Hi, I’m Amy, and I’m as second year Ancient History student at the University of Nottingham. Ancient food has and always been a fascinating topic for me due to the fact it is considered so different from anything that we, as a modern audience, would eat. However I believe a lot of people have over looked what the Ancient Europeans really ate. This is because for a lot of people their knowledge of food and food culture in the ‘ancient’ era is based on the stories of lavish Roman banquets, an over indulgence of wine and gluttony. These make for good children’s stories, but does not do justice to the Roman culture. Furthermore I decided to focus specifically on ‘Roman’ food so that a reader could get a more thorough knowledge of what it might have been like to be a Roman.
The majority of the inspiration for my blog comes from Apicius, who wrote one of the greatest surviving Roman cookbooks. Alongside this I also found recipes in Cato and Ovid, but less survive from them.
Despite this, a large amount of secondary literature has been written about Roman food, specifically by Andrew Dalby who, alongside Sally Grainger, created ‘The Classical Cookbook’ which is a hugely useful book for anyone who may be interested in studying the topic of ancient food.
It is my intention in this blog to present this tremendously importantly area of Roman life. I am hopefully going to give my thoughts on from the lavish dinner party food of Trimalchio in Petronius’ ‘Satyricon‘, to the bog standard recipe for bread, and pretty much everything in between.
Personally I have always had an interest in food, and from a young age I took up baking. It was only mid-way through my degree that I discovered an interest in food history. Why do we have the recipes we do? How have recipes changed through out time? What happens when you recreate ancient recipes? Would we still eat them?!
So come along on this journey of exploration into the Roman world, and eat as they would have done.
Real Roman Recipes 