasonally available foods than most of us do today.
For reasons of space, there is little here that treats the ancient diet specifically, and no recipes from Apicius to illustrate the culinary technology of the ancients. Some information about the former can be culled from other selections in this volume, like the list of foodstuffs in Diocletian’s Price Edict (10.127); for the latter, prospective Roman chefs are directed to one of the several good translations of Apicius by scholars who have tested the recipes in their own kitchens.
MILLS AND BREAD
4.1 METHODS OF MILLING
Not all grains are easy to mill, for which Etruria can serve as obvious proof: here the ear of emmer wheat is first roasted, then crushed with a pestle fitted with an iron tip in a mortar whose inner surface has toothed ridges radiating from the centre; if the millers put their weight behind their pounding, the result is that they can shatter the iron tip while breaking up the grains. The greater part of Italy uses a plain pestle, as well as water wheels and the millstone.
As for the precise method of milling, I shall quote the opinion of Mago, who instructs that wheat should first be soaked in a fair bit of water, then hulled, dried in the sun, and worked on again in a mortar. The same technique can be used for barley, except that 20 sextarii of grain should be moistened with 2 sextarii of water. Lentils, he says, should first be roasted and then lightly milled together with bran or with the addition of a bit of unbaked brick and half a modius of sand for every 20 sextarii of lentils. Vetch similarly. Sesame should be steeped in warm water, spread out [to dry], then rubbed vigorously and immersed in cold water so the chaff can float to the surface, and again spread out in the sun on a linen sheet: unless this is done with all speed, it turns pale yellow and begins to go mouldy.
4.2 OPERATION OF A HAND MILL
Hand mills are first mentioned by Homer, who describes twelve female servants toiling over the mills in Odysseus’ palace, producing coarse-ground barley groats and finer wheat flour (Odyssey 20.106–111; cf. 7.104). Those mills may have been simple querns like the ones commonly found in Bronze Age sites on Crete, for example: the hand-held upper stone, shaped like the inverted hull of a boat, was moved back and forth over the grain placed on a larger, flat lower stone. More efficient than this reciprocal action was the rotary motion of the hand mill affectionately described here as part of the early-morning activities of the rustic Roman farmer Simylus.
[Vergil], Moretum 16–29, 39–51
A meager heap of grain was poured upon the ground, from which he helps himself to as much as his measure would hold, amounting to 16 pounds in weight. He leaves his storeroom and takes his position beside the mill, placing his trusty lamp on a small shelf firmly fixed to the wall for just such a purpose. Then from his clothing he frees his two arms and, first putting on an apron of hairy goatskin, he sweeps the stones and hollow of the mill with a brush made of tail. He mobilizes his two hands for the task, allotting a job to each: his left is given to feeding the mill, his right to the work of turning and driving the unceasing spin of the wheel, while the left from time to times helps out her weary sister by taking her turn—and the grain passes through, braised by the stone’s swift strokes….
Once his work of turning has made up the proper amount, he transfers handsful of the bruised meal from the mill to a sieve and shakes it. The husks remain behind in the sieve, while the flour filters through the holes and falls out clean and pure. At once he lays it out on a smooth table, pours warm water over it, mixes together the meal and liquid and forms a ball of it, and kneads it by hand until it is firm, now and again sprinkling the mound with salt. Once he has tamed the dough he smoothes it off and with his palms presses it out into a circle, and impresses lines to divide it into four equal pieces. He then places it on the hearth, where his wife has already cleaned off a suitable spot, covers it with tiles, and heaps up the fire on top.
4.3 A DONKEY MILL
Apuleius, The Golden Ass 7.15
For without a moment’s hesitation his mercenary wife—to my mind a completely unscrupulous woman—had me yoked to a grinding mill and, by beating me continuously with a leafy stick, she supplied bread for herself and her family out of my hide. Not content with exhausting me for her own food, she would make a profit from my going round and round by having me grind her neighbours’ grain as well. And in return for all these labours I was distressed not to be given even the prescribed diet. For my own barley that I broke up and ground down during my circuits around that very millstone she used to sell to farmers nearby, while for me—after a day spent working at that toilsome machine—she would serve up an evening meal of dirty, unsifted grain husks, made gritty by its liberal dose of stone fragments.
See also 2.18. It is clear from Pliny (Natural History 18.112) that forced labour in the mills was not restricted to donkeys: “Gruel is made from emmer…. Its grain is pounded in a wooden mortar to prevent it from being ground to a powder by the hardness of stone. The pestle, as is well known, is worked by the effort of chained convicts.” A famous passage from Vitruvius (On Architecture) 10.5 (2.12) shows that water-driven grain mills were known in the first century B.C., but they were not common until late antiquity (see also 2.13).
4.4 TYPES OF WHEAT AND THEIR YIELD
Pliny, Natural History 18.86–90, 92
From soft wheat comes the finest bread and the most famous baked goods. In Italy, top place goes to a blend of grains from Campania and Pisa: the former are reddish, the latter whiter and heavier, like chalk. A reasonable yield from the Campanian grain that they term “emasculated” is 4 sextarii of fine flour from a modius (or 5 sextarii from a modius of common grain that has not been “emasculated”), together with half a modius of choice flour, 4 sextarii of ration-bread (called “seconds”), and 4 sextarii of bran….
