Culinary Aspects of Ancient Rome


Book Description

This book provides a thrilling account of a thoughtful gastronomic journey through the Roman Empire. It reviews the role that food and its associated constituents had in the evolution of Roman, and highlights the cookery processes practised by both social elites and humble peasant and common households. The hypotheses and conclusions presented here shed light onto the significance that Ancient Romans attached to food, the banquet, and the simple daily act of sharing food, while the text also offers new research findings on recipes and cooking technologies that have passed unnoticed.




Culinary Aspects of Ancient Rome


Book Description

This book provides a thrilling account of a thoughtful gastronomic journey through the Roman Empire. It reviews the role that food and its associated constituents had in the evolution of Roman life, and highlights the cookery processes practised by both social elites and humble peasant and common households. The hypotheses and conclusions presented here shed light onto the significance that Ancient Romans attached to food, the banquet, and the simple daily act of sharing food, while the text also offers new research findings on recipes and cooking technologies that have passed unnoticed.




Ancient Roman Cooking


Book Description

Ancient Roman gastronomy was famous for an incomparable skill in the art of pairing the ingredients, with its Mediterranean flavors and healthy balance among the aromas.Many sources record the greatness of Roman cuisine. Writers and poets celebrate its beauty, complexity, decadence, and at the same time, its simplicity. Agronomists tell the life in the countryside, showing the farming techniques and the preparation of common preserves, from cured meat to cheese, vegetables, fruit. Cooks focus on providing unique sensorial experiences through the learned use of ingredients that belong to our history, now almost forgotten. Silphium, garum, mulsum, allec, sapa are just some of them.A journey back in time through ingredients and recipes, from the republican age to the empire, to rediscover an extraordinary culinary tradition that will satisfy, still today, the most refined palates.




Roman Cookery


Book Description

Roman Cookery unveils one of Europe's last great culinary secrets – the food eaten by the ordinary people of ancient Rome. Based on olive oil, fish and fresh vegetables, it was the origin of of the Mediterranean diet as we know it today and, in particular, of classic Italian cooking. Mark Grant, researcher extraordinaire, has unearthed everyday recipes like Tuna Wrapped in Vine Leaves, Olive Oil Bread Flavoured with Cheese, and Honeyed Quinces. Like an archaeologist uncovering a kitchen at Pompeii, he reveals treasures such as Ham in Red Wine and Fennel Sauce, Honey and Sesame Pizza, and Walnut and Fig Cakes. The Romans were great lovers of herbs, and Roman Cookery offers a delicious array of herb sauces and purées, originally made with a pestle and mortar, but here adapted, like all these dishes, to be made with modern kitchen equipment. This revised and expanded edition includes previously unknown recipes, allowing the reader to savour more than a hundred simple but refined dishes that were first enjoyed more than two millennia ago.




The Classical Cookbook


Book Description

Explores the cuisine of the Mediterranean in ancient times from 750 B.C. to A.D. 450.




Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome


Book Description

"Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome" by Apicius is the oldest known cookbook in existence. There are recipes for cooking fish and seafood, game, chicken, pork, veal, and other domesticated animals and birds, for vegetable dishes, grains, beverages, and sauces; virtually the full range of cookery is covered. There are also methods for preserving food and revitalizing them in ways that are surprisingly still relevant.




Tasting Rome


Book Description

A love letter from two Americans to their adopted city, Tasting Rome is a showcase of modern dishes influenced by tradition, as well as the rich culture of their surroundings. Even 150 years after unification, Italy is still a divided nation where individual regions are defined by their local cuisine. Each is a mirror of its city’s culture, history, and geography. But cucina romana is the country’s greatest standout. Tasting Rome provides a complete picture of a place that many love, but few know completely. In sharing Rome’s celebrated dishes, street food innovations, and forgotten recipes, journalist Katie Parla and photographer Kristina Gill capture its unique character and reveal its truly evolved food culture—a culmination of 2000 years of history. Their recipes acknowledge the foundations of Roman cuisine and demonstrate how it has transitioned to the variations found today. You’ll delight in the expected classics (cacio e pepe, pollo alla romana, fiore di zucca); the fascinating but largely undocumented Sephardic Jewish cuisine (hraimi con couscous, brodo di pesce, pizzarelle); the authentic and tasty offal (guanciale, simmenthal di coda, insalata di nervitti); and so much more. Studded with narrative features that capture the city’s history and gorgeous photography that highlights both the food and its hidden city, you’ll feel immediately inspired to start tasting Rome in your own kitchen. eBook Bonus Material: Be sure to check out the directory of all of Rome's restaurants mentioned in the book!




Around the Roman Table


Book Description

Looks at the dining customs, social traditions, and food of the Roman Empire, and includes recipes reconstructed for the modern cook.




The Eternal Table


Book Description

The Eternal Table: A Cultural History of Food in Rome is the first concise history of the food, gastronomy, and cuisine of Rome spanning from pre-Roman to modern times. It is a social history of the Eternal City seen through the lens of eating and feeding, as it advanced over the centuries in a city that fascinates like no other. The history of food in Rome unfolds as an engaging and enlightening narrative, recounting the human partnership with what was raised, picked, fished, caught, slaughtered, cooked, and served, as it was experienced and perceived along the continuum between excess and dearth by Romans and the many who passed through. Like the city itself, Rome’s culinary history is multi-layered, both vertically and horizontally, from migrant shepherds to the senatorial aristocracy, from the papal court to the flow of pilgrims and Grand Tourists, from the House of Savoy and the Kingdom of Italy to Fascism and the rise of the middle classes. The Eternal Table takes the reader on a culinary journey through the city streets, country kitchens, banquets, markets, festivals, osterias, and restaurants illuminating yet another facet of one of the most intriguing cities in the world.




Feast of Sorrow


Book Description

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read” Set amongst the scandal, wealth, and upstairs-downstairs politics of a Roman family, this “addictively readable first novel” (Kirkus Reviews) features the man who inspired the world’s oldest cookbook and the ambition that led to his destruction. In the twenty-sixth year of Augustus Caesar’s reign, Marcus Gavius Apicius has a singular ambition: to serve as culinary adviser to Caesar. To cement his legacy as Rome’s leading epicure, the wealthy Apicius acquires a young chef, Thrasius, for the exorbitant price of twenty thousand denarii. Apicius believes that the talented Thrasius is the key to his culinary success, and with the slave’s help he soon becomes known for his lavish parties and sumptuous meals. For his part, Thrasius finds a family among Apicius’s household, which includes his daughter, Apicata; his wife, Aelia; and her handmaiden Passia, with whom Thrasius falls passionately in love. But as Apicius draws closer to his ultimate goal, his dangerous single-mindedness threatens his young family and places his entire household at the mercy of the most powerful forces in Rome. “A gastronomical delight” (Associated Press), Feast of Sorrow is a vibrant novel, replete with love and betrayal, politics and intrigue, and sumptuous feasts that bring ancient Rome to life.