What’s for Dinner? Eating Like a Roman at Our Events
Walk into our camp around mealtime and there is a good chance you will smell wood smoke, bread, herbs, onions, leeks, or meat cooking over an open fire. You might see a pot simmering beside the flames, dates and olives sitting on a table, or one of our members trying to figure out exactly how much garum is too much garum.
Food is one of our favorite parts of Roman living history because it is something everyone can understand. You may not know the difference between lorica hamata and lorica segmentata, but everyone knows what it is like to sit down for a meal. At Legio XIIII GMV Cohort II, we try to make food part of the historical experience rather than simply disappearing behind the tents and eating modern food out of sight. Whenever practical, the meals we prepare in camp are based on ingredients and recipes that would have been familiar somewhere in the Roman world.
So, What Do We Actually Eat?
The answer changes from event to event.
Our goal is not to pretend that every Roman legionary ate elaborate meals from a cookbook every night. Roman soldiers depended heavily upon staples such as grain, along with foods that could be obtained locally, purchased, issued, or prepared by the soldiers themselves. What was available also depended on where the army was stationed. Instead, we use surviving evidence to give visitors a taste of the larger Roman food culture. One of our best resources is the Roman recipe collection commonly called De Re Coquinaria, traditionally associated with Apicius. The collection contains recipes using ingredients such as pork, fish sauce, wine, vinegar, honey, pepper, herbs, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and olive oil. Some of those flavor combinations can sound strange to a modern American palate. Honey and fish sauce? Pepper and dates? Wine, vinegar, herbs, and pork all in the same pot? Then you actually try it, and surprisingly often, it works.
Modern historical cooking resources are also extremely useful. One of our favorites is Max Miller’s Tasting History, which takes surviving historical recipes and works through the challenge of turning ancient instructions into something a modern cook can actually prepare. His Roman recipes include everything from pork cooked with apples to lentil soup, stuffed dates, Roman style pork dishes, and even preparations for posca. Many of these are themselves based on recipes preserved in De Re Coquinaria. That is important because ancient recipes rarely tell you to cook something at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. Measurements can be vague or completely absent. Recreating the dish requires some experimentation. Which, frankly, is part of the fun.
Cooking Over the Fire
Of course, the food is only half of the interpretation. How we cook it matters too. At events, our kitchen does not revolve around an electric stove or propane grill sitting in the middle of camp. We cook over an open wood fire using reproduction cookware and a reproduction Roman style iron grill. That changes cooking considerably. There is no temperature dial. If you want more heat, you manage the fire. If something is cooking too quickly, you move it. Pots, pans, grills, coals, flames, and cooking height all become part of the process. It also makes the camp come alive. There is something about seeing food cooking over an open fire that immediately makes the scene more believable. The smoke drifts through camp. Someone is tending the fire. Someone else is chopping ingredients. A pot is simmering nearby. Suddenly the camp does not look like a static museum display, it looks occupied. That is exactly what we want.
The Food Display Is Part of the Story
Not everything on our table is destined for the cooking pot. We also like to create food displays using ingredients that help visitors visualize what was available in the Roman world. Depending on the event, you might see loaves of bread, leeks, dates, olives, nuts, herbs, apples, onions, garlic, grains, or other appropriate foods laid out around the cooking area. These displays are surprisingly effective teaching tools. A leek does not seem particularly exciting until you explain that De Re Coquinaria contains multiple preparations specifically for leeks, including boiling and seasoning them with oil and broth. Dates become more interesting when visitors learn that one surviving Roman recipe calls for removing the stones, stuffing the dates with nuts or pepper, salting them, and cooking them in honey. Bread, olives, fruit, vegetables, grains, herbs, oil, and preserved foods also help break one of the easiest misconceptions to develop about ancient people: that their meals must have been universally bland and primitive. Roman food could be remarkably varied.
Experimental Archaeology You Can Eat
Cooking Roman food also gives us an opportunity to learn through experience. You can read a recipe in a book, but preparing it beside a fire teaches you different things. How difficult is it to maintain a steady cooking temperature? How much wood does a meal require? How long does preparation take? Which foods work particularly well in a camp environment? How do smoke, cookware, and fire management change the finished dish? Sometimes our experiments turn out wonderfully, and sometimes they become a VERY educational example of what not to do next time. Both results have value. That is one of the things we enjoy about living history. We are not simply memorizing facts and repeating them to the public. We are constantly experimenting, researching, asking questions, and trying to better understand the everyday experiences behind the artifacts and written sources.
More Than Just Dinner
When people imagine a Roman legionary, they usually picture armor, shields, swords, marching, and battle. But soldiers spent far more time doing ordinary things than fighting. They marched, built roads and buildings, repaired equipment, stood watch, talked and complained, and they all ate. Recreating those ordinary moments is what turns a collection of tents and equipment into a living camp. So if you visit Legio XIIII GMV Cohort II at an event, take a look around our cooking area. Ask us what is simmering in the pot. Look at the ingredients on the table. Take a closer look at the grill over the fire. If you smell something particularly good cooking, there is only one question left to ask:
“Is that actually Roman?”
Chances are, we will be very happy to tell you the story behind it.
Legio XIIII, Protinus!