A modius of flour from Celtic soft wheat yields 20 pounds of bread, from the Italian variety 2 or 3 pounds more, in the case of bread baked in a metal pan; for oven-baked loaves they add 2 pounds for either variety. The best flour made from hard wheat is from Africa. A reasonable yield is half a modius from a modius, and 5 sextarii of fine flour (…they use this in the production of bronze and paper), as well as 4 sextarii each of second quality flour and bran. A modius of flour from hard wheat yields 22 pounds of bread, or 16 pounds if the modius is choice flour.
The price for this in an average market is 40 asses for a modius of flour, 48 asses for flour from hard wheat, and 80 asses for flour from the “emasculated” soft grain.2
The sweetest bread comes from arinca, a denser grain than emmer with a larger and heavier ear. Rarely does a modius of this grain fail to yield 16 pounds [of bread]. In Greece it is difficult to thresh, which is why Homer,3 who calls it olyra, says it is fed to the draught animals; but the same grain in Egypt is easy [to thresh] and gives a high yield.
4.5 PORRIDGE, THE STAPLE OF OLD
Pliny, Natural History 18.83–84
Of all varieties of grain the hardiest and most resistant to frost is emmer. It can stand regions of extreme cold that are poorly cultivated, or those that are raging hot and dry. In ancient Latium it was the first food (that it was used, as I have said [18.14], as the ancient prize for valour is strong proof of this). Still, it is clear that the Romans for a long time subsisted not on bread but on porridge [puls], since even nowadays foods are called pulmentaria; and Ennius, the most venerable of our poets, in describing a famine during a siege, tells of how the fathers snatched a lump of it from their crying children. Even today archaic rituals and birthday sacrifices are carried out using porridge-cake. And yet porridge, it seems, was as foreign to Greece as polenta was to Italy.
4.6 THE MANUFACTURE OF LEAVEN
In early antiquity bread was always simple and unleavened, as we read in Genesis 18.6: “And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, ‘Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.’” Even after the discovery of leavening agents like those described below, this traditional type of bread remained popular.
Pliny, Natural History 18.102–104
The principal use of millet is in making leaven: mixed with unfermented wine and kneaded, it will last a year. A similar leaven is made from the best and most powdery bran of the wheat itself, which is marinated for three days in unfermented white wine, then kneaded and left to dry in the sun. In bread-making, they first dissolve tablets made of this leaven, add emmer flour, and bring the mixture to the boil; this is then mixed with the flour to produce, in their opinion, the best bread. The Greeks have established a workable proportion of 8 ounces of leaven for every 2 half-modii of flour.
Though these kinds of leaven can be made only during grape harvests, you can at any time you like make a leavening agent out of water and barley: two-pound loaves of this mixture are baked in ash and charcoal on a hot hearth or in an earthenware dish until they turn reddish-brown, after which they are sealed in containers until they turn sour; when soaked in water they become leaven….4
These days leaven is made from the flour itself, which is kneaded before the addition of salt. It can be boiled down into a kind of mush, and then left until it turns sour, though in general they do not bother with this simmering process, but rather use some dough left over from the day before. Two things are equally obvious: that fermentation occurs naturally from sourness, and that people fed on leavened bread have weaker bodies, as you might expect since our ancestors attributed special wholesomeness to whichever wheat was heaviest.
4.7 KINDS OF BREAD
Pliny, Natural History 18.105–106
It seems unnecessary to describe the various kinds of bread itself—sometimes named after the side-dishes served with it (like oyster bread), at other times after its special delicacy (like cake bread), or even at times after the speed with which it can be made (like hasty bread). It can also be called after the way it is baked (like oven bread, pan bread, or bread made in a clay baker), and quite recently there was even a type imported from Parthia called water bread,…since water is used in drawing it out into a thin consistency full of holes like a sponge. The highest quality is derived from the excellence of the wheat and the fineness of the sieve. Some knead the dough with the addition of eggs or milk, and there are even peoples who use butter, when the absence of war allows them to transfer their attention instead to the various styles of pastry-making.
Cato, On Agriculture 74
Recipe for kneaded bread: Wash thoroughly your hands and a bowl. Put the flour in the bowl, add water a little at a time, and knead well. When you’ve kneaded it thoroughly, form it into a loaf and bake it under an earthenware lid.
4.8 WHITE BREAD OR DARK?
From these two passages, both from satirists of the early Roman Empire, we can deduce that, though the healthfulness of wholewheat bread was recognized, those who could afford it preferred the more refined white loaves as a sign of social superiority. The first text is from a dinnertime conversation among Trimalchio’s nouveau-riche guests, about the merits of various foods; the second, a lament for the poor but honest client, humiliated by being given inedible food while his patron enjoys the finest.
Petronius, Satyricon 66.2
…and 100% wholewheat bread, which I prefer to white: it gives me energy, and I’ve no discomfort when I do my business.
Juvenal, Satires 5.67–75
Notice the grumbling with which another has offered you some bread that you can hardly break in two, and mouldy bits of hardened dough, the sort of stuff to get your back teeth going while resisting every bite. At the same time a soft and snowy white loaf moulded from the finest flour is reserved for the master of the household. Be sure to keep your paws off it and maintain the necessary respect for the breadpan. But imagine yourself giving in just a little to temptation—and there’s somebody there to make you put it back. “You’re a presumptuous table companion! You really must fill yourself up from your proper breadbasket and learn the colour of your bread.”
4.9 PROFESSIONAL BAKERS APPEAR IN ROME
In both Greece and Rome, the grinding of grain and baking of bread were traditionally done at home, until urban development in both cultures made it possible (and more efficient) to support professionals, who normally functioned as both millers and bakers: in Athens this occurred in the fifth century, and in Rome, as we learn from this passage, around 170 B.C. This is a particularly fine example of Pliny’s scholarly sleuthing, as he looks for corroborating evidence in datable sources. Plautus’ Aulularia was produced sometime before the playwright’s probable death in 184 B.C.
