The Roman table from antiquity to the papal city

The Roman table begins on the Tiber, in the city that grew from a cluster of settlements in Latium into the capital of the Mediterranean world, and it passes by way of the Roman Empire and the medieval city to the Rome of the popes. Waverley Root, in The Food of Italy, treats Rome and Lazio as a place where the cooking of the ancient city and that of the papal court left separate and still legible deposits.

The ancient table, as Root presents it, was a table of contrasts. The simple diet of the early Romans rested on cereals, taken as porridge and later as bread, with pulses, vegetables, olive oil and wine. As conquest brought wealth and produce from the provinces, the tables of the rich grew elaborate and costly, and the contrast between the plain food of the many and the display of the few became a mark of the city. Root draws on the literature of the period for this picture, and the record he relies on is largely the record of the wealthy. With the fall of the empire the splendour of that table faded, and Root does not claim a straight line from the banquets of antiquity to the dishes of the modern city. What he does attribute to the Roman inheritance is a habit of the kitchen: a reliance on a few strong ingredients, among them pork fat, sheep's milk cheese, olive oil and the produce of the nearby countryside, handled without elaboration. The cooking of the Roman countryside, shepherds' food above all, supplied much of the character that the city later took as its own. The papal city added a second layer. A court of cardinals and officials, with a calendar of fasting and feasting set by the Church, shaped what was eaten and when. Days of abstinence made fish and vegetable dishes a regular part of the table, while feast days permitted abundance. Root links this rhythm of restraint and indulgence to the way Romans came to eat, and he notes the part played by the great households of the Church in sustaining a more refined cookery beside the plain food of the people. The cooking of the people, however, is where Root finds the lasting identity of Rome. It drew on what the city's markets and slaughterhouses supplied, and above all on the cheaper cuts and the offal of the animals, made into dishes of strong flavour that belong to the Roman kitchen today. The Jewish community of the city, confined within its own quarter, contributed its own cooking to the common stock, and its influence on Roman vegetable and fried dishes is part of the story that Root tells. The Roman table is therefore best read as a sequence of strata: the ancient reliance on grain, oil and wine; the pastoral food of Latium; the ordered table of the papal court; and the robust cooking of the common people. Each remained visible beside the others, and none replaced them. That layering explains why the cooking of Rome is at once austere in its means and decided in its taste, and why it reads as the cooking of a city and not of a single class.