[Sca-cooks] "What Did the Romans Eat?"

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

Yes, accurate in the main. "Corn" is simply the old English term for grain  
and is found all through nineteenth century texts and translations; it may 
still  have that meaning, though I think the English today are very aware of 
its use to  refer to what they call "maize".
 
There is some disagreement, depending on authors, on whether liquamen was  
simply a synonym for garum (which seems to be how Anthimus uses it) or a  
distinct term. (Pseudo-) Apicius for instance uses it exclusively, though the  
anonymous author(s) appear to mean garum. 
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=srY9AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA101&dq=inauthor:apicius+
liquamen&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rrBGVbDQIYy9ggTvtIHoBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=snippet&q=li
quamen&f=false

It could also simply mean liquid and is used in that sense in later  
medieval texts. Vehling sometimes takes it to mean "broth", but that is very  
unlikely.
 
Garum - which was still being produced (in some form) on Charlemagne's  
estates - is believed to have been pretty much like Asian fish sauce, which is  
the standard substitute today. Liutprand of Cremona had what was probably 
garum  (garon) in Byzantium and hated it as much as most Westerners do fish 
sauce  today, suggesting that the old Roman preference had finally 
disappeared in the  West.
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=pGfbbVfR9Z8C&lpg=PA72&dq=Cremona%20garum&p
g=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
As always, one has to be cautious about extending information about food  
across all social classes. It is not clear for instance that everyone had  
breakfast as a matter of course.
 
If you want an overview of what peeked through about food in Roman  
literature, I wrote a blog post about that sometime back:

http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2014/04/beyond-apicius-alternate-sources-on.htm
l

On  a much broader note, the Roman culture of bread, oil and wine is 
sometimes  schematically contrasted with the Germanic one of gruel, meat, dairy 
and beer.  This is something of a caricature - the Romans had eaten gruel for 
a long time  and certainly ate meat - but in the broad lines the takeover of 
Gaul, at least,  by Germanic groups meant that meat, which had only been 
part of a varied Roman  diet, took pride of place, arguably all the way up 
into this century, when we  again have discovered the virtues of a 
Mediterranean diet. There is also the  curious fact that broad beans were harder for 
Mediterranean peoples to digest  and so may have made them more vulnerable to 
favism when these became standard  medieval fare. This may be one reason 
lentils were more common at the start of  Frankish rule, but are mentioned far 
less than broad beans and field peas as  Roman culture faded.
 
Jim  Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/) 

FRENCH BREAD HISTORY:  Early medieval bread
_http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2015/04/french-bread-history-early-medieval.ht
ml_ 
(https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=605157142783588112#editor/target=post;postID=5731051559935660544;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=all
posts;postNum=0;src=postname) 




In a message dated 5/3/2015 3:16:43 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
t.d.decker at att.net writes:

Accurate  enough as far as it goes.  More problematic to me is the use of  
"corn" apparently as a specific grain (maize, presumably, although in this  
context it could be the general being attached to the most common  
specific, 
either barley or emmer).

According to Curtis (Curtis,  Robert I., Garum and Salsamenta; E.J.Brill, 
Leiden,  1991.),