Pliny, Natural History 18.107–108
There were no bakers in Rome before the war with Perseus, more than 580 years after the city was founded. The citizens used to make their own bread, a task that belonged particularly to the women, as it still does nowadays for most races. Plautus already mentions the Greek word for bakers in the play he titled Aulularia,5 which has prompted considerable controversy among the learned about whether this line can be attributed to the poet himself. It is, in fact, confirmed by a sentence in Ateius Capito, to the effect that it was customary in his day for cooks to bake bread for the grander households, and that only those who ground [piso] emmer were called bakers [pistores]; and rather than having cooks on their permanent staff, people would hire them from the market.
4.10 RICE
Just as grain was the dietary staple of the ancient Mediterranean, so rice served the same function in Asia (and maize in pre-Columbian America). Though known to the Greeks and Romans (see, too, Strabo Geography 15.1.13; Horace, Satires 2.3.155), it seems never to have made its way westwards.
Pliny, Natural History 18.71
The inhabitants of India are especially fond of rice, from which they make the sort of drink for which the rest of the world uses barley. The leaves of rice are fleshy, similar to the leek’s but broader. It grows to the height of a cubit, with a purple blossom and a root that is round like a stone.
PRESSES, WINE AND OIL PRESSES
To produce both grape juice and olive oil, it was necessary first to crush the fruit, then squeeze out the liquid. The first stage was simple in the case of grapes: the fruit was gently trodden by naked feet, producing only a small amount of liquid (mustum lixivium) that was reserved for special uses (see 4.25). For the second stage—extraction of the juice or must—a variety of presses common to both wine and olive production were invented in the classical period, most notably those that created pressure through levers or screws. Before the olive could be pressed its pulp had to be bruised, but without cracking the bitter pit, a difficult procedure for which a small number of special mills like the trapetum were designed. This type of mill also allowed the amurca or bitter watery liquid that was heavier than the oil to be drawn off from bottom of the vat and the best oil to be extracted, even before the pulp was pressed for the poorer quality oil.
4.11 PRESSING THE GRAPES FOR WINE
Varro, On Agriculture 1.54.3
As for the grapes that have been trodden, their stalks should be put under the press together with their skins, to squeeze into the same vat whatever must they still contain. When there is no more flow from under the press, some people trim off the edges and press again; they call this second pressing circumsicium [literally, “cut around”] and keep separate what it produces because it has taken on the taste of the iron knife. The pressed skins of the grapes are collected in large, wide-mouthed jars, to which water is added: this is called lora because the grapes have been washed [lota], and is a winter substitute for the labourers’ allotment of wine. The first part of this passage appears in 3.50. For vineyard work leading up to the gathering of the grapes, traditionally undertaken in early autumn, see 3.48–49.
4.12 CONSTRUCTING AND EQUIPPING A WINERY
Palladius, On Agriculture 1.18
We should have a winery that faces north, is cool or as dim as possible, and at a distance from the baths, stables, oven, dung hills, cisterns, standing water, and other places that give off a terrible stench. It should be furnished with enough equipment to match the harvest and should be laid out in a way that, like the plan of a basilica,6 it has its treading floor built at a higher elevation with access by (normally) three or four steps rising between a pair of tanks inserted one on each side to catch the wine. From these tanks built channels or clay pipes run around the outside walls and pour the wine, flowing through tributary channels, into large basins placed along its edge. If there is a rather large vintage, the intervening space can be assigned to barrels, which we can keep from blocking the passageways by placing them on higher stands above the tanks, separated by a rather wide space between them to allow a passage for the attendant as the need arises.
But if we decide on their own space for barrels, it can be solidly built with slightly raised curbs and a tiled pavement, like a treading floor, so that even if a cask has been broached by mistake, the leaking wine will not be lost but can be caught in a vat placed underneath.
4.13 USING VARIOUS STYLES OF GRAPE PRESS
In Palladius’ winery the juice was extracted from the grapes by the age-old technique of treading. Yet, to judge from the agricultural handbooks of Cato, Varro, and Columella, most establishments were fitted out with presses that could extract more of the residual juice.7
Pliny, Natural History 18.317
A reasonable basis for calculation is that a single pressing should fill 20
Our forebears used to pull down the beams using ropes and straps and by levers;8 but within the last hundred years the Greek system was adopted, in which the grooves of a vertical screw run in a spiral. Four turning-spikes are fitted to the screw by some, while in other examples the screw lifts up boxes of stones with it—a design that is particularly recommended.9 Within the past twenty years we have discovered how to use small presses and a less spacious pressing shed: a shorter vertical screw projects downward onto the middle of the pressing disks, which exert a continuous downward pressure on the grape sacks set beneath; a heavy stone weight is placed on top of the apparatus [adding to the force of the screw].
4.14 PROTECTING WINE DURING FERMENTATION
Macrobius, Saturnalia 7.12.13–16
Avienus speaks again: “Hesiod says that, when you get to the middle of a jug of wine, that is the part that should be hoarded, while you can fill up by consuming the rest—indicating clearly that the best wine is found in the middle of the bottle. But it has been proved by experience that, in the case of olive oil, the best floats on top, while for honey the best is at the bottom. My question, then, is this: why are the best oil, wine, and honey thought to come from the top, the middle, and the bottom respectively?’’
