Posted on 02/07/2015 9:01:27 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome...
You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and likely in larger quantities.
They had pork chops and a form of bacon. They even served sausages and prosciutto; in other words, a meal not unlike what you'd find in Rome today -- or in South Philadelphia...
MacKinnon and Trentacoste are zooarchaeologists... They rummaged through ancient garbage dumps or middens, and occasionally even ancient latrines looking for the bones of animals and fish people ate. People would sometimes dump the garbage in the latrine... can deduce a great deal from the bones about what life was like.
They also can often piece together a typical diet based on recovered porcelain shards.
They can look at bones in a dump and can tell what the animal was, sometimes how it was slaughtered, where it came from, and how the food supply worked...
Zooarchaeologists also have literary evidence of what was eaten from writers such as Juvenal and the poet Martial, often in satirical plays where writers mocked the ostentatious indulgence...
Some historians believed the lower class was mostly vegetarian but that is not true... generally ate the same things the upper class did, but not the same cuts (think mutton versus lamp chops) and probably not in the same quantities.
(Excerpt) Read more at insidescience.org ...
Ever been to Lorenzo’s? Had a run-in with the Vitellio Boys there. They were named after the eighth emperor.
Where’s the gabagool?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w08YyikFm-8
Si, é vero! Sono andata a Napoli tre volte. A me piace molto. Ti ricordi il ristorante Dante é Beatrice, nel Piazza Dante?
Hilarious! Dead on!
Didn’t the wealthy often eat, vomit and eat some more?
mmmmmm....lamp chops.
The Amber-Lamps? Bring dem?
Because all Romans lived in the city and wood is the only available fire source.
Finding that hard to believe, too. A stick over an open fire and there's your bbq. Bury that pig in a hole and you've got yourself another type of bbq. Last I heard a hole in the ground and a stick don't cost a thing.
It wouldn't have been easy to pit barbecue, since Italian soil is rocky and Italian cities tend to be heavily paved over. The houses of the rich were square compounds with a paved courtyard in the center — tufa (lava stone) for the poor, and marble, travertine and terrazzo for the rich. Even the streets and sidewalks came right up to the foundations of the houses. Trees, in the cities where the wealthy Roman senators and elites lived, were planted in little open squares in the pavement, or in huge pots. The rich would not have wanted to live out in the countryside, but rather to congregate in cities, since they had servants to do all their busywork.
And the olive wood is oily and doesn't burn well like hardwoods, of which they had very few.
I remember walking through the ruins of Pompeii and seeing a corner store -- it had a long counter of wood with round holes in it, into which huge terra cotta pots would be suspended, full of soups or stews for sale for the day.
Also, even to today, women in the countryside bake or buy bread that has been cooked in the village brick oven on Monday to last the week. It is the origin of the crusty Italian loaf, since the crust helped preserve a soft interior.
Probably lava lamps. Get it? Huh? Huh?
My Italian is exhausted. I don’t recall specific ristoranti, but one called Dante e Beatrice sounds classic.
Mom & Dad both liked to cook Italian. The local pomodori were so good the bolognese needed little seasoning. And the sweet lemons of Sorrento! But our local favorite was spaghetti carbonara - one of Dad’s WWII buddies married a Napoli girl & retired there so local pasta & formaggio originally was combined with G.I. bacon & eggs & that became their signature dish.
Restaurant names in Naples: a place called “Il Buffone” with a Pagliacci theme. But the food there was so awful Americans called it “Il Fullabaloney”.
So many years ago.
Did their food have MSG or high fructose corn syrup?
Then they did not dine like we gods of Olympus.
lol!
I had to cut that part, but they say, yes, it did happen. :’)
They also enjoyed dormice.
That is hilarious!
The food in Italy was soooooo good. I still dream about how good the prosciutto, salami, mortadella and bocconcini were.
The best pizza I ever had was from Pizza Al Metro and the best ponzerotti from Pizzaria D’Angelo.
That’s hilarious! It reminded me of a sound wav I heard back when I started using the internet called Understanding Italian. I wish I could find it!
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