But it still looks delicious. This is a fresco found in the ruins of Pompeii.
I stared at that image trying to figure out what’s in it: focaccio bread, was easy enough, seasoned with pesto, but what’s on it? Is it all dried fruit, which would make it rather sweeter than I’d like, or are there onions and mushrooms in there? There’s not enough information in the picture, I’d have to free wheel it.
The more I stared, the hungrier I got. I could probably make the focaccio, since I won’t find it in the markets around here, and I make pesto all the time. But what to top it with? I’d want something more savory, with dried fruit on the side, and of course I’d need a cup of red wine. This could be an all day project.
Well, of course there couldn’t be tomato sauce because tomatoes didn’t make it to the Eurasiafrican land mass until the 1500s. One can’t help but wonder what Italians ate before then.
And noodles/spaghetti were brought over by that bloke who went to Kublai Khan and back. Johnny Appleseed or something. Marco Knopfler?
The bread would have to be packed with basil, oregano, tarragon, rosemary, and thyme, which would definitely give it an Italian flavor.
Yeah, no tomatoes allowed in ancient Western recipes. What would they use for acid? Maybe a fermented fish sauce, like garum? That would add to the savory flavor, too.
I’ll wager 10,000 Quatloos on garum. Dried fruits and onions.
Veni, Vidi, Edi!
Garum was an extremely important part of Roman cuisine, almost certainly it would be part of a meal like this.
The BBC has a good analysis and even a recipe for this Roman flatbread.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230629-adoreum-the-newly-discovered-flatbread-fresco-of-pompeii
As already noted, tomatoes are a New World vegetable.
So are chili peppers.
@2, birgerjohansson
It was recently (re)discovered that the ancient Romans actually knew about pasta long before contact with China. They were making a kind of layered lasagna with large pasta sheets. Whether they knew how to make extruded pasta is not known. Perhaps a bronze extruder will be found in Pompeii someday.
That BBC article says it’s all fruit, which is interesting. So ancient Roman pizza makers would have been fine with pineapple on their pizza, if they had pineapple?
R.L. Foster @ 8
The fall of the Roman empire really was the end of civilised receipts!
Add a little ash.
(Too soon?)
“focacciA”
Acme markets sells focaccia bread. But, as you said, it’s a simple enough recipe, made it myself many times.
A neighbor once remarked, “Oh, so you have a bread machine?”, I deadpanned back, “Yep, (waving hands) a left one and a right one, the yeast and the oven do all the work though”.
Which is actually true.
It only took a pandemic lockdown for people to rediscover making bread and sourdough.
I used to send our kids to school with homemade bread, panini style, with the meats and cheese baked in. Slice off a couple of inches of the large Italian style loaf, call it lunch. Initially, their peers derided it, until they tried it. Then, they wanted some and well, prosciutto and sharp cheeses cost money, cross my palm with some cheddar and you’ll get a loaf for cost. Not a one wanted to pay. :/
Want to splurge a bit? Toss an egg into the dough. :)
To this day, focaccia is still a staple in Italy and cousins abound throughout the region. Bread, that’s just essentially a universal staple worldwide.
As for garum, that’s also a fairly universal ingredient. I use a fish sauce in my stir fry. The only trick is not to overdo it, lest it turn into a salt fry.
There is one continent that didn’t discover bread – Antarctica. That’s largely for one reason, nobody lived there.
Well tomatoes are a fruit also and can be quite sweet. Plums can have a bit of acid and plum sauces seem to have been part of Roman cooking.
Flat leavened breads with local produce had probably been a staple of agrarian communities for thousands of years by the time this fresco was done. Whether that’s “pizza” or not will be the source of endless discussion.
There’s a good try on making one on the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/01/how-i-recreated-the-pompeii-pizza-smelled-like-toffee-apples
more like a fancy focaccia than a real pizza, obvs, but I will try it sooner or later.
As for pasta, there’s lots of former examples, they didn’t need Marco Polo to come back from China to get it. Different from today of course, but recognizable enough – the real pity was the absence of tomatoes. Once you have those, yay.
A definitive answer to the contents of the Pompeiian diet is being researched by the British School at Rome, thanks to the discovery of vast quantities of preserved Roman faeces from the sewers of Herculaneum. Eggs, figs, olives, walnuts and legumes are the most likely options for topping your Roman flatbread, though Sea Urchin spines were also found in abundance, along with other fish bones. There is even some evidence that butchered giraffe bones were among the waste.
Incidentally, the word pizza is also first attested in Latin, though from the Middle Ages. Our earliest recorded usage comes from a rental deed of 998AD, where the Bishop of Gaeta paid his rent with twelve pizzas at Easter and twelve at Christmas.
The Romans did not have pineapple.
I think people are overlooking the most obvious answer to what Romans could have put on bread for a sour/acidic flavor: vinegar.
Their wine would also have been more sour than modern stuff, this was before modern fermentation and preservation techniques. That could be incorporated into a sauce
This sounds like it could be pretty tasty
dangerousbeans, you’re aware of the claims that the Romans sweetened their wine with lead?
Pretty darn tasty, that is.
Lead acetate, aka “lead sugar”. It took until the 1800’s to get that crap banned, longer for chemistry to be able to detect it and hence, enforce the ban.
It’s also theorized as a possible cause of Beethoven’s death, although I’m fairly dubious, as he was patently deep into end stage liver failure and had severe, chronic pancreatitis.
As for wine making and fermentation, not highly relevant. Sulfur candles were used to prepare casks, when frankincense wasn’t used (the difference largely being regional and both do well in killing off spores of bacteria that can ferment wine into vinegar).
Romans used either honey or lead acetate for a sweetener, the latter being cheaper. Roman habits also being the origin for the phrase “shit end of the stick”, although Wikipedia tries to blame China, Europeans were doing the same deed for longer than contact with China began.
Not a pizza???? Tell that to the Neapolitans. Ms. KG, son and I bought pizza in a traditional pizzeria in Naples some years ago. There were two varieties available: margherita, and one with nothing on top but olive oil and garlic.
now I am hungry! I have not made any foccacia in a while and just saw some videos of Detroit style deep-dish pizza which clearly sounds like an iteration of foccacia to me the my wheels are turning, sourdough deep dish something
yes to fish sauce, but like anything else carefully does it.
Tourists, were you?
Back in the day, my grandma would toast bread on a bare electric element, scrape a cut clove of garlic on it and finish it with drizzled olive oil. Didn’t call it a pizza, of course, but wrong country.
Anyway. Olive oil (is there any other kind, in those places?) and garlic is not much of a topping, however traditional.
Mind you, what is now traditional used to be desperate chomping of whatever was available — thus garlic and bread soup.
But sure, very traditional. Not like the featured, laden specimen with actual goodies topping it.
wzrd1, what did the Romans give us, apart from plumbing? ;)
John Morales@24,
Yes, we were tourists. So what? Neapolitans (or at least, Italians, I didn’t ask them whether they were locals) were buying and eating the olive oil and garlic pizzas. If a discoid of dough baked in a pizza oven in a pizzeria in an Italian city isn’t a pizza, what would be?
Further to #26,
IIRC, it was advertised as pizza aglio et olio. It may be specific to Naples, or at least to southern Italy.
KG,
I’m sure it was a very good pizza. You certainly recall it fondly.
And I don’t disbelieve you; the locals probably did indulge, not like a place can just live off tourists. Still, would not have been my choice, I like toppings.
To be fair, a truly plain pizza would lack the aglio and the olio, and just be bread.
Very tasty, no doubt. Though if the garlic is cooked, it will taste rather different to the raw rubbed garlic I fondly remember. That freshness and tang goes away.