Disarius responds without hesitation: “The honey that is best is heavier than the rest; in a jar of honey, the portion at the bottom is certainly the heaviest, and for this reason is more valuable than the honey floating on top. In wine bottles, on the other hand, contact with the sediment renders the bottom portion not only cloudy but inferior in flavour, while the top part is spoiled by its proximity to the air, contact with which spoils it. It is for this reason that farmers, not happy with laying down their wine jars indoors, bury them and strengthen them by applying a coat of something to the outside, preventing as much as possible the wine’s contact with the air, whose harmful effects are so obvious that wine is scarcely safe in a full bottle, let alone when exposed to the air. Once you drink from the bottle and create a space for contact with the air, the rest that remains is all contaminated as well. The further the middle part of the bottle is separated from the two extremes, the more removed it is from harm, as neither disturbed nor spoiled.”
4.15 PITCH AND OTHER ADDITIVES TO WINE
The ancients frequently added various supplements to their wines, believing them to improve the flavour as well as to help in preservation: spices, drugs, and aromatic herbs; pitch, turpentine, and even sea-water. Modern vintners are somewhat more discriminating, adding little more than sulphites to stabilize and preserve their products. Readers fond of Greek retsina will especially enjoy the following passage (and might want to read more about the various ways of using liquid pitch to preserve wine in Columella On Agriculture 12.22–24), while those who are not will be happy to echo Pliny’s final comment here.
Pliny, Natural History 14.124, 126–130
The method of preserving wine involves the sprinkling of pitch on the must when it begins to ferment, which is over within nine days at most. In this way the wine is tinged with the scent of the pitch and a bit of its sharp flavour….
As for the other additives to wine, such attention is paid to them that some people add doses of ash and elsewhere gypsum;…but ash made from the branches of vines or from oak is the additive of choice. Even sea-water is prescribed for this same purpose, as long as it is obtained from the open ocean by the spring equinox, and thereafter kept in storage, or at least is collected at the solstice on a night with a north wind blowing, or—if collected at the time of the vintage—first reduced by boiling.
The pitch especially recommended in Italy for wine-storage vessels comes from the region of Bruttium, and is made from the resin of the spruce tree…. The more assiduous vintners mix in black mastic [a mineral pitch], which is produced in Pontus and looks like bitumen, as well as the root of iris and olive oil. It has been found that wine from vessels treated with wax turns sour; and that it is less harmful to transfer wine into vessels that once contained vinegar than into ones used for sweet wine or mead.
Cato recommends that wine be “conditioned”—that is his word—with the addition to each culleus of a fortieth part of lye10 boiled with defrutum, or a pound and a half of salt, and from time to time crushed marble. He mentions sulphur as well, but resin he puts at the very end. As the wine begins to age, he recommends topping up the whole batch with the must he calls tortivum, which I understand to be the juice from the final pressing.
And we know that colours are added, like some kind of stain, to tint the wine, and that this makes it more full-bodied. We use so many poisons to force our wine to taste the way we want, and yet we are surprised that it is noxious!
Pliny, Natural History 14.133–135
Climate makes a great difference even for wine that has already been processed. In the region of the Alps they store it in wooden kegs that they surround with hoops, and in very cold weather they use fires to keep off the chill. Though rarely reported, it has been observed from time to time that these kegs burst open and the wine is left standing in frozen blocks—it is like a miracle, since wine does not naturally freeze but otherwise is only made sluggish by the cold. People in milder zones store their wine in jars that they bury in the earth either completely or only partially covering the belly, to protect them from the elements; other places use overhanging roofs to keep off the weather….
The shapes [of the storage jars] are also important: those with pot bellies and wide mouths are less suitable…. They must not be filled to the top, and the space left should be smeared with a mixture of passum or defrutum, and saffron or iris pounded together with boiled-down new wine. The caps of the jars suld be treated similarly, with the addition of mastic or pitch from Bruttium. The opening of wine jars in winter is viewed with general disfavour, except on a clear day, and not when thohe south wind is blowing or the moon is full.
4.17 VARIETIES OF WINE
Pliny describes at length the various wines from different centres of production (Italian wines alone are treated in Natural History 14.59–72). In the following three passages we read of noble wines of exceptional age; of a cheap wine-substitute made from the lees; and of Athenaeus’ reasons for preferring old wine to young.
Pliny, Natural History 14.54–55
…and Pramnian wine—the same wine whose praises Homer sang—is still highly esteemed; it is produced around Smyrna, near the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods. There was no special distinction to any particular variety of the other wines, though the year when Lucius Opimius was consul (the same year the tribune Gaius Gracchus was assassinated for inciting the common people by his factional discord) was famous for the quality of every type of wine: that year [121 B.C.] the sun did its work, and the weather was bright and warm for what they call the “cooking” of the grape. Those wines have kept until now, almost 200 years later, though (as is natural for wines of a mature age) they are reduced to the consistency of unrefined honey;…still, they can be used in small amounts as a treatment to improve other wines.
Pliny, Natural History 14.86
Leftovers taken from the grape pressing and steeped in water make a drink—called ‘‘seconds” by the Greeks, lora by Cato and the rest of us—that we cannot properly term wine but is still listed among the wines drunk by the working class. It comes in three varieties;…but none of them is good for more than a year.
Athenaeus, Philosophers at Dinner 1.26a
Old wine not only tastes better but is healthier: it promotes the better digestion of food; because it is composed of small particles, it is easily absorbed; it gives the body strength; it makes the blood redder and more absorbent (?); and it produces undisturbed sleep.
