Everyone’s heard about the elaborate bath houses and alleged vomitoriums, the powerful emperors and the battles of bravery in the Coliseum in Ancient Rome. But what about the main social and networking event of the day — the dinner parties? Was there really braised flamingo tongue on the menu, as gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius wrote in his cookbook in 900 BCE, or were simple wheat bread, olive oil, and canned sardines the staples of the day?
The Romans took cues on dinner arrangements, manners and ingredients from all over the world, but they always maintained their own unique perspective on all aspects of the dining experience, making it distinctly Roman.
The Dining Room
Restaurants catered to the lower classes, so most fine dining was done at home at this time. The Romans ate in specially designed eating rooms known as triclinium. These lavishly decorated chambers often faced out to an inner courtyard so a breeze could freshen the room while its diners indulged.
Early in the Roman Empire, diners reclined on the floor, propped and cushioned with pillows, with the food laid out directly on the richly tiled floor. Eventually, the dining moved up onto specially designed chaise lounges, cushioned for comfort, with a wooden arm for diners to lean on. Since the arm was always on the left for guests, leaning to your left became the proper way to sit.
Three chaise lounges, arranged in a squared off U-shape were arranged around a low table, similar to our coffee tables, with one side left open for serving by the house’s literal slaves. Some triclinium had built-in dinner couches arranged the same, made of concrete softened by mattress-like pillows in rich fabrics. The Romans probably picked up the idea of reclining for dinner from the Greeks, who used single couches onto which companions were often squeezed for after-dinner drinking parties. The Greeks, it seems, learned of the practice from further east, where it was a form of dining for elites. Eventually, the reclining part of the meal, which at first was only for after-dinner drinks, was incorporated into the entire dining experience. So lying down around a table for hours on end while eating an drinking became the norm.
The Etiquette
These reclined dinners, or “cenas” as the Romans called them, often lasted 6 — 8 hours. Course after course of food and wine, which they added water to at the time just before serving because the alcohol content was so high, was served by literal slaves in most cases. The Romans felt those who drank undiluted wine (like the French) were barbarians, perhaps because they got drunk more quickly off the undiluted wine.
Status seating was a very important aspect of Roman dinners. The chart (above) shows the seating arrangement and the distribution of high to low status seats. The host’s bench, arranged on the left with the rail on the right, meant that the host leaned right while his guests leaned left on their chaise rails. The center lounge was considered the most prestigious, because of its central location in the middle of all the guests (like our head-of-the-table location) and the best view out the doors, and the right “high couch” was given to low status guests, so no one prefered to be seated there.
Nine dinner guests was considered ideal for the home dinner experience, known by Romans as convivium. In the early days of the empire, only men would dine like this, but soon women were present at most dinners.
Another interesting aspect of ancient Roman dining is that they did not have forks and, in general, used their hands for much of the eating.
The Food and Drink
Many of the foods closely associated with Italian cuisine — ingredients such as eggplant, tomatoes and chiles — weren’t around in Ancient Rome, because they come from the Middle East or the New World, which hadn’t yet been discovered by Europeans, so the cuisine was sometimes quite different.
The Roman poet Martial described a typical banquet dinner in his writing. The meal he describes begins with the gustatio, which was a composed salad of mallow leaves, lettuce, chopped leeks, mint, arugula, mackerel garnished with rue, sliced eggs, and marinated sow udder. The main course he describes was succulent cuts of kid, beans, greens, a chicken, and leftover ham, followed by a dessert of fresh fruit and vintage wine.
Salt was an expensive commodity and highly sought after. Garum, the Roman version of fish sauce was everywhere. It seems that the Romans loved their umami.
Locally available seasonings included garden herbs, cumin, coriander, and juniper berries. Imported spices included pepper, saffron, cinnamon, and fennel, although the fennel eventually went instinct in this area from over harvest, so they had to start using asafoetida, which they sourced from the Middle East.
Wine and olive oil were everywhere and plentiful, since both were produced in large quantities all over the Roman Empire, especially on the mainland of Italy and in Spain. Butter wasn’t used as is the custom today in all but the most northern reaches of Italy.
The rich ate bread made from wheat, while the lower classes had to use cheaper grains, such a spelt and barley for their bread, considered less refined at the time.
New trade routes meant that new exotic products were becoming available, and the ancient Romans who could afford them could eat extravagantly, showing off their means through what they served in their triclinium.
One of the best records of what the upper classes in Ancient Rome were experimenting with exotic foods at dinner time is written down by Roman gourmet and cookbook writer Marcus Gavius Apicius, who published his Patina Apicius around 900 BCE. This cookbook includes many recipes made with bizarre ingredients, from brain sausages to braised flamingo tongues and stuffed giraffe necks, always served with the ever-present garum, or fish sauce.
While most people would have consumed at least 70% of their daily calories in the form of cereals and legumes, richer Romans often ate meat in all its forms. But this is not to say that there wasn’t a growing vegetarian movement. Some very notable people such as the emperors Didius Julianus and Septimius Severus refused to eat meat, as well as the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, who regarded meat-eaters as not only less civilized but “slower in intellect.”
The After Dinner Activities
After dinner meant more diluted wine or mulled sweet wine called Mulsum, or proto-cocktails, often made with a wormwood-flavored forerunner of absinthe called apsinthium. Though there was hours more of drinking and talking to do — so much so that the poet Horace coined the expression “truth in wine” (in vino veritas) — getting visibly drunk and sloppy was highly looked down upon and could lead to disrespecting the host, which possibly could lead to being arrested — not a great way to end a pleasurable dinner party.
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