4.18 PREPARING OLIVES FOR PROCESSING
For orchard work preliminary to the olive harvest, see 3.52–54.
Varro, On Agriculture 1.55.4–6
The olive follows the same two paths to the farmstead as the grape: one part for solid food, the other to flow forth as liquid to anoint the body both internally and externally. So it is that the olive follows its master into the baths and gymnasium!
The share from which oil is made is usually piled on the wooden floor, one heap each day, where it can turn slightly mushy.11 And each pile is sent in order via the earthenware casks and the olive jars to the trapeta, which are olive-mills made from hard stone with roughened surfaces.12 Once the olives are picked, if they remain too long in their piles they grow soft from the heat and their oil goes rancid. So if you cannot process them at the proper time, you should expose them to air by stirring them up in their piles.
4.19 PRESERVING OLIVES
Columella, On Agriculture 12.50.1–3
The cold of winter follows, when the olive harvest (like the vintage) again demands the attention of the overseer’s wife…. So when your olives have already
The making of oil from olives required the crushing of the fruit in a trapetum to break its skin, and the pressing out of its liquid in a press similar to that used for grapes.
Pliny, Natural History 15.5
It takes greater skill to master the production of oil than of wine, since the oils that come from a single olive tree are not in fact the same. The immature olive gives the very first oil, before it has begun to ripen, and its flavour is quite extraordinary. And it is a fact that the first stream of this oil to come from the press is the richest, the quality decreasing with each successive issue, whether the olives are pressed in wicker baskets or—a recent invention—with the mush enclosed between thin strips of wood.
Columella, On Agriculture 12.52.1, 6–7, 10–11
The middle of the olive harvest usually falls at the beginning of December (oil made before this time, called “summer oil” is bitter), and it is round about this month that the green oil is pressed, and afterwards the ripe oil….
Rotary mills [molae] are more expedient for making olive oil than trapeta.13 They allow for very easy operation, since they can be lowered or raised according to the size of berries to avoid spoiling the flavour of the oil by crushing the pit. The trapetum in turn does more work more easily than tramping with clogs on the olives in a vat. There is also an instrument like a vertical threshing sledge, called a tudicula, which accomplishes its purpose with no real trouble except that it frequently breaks down and becomes jammed if you throw in a few too many berries. Local conditions and custom determine the choice of machines I have described; but the rotary mill works best, and then the trapetum….
Once the olives have been carefully cleaned they must be taken immediately to the press, put into new woven bags while still whole,14 and placed under the press so that as much as possible can be pressed out in a short space of time. Then, once the rinds have been opened and softened and two sextarii of pure salt have been added for each modius, the pulp will have to be pressed out either with slats, if that is the local custom, or at least with new woven bags. Then the fellow with the ladle must immediately empty what has flowed down first into the round basin (which is better than a square one made of lead or a two-chambered concrete one), and pour it into earthenware vats made ready for this purpose.
There should be three ranks of vats in the oil cellar, one to receive the first-quality oil (that is, from the first pressing), another for the second-quality, and a third for the third. For it is extremely important not to mix the first two issues, let alone the third with the first; the flavour of the first pressing is better by far, because it has not felt as much the force of the press and has flowed like grape juice. When the oil has stood for a little in the first vats [of each rank], the ladler will have to strain it off into the second row of vats, and then into subsequent ones right up to the last. For the more often it is aerated by being transferred [from one vat to another], rather like being agitated, the clearer it becomes and it loses its dregs.15
Pliny, Natural History 15.23
To press more than 100 modii is not recommended. This is called a pressing [or batch],…and it is normal for three pressings to be carried out in a day and night by four men at a time using a double basin [beneath the press].
OTHER FOODS AND DRINKS
4.21 OTHER ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES
In areas of the Mediterranean where grapes were not grown, people turned to local products for making alcoholic drinks: fermented dates, for example (Xenophon, Anabasis 2.3.14–16 describes the arrival of the Greek soldiers in a village where they found palm wine, a sour, boiled date drink, and the edible but headache-producing crown of the date palm [3.56]), or honey mead, or beer from fermented grains, a drink probably as old as agriculture itself.
Plutarch, Moralia 4.6 (672b)
The Jews used honey as wine16 before the appearance of vineyards. Even up to the present those non-Greeks who do not make wine drink mead, whose sweetness they reduce with the addition of bitter roots that have something of a wine flavour.
Diodorus of Sicily, History 5.26.2–3
Extreme cold can ruin the otherwise temperate climate of Gaul, which cannot produce wine or olive oil. So the Gauls who find themselves without these fruits prepare a beverage from barley, which they call beer.17 They also soak their honeycombs in water and use the resulting infusion as a drink. But they have an excessive addiction to wine, and saturate themselves with the vintages imported by traders, which they drink neat.
Pliny, Natural History 14.149
People who live in the west have their own form of intoxicating drink. There are different techniques used in the various districts of Gaul and Spain, and the drink goes by different names, but the basic principle is the same: grain is steeped in water. We have already learned from our Spanish provinces that these beverages even age well. And Egypt, too, has invented for its own consumption similar grain-based drinks—intoxication is constantly with us in every corner of the world!18—and these liquids they actually drink straight, not adding any water to make them less potent, as we do with wine. God knows, we used to think that Egypt produced grain for bread; but men’s vices are wonderfully resourceful, and a way has been found to make even water intoxicating!
4.22 WATER
Horace, Satires 1.5.1–8
I left the metropolis of Rome, accompanied by Heliodorus, easily the most learned of the Greeks. I put up at an unpretentious inn in Aricia; then on to Forum Appii, full of sailors and money-hungry innkeepers. We were lazy and divided this leg in two, though more serious travellers than we would do it in one; but the Appian Way is easier to bear if you take it slowly. It was here that I declare war on my stomach because of the water, which was pretty foul, and wait with no great patience as my fellow travellers have dinner.
Aristotle, Meteorologica 2.3 (358b)
I can say from experience that salt water becomes fresh water when it is vapourised, and the vapour, when it condenses again, does not turn back into salt water.
Without artificial means of refrigeration, the ancients could rely only on naturally occurring snow and ice to cool their food and drinks. But the expense and impracticalities of preserving and transporting water in its solid state made it unavailable to any but the wealthiest—hence the common literary complaint that the use of these natural refrigerants not only was decadent, but violated the very laws of nature.
Pliny, Natural History 19.55
Varieties of water are differentiated as well: the power of money has separated the very elements of nature into classes. Some people drink snow, others ice, turning what is an unpleasant condition of the mountains into an agreeable experience for their appetite. Water is preserved frozen for the hot seasons, and a way is being sought to keep snow cold for the months when it does not occur naturally. Some bring to a winter temperature even the water they have previously boiled. It is a fact that what pleases nature is unacceptable to humans.19
4.23 CHEESE-MAKING
Homer, Odyssey 9.218–223, 237–239, 244–249
We went into the cave and gazed in wonder at each thing in turn. There were crates full of cheeses, and pens crowded with lambs and kids. They were confined separately [by age], the spring lambs, summer lambs, and newborns each by themselves. All the handmade vessels were overflowing with whey, the pails and bowls into which he milked them…. He drove his plump herds into the broad grotto—at least, all those that he milked—but the male rams and billies he left outside in the extensive courtyard…. Sitting down, he milked the ewes and bleating nannies duly in turn, then placed the newborns under their mothers. Without a pause he curdled half the white milk, collected it in braided baskets, and stored it away; the other half he set in bowls, to have it within reach to drink for his supper.
Columella, On Agriculture 7.8.1–5
Cheese should be made from whole milk that is as fresh as possible, since it quickly takes on a sour flavour if it is left standing or mixed with water. It should generally be curdled using rennet from a lamb or a kid…. When the pail has been filled with milk, it should not be kept for any length of time before heating; and yet the pail ought not to come into contact with an open flame (which is a popular technique with some people) but should be stood near the fire. The moment the liquid has congealed, it should be transferred to wicker filters or baskets or moulds; for it is especially important that the whey be allowed to filter through and separate itself from the solid matter at the first possible moment….
Once the cheese has been removed from the moulds or baskets, to keep it from going bad it is placed on very clean boards in a cool, shady spot, and even still is sprinkled with ground salt to draw out its sour liquid. When hardened, it is compacted by pressing it with great force; it is again lightly sprinkled with absorbent salt, and again compressed with weights. When this procedure has been followed for nine days, the cheese is washed with fresh water and set out in rows on specially designed wickerwork racks, no one touching another, until it is fairly dry. Then, to keep it from becoming too leathery, it is packed tightly onto several shelves in an enclosed space protected from the winds.
In his short note on cheese-making, Varro (On Agriculture 2.11.3–4) includes a list of the principal types of cheeses. For goat’s-milk cheese in particular, see Vergil, Georgics 3.400–403; “The milk they extracted at dawn and during the day, they press at night; what they milk in the dark and at the setting sun they carry off in the morning, packed in baskets, when the goatherd goes to town; or they sprinkle it with a little salt and lay it down for the winter.”
4.24 SUGAR
The principal sweetening agent in antiquity was honey, for descriptions of which see 3.72 and, for its many varieties from the ancient Mediterranean, Pliny, Natural History 11.32–42. As the following passage from Pliny reveals, sugar was only vaguely recognized by the Romans.
Pliny, Natural History 12.32
Arabia also produces saccharon, but the most prized comes from India. It is a kind of honey that has collected in bamboo, white like gum, easily broken by the teeth, in pieces no larger than a hazel nut, and used only for medicine.
Note that this is not beet-sugar, but cane-sugar, to which Strabo (Geography 15.1.20) also alludes: ‘‘Concerning the reeds, Nearchus says that they produce honey, although there are no bees around.”
4.25 ROMAN SAUCES
The ancients made extensive use of various sauces in their preparation of food, in part to alleviate the blandness of their diet, in part to camouflage the taste of rotting foods that is common in societies without easy access to refrigeration. The most famous Roman version was garum or liquamen, a fish-based sauce used not just in main courses but even in desserts, and so valued that varieties were shipped around the Mediterranean.20 Another common base for these sauces was wine, in the form of must, which was transformed into defrutum (a thick syrup from reduced grape-juice), passum (raisin wine), and mulsum (a mixture of honey and wine, not unlike mead), all of which figure prominently in surviving recipes from the Roman period.
Columella, On Agriculture 12.19–21, 39, 41
Defrutum
Must with the sweetest taste possible will be reduced to a third [of its original volume], and when boiled down as I have suggested is called defrutum. Once it has cooled off, it is transferred to jars and put down to be aged a year before it is used.
Passum
Mago21 gives the following recipe for the best passum, one that I myself have used. Harvest early-maturing grapes that are fully ripened, discarding the berries that are mouldy or bruised. You want to create a platform of reeds, so take forks or stakes, fix them in the ground at 4-foot intervals and join them together with [a grid of] shoots, then arrange reeds on top of them. Spread out the [bunches of] grapes in the sun, covering them at night to keep the dew off. Then, when they have shrivelled up, pluck off the raisins and throw them into a vat or smaller clay vessel, and add to them enough of the finest must to cover them. On the sixth day, when they have soaked up the must and are saturated with it, gather them into a filter bag, bear down on them in a wine-press, and draw off the passum.
Mulsum
You can make the finest mulsum as follows. Remove from the vat as soon as you can the must called lixivum, which has trickled out from the very first treading of the grapes.22…Add to 1 urna of this must 10 librae of the finest honey, carefully blend the mixture, store it in a flagon, immediately seal it with plaster, and have it placed in a storeroom…. After 31 days you will have to open the flagon, strain the must into another vessel, seal it up again, and store it in the smoke-house.
4.26 FOOD PRESERVATION
In the absence of artificial means of refrigeration, the Greeks and Romans relied principally on salting, smoking, and drying foodstuffs to preserve them for consumption out of season. Salt, then, was a particularly valuable commodity in antiquity, and fortunate was the town situated near natural saltbeds like those at the mouth of the Tiber River, just a few kilometres downstream from Rome. In the following passages, Cato first gives detailed instructions for curing ham, and Pliny then describes the preservation of seasonal fruits using a variety of methods from around the Mediterranean.
Cato, On Agriculture 162
You must salt hams in a jar or crock as follows. Once you have bought the hams, cut off their hocks. [Allow] a half-modius of powdered Roman salt for each ham. In the bottom of a jar or crock spread a layer of salt, then put in the ham skin-side down, and cover the whole thing with salt. Then put another ham on top and cover it in the same way, making sure that one piece of meat does not touch another. Cover all the hams in this way. Once you have arranged them all, pour more salt on top until no meat is visible, and level it off. When they have been in the salt for five days, remove each one with its own salt; put them back in reverse order, and cover and arrange them as before. After twelve days altogether, remove the hams, wipe off all the salt, and hang them out in a breeze for two days. On the third day use a sponge to wipe them down thoroughly, rub them with oil, and hang them in smoke for two days. On the third day take them down, rub them with a mixture of oil and vinegar, and hang them on a meat-rack. No maggots or worms will touch them.
Elsewhere (88) Cato gives instructions on how to make brine and refine salt. Pliny (Natural History 31.73–92) describes varieties of natural and prepared salt. For salt’s modern counterpart, pepper, which in antiquity was imported from India, see Pliny Natural History 12.26–29.
Pliny, Natural History 15.62–65
After the over-ripe berries are removed with shears, but leaving the hard hammer-shaped shoot on the branch, the grapes should be suspended in a large wide-mouthed jar that has just been coated with pitch and then made airtight by sealing its lid with plaster. The same technique works for sorb-apples and pears, all of whose shoots should be smeared with pitch…. Some put them up in jars with a residue of wine, but making sure that the grapes do not come into contact with the liquid; others store apples floating [in wine] in terracotta pans, a method they think imparts the wine’s flavour to the fruit. Some prefer all fruit of this kind to be preserved in millet, but the conventional way is to bury it in a 2-foot-deep pit on a bed of sand, covered with a clay lid and with soil on top of that.
Some go so far as to coat grapes with potter’s clay, dry them in the sun, and then hang them up, washing off the clay when the grapes are to be consumed (they use wine to remove the clay from other kinds of fruits). In the same way they apply a coating of plaster or wax over the choicest apples—but if the fruit has not already ripened it expands and bursts the crust…. Others devote a separate terracotta jar to each individual apple and pear, seal their lids with pitch, and place them inside a second vessel. And there are even those who nestle the fruit in tufts of wool in boxes that they coat with a mixture of mud and chaff….
The area of the Ligurian coast nearest the Alps first dries its grapes in the sun, then wraps them in rush bundles and stores them in jugs sealed with plaster. The Greeks follow the same procedure, but instead use leaves (of the plane-tree, of the vine itself, or fig-leaves) dried for a day in the shade, and they layer grape-skins between the fruit. The grapes from Kos and Beirut are preserved in this way, and their sweetness is second to none.
Columella (On Agriculture 12.4–16, 43–51) gives exhaustive detail on this topic, and includes instructions on making vinegar, brine, and sour milk, pickling herbs, and preserving olives, vegetables, and cheeses as well as fruits.
4.27 COOKING UTENSILS AND PROCEDURES
We have no comprehensive list of kitchen equipment, cooking utensils, or cutlery from antiquity; most of our evidence for these comes from archaeological artefacts. What follows is a glossary of a few specialized implements and cooking techniques culled from the pages of a Roman cookbook attributed to the first-century A.D. gourmand Apicius. Though not a complete inventory for the kitchen and triclinium, it gives a good impression of the variety of culinary tools in a wealthy Roman household; and from the methods of preparation, for example, we can deduce the existence of a variety of knives and spoons (there being no evidence that a fork was used in antiquity in the kitchen or at table).
APICIUS, ON COOKING
[The Stove]
stationary oven, portable earthenware oven, grill, grid-iron, tiles for baking, hot ashes for cooking.
[Utensils for Food-Preparation]
mortar and pestle, colander, strainer, bouquet for flavouring, sausage-skin for stuffing, mould, various receptacles for liquids, paté tub.
[Methods of Preparation]
chopping, dicing, creaming, marinating, smoking, frying, boiling, steaming, baking, roasting, braising.
[Cooking Vessels]
roasting-pan, frying-pan, saucepan, large cauldron for boiling joints of meat, shallow pan, shallow earthenware cooking dish, shallow bronze cooking dish, small, deep vessel for cooking sauces, deep pan for layered dishes, double-boiler, bain-marie,
[Serving Utensils]
metal serving dish, ,circular serving plate, serving dish for mushrooms, small spoon, ladle, flask.
NOTES
1
Hence the Latin word pistor, which comes to mean “miller” and even “baker,” actually derives from the “pounding” of far, the evolution of a word reflecting the changing occupation (see 4.9).
2
Compare the prices some 250 years later, in Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (10.127).
3
See Homer, Iliad 5.195.
4
Compare Natural History 18.68: “When those varieties of Gallic and Spanish wheat we have already discussed are steeped to make beer, the foam that forms on the surface is used as leaven, which is why bread from those regions is lighter than others.’’
5
Line 400.
6
Palladius probably is comparing the treading floor to the nave (or the apse?), the flanking tanks to the aisles. This passage is a difficult one. A good discussion, together with a conjectural reconstruction of the winery, can be found in H. Plommer, Vitruvius and Later Roman Building Manuals (Cambridge, 1973); K.D.White, Farm Equipment of the Roman World (Cambridge, 1975) 142 gives an abbreviated discussion.
7
The types of presses mentioned in this passage are discussed, with drawings, in White (above, n. 6) 230–32.
cullei, for which—together with vats for 20 iugera [of vineyards]—a single lever-press is enough. Some use individual presses, though it is more expedient to use a pair, however large the single presses. Length is what counts with these beams, not their thickness: the long ones press better.
8
Cato (On Agriculture 18–19) gives full (though confusing) details about the construction of a lever-press (prelum), in which pressure is exerted on the bag of grapes set on a platform beneath a horizontal beam pivoted at one end between vertical posts, the other end drawn down by ropes or thongs attached to a windlass turned by handspikes.
9
For an explanation of this bewildering design, see White (above, n. 6) 230–31.
10
Cinis lixivus, a surprising additive. In fact, Pliny seems to have conflated two separate passages from Cato: On Agriculture 23.2 calls for improving (?) wine by adding mustum lixivum, apparently the juice from the first pressing, while 114.1 talks of “conditioning” grapes in advance by covering the vine’s roots with ash (cinis), which will eventually produce a laxative wine.
11
Compare Pliny, Natural History 15.21: “The bitterest olive makes the best oil;…olives stored on a wooden floor shrivel and lose their quality.”
12
Cato (On Agriculture 20.1–22.2) gives a detailed description of the design of a trapetum: it was basically a stone mortar resembling a Bundt pan, with two rounded millstones attached vertically to a horizontal bar pivoting on the mortar’s central column.
turned black but are not yet quite ripe, it is time to pick them by hand when the weather is fair, to sieve them and separate out those that will seem spotted or spoiled or of inferior size. Then, to every modius of olives add three heminae of pure salt, pour the lot into wicker baskets, and spread lots more salt over the top to cover the olives. Let them sweat thoroughly for thirty days, allowing all the lees to drip through [the wickerwork]. Next pour them into a trough and with a clean sponge wipe off the salt to prevent it from penetrating; then put them in a jar and top up the vessel with must that has been reduced by boiling, placing on top a plug of dried fennel to keep the olives down. Most people mix three parts (some only two) of reduced must or of honey with one part vinegar, and season their olives with this decoction.
13
For the differences in design, see White (above, n. 6) 227–29.
14
Columella here seems to be outlining a method of processing uncrushed olives, which might be a variant of the technique found in Pliny, Natural History 15.23: “It was later discovered that, by washing olives in rapidly boiling water and then immediately putting them under the press while still whole, the lees are pressed out, and then they can be crushed in a trapetum and pressed a second time [for the oil].”
15
See Pliny (Natural History 15.22), who emphasizes also the need for cleanliness in the operation: “Oil must be ladled frequently each day, using a cup shaped like a conch shell, into lead kettles (it is spoiled by copper).’’
16
Ironically, the Greek word used here for wine (methu), in fact comes from the Sanskrit for honey, and has given us our word “mead.”
17
Elsewhere (13.11) Diodorus makes pejorative comments about Celtic beer, a beverage always viewed by the Romans with a mixture of wonder and arrogant scorn, subscribing as they did to the common Mediterranean belief that consumption of wine was an integral part of civilization: “The Celts at that time knew nothing of wine from the vineyards or oil produced by olive trees, which we have. As a substitute for wine they used a foul-smelling juice made from barley left to rot in water, and for oil rancid pig-fat with a disgusting smell and flavour.”
18
See Pliny, Natural History 14.137–148 for a lengthy condemnation of intemperance and some stories of famous drinking bouts.
19
20
Several storage vessels found in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum bear the inscription liquamen optimum. The principal source for the recipe—fish parts soaked in oil and left for weeks in the sun—is Geoponics 20.46.1–5; see also Pliny, Natural History 31.93–94.
21
See 3.4.
22
see 3.50.
By John William Humphrey, John Peter Oleson & Andrew N.Sherwood in the book 'Greek and Roman Technology : A Sourcebook : Annotated Translations of Greek and Latin Texts and Documents', Taylor & Francis- Routledge,2003, p.147-169. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
cool info! shrimp processing equipment has come a long way for sure!
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