Upper-class Cuisine and Culture in Roman Society
by For the ten percent of the Roman population who were the wealthy upper class—called patricians, breakfast and dinner were the main meals, eaten at home. Lunch was lighter, often bought from a street vendor.
Breakfast was mostly leftover cheese, olives, and bread. Lunch was called prandium and might be followed by a visit to the public baths. Dinner was cena if it was only family; if there were guests and it was more elaborate with additional courses like appetizers and desserts, it was a convivium.
Like the Greeks, the Romans believed strongly in the guest-host relationship. In Latin, the word for “guest” and the word for “host” are the same-hospes (pronounced HA-space). It is where we get our word hospitality.
But what time did Romans dine? The Romans divided the day into two parts, with the middle of the day, noon-meridiem-as the dividing line. Midday was important because Rome was a society of laws, and lawyers had to be in court before noon. The Romans called the part of the day before noon ante-meridiem, which we abbreviate “a.m.”; postmeridiem, “p.m.,” was after the middle of the day. They read the time on big sundials in their gardens or on one-and-one-half-inch portable, pocket-sized sundials. Neither worked on cloudy days. Water clocks, which measured the flow of water against lines drawn on a basin, served as a backup but were not portable, so people were much more casual about time. Roman dinner would have been in the late afternoon or early evening. Depending on how elaborate the convivium was, it could last all night.
Since the dining room was where entertaining took place, it was the best room in the house. It was called the triclinium, after the couch on which three people could recline while they ate. The dining room was elaborately decorated with paintings on the walls or a mosaic tile floor that might have pictures of food, like fish and baskets of grain. Romans ignored the religious rituals that the Greeks had observed regarding meat and wine. They didn’t make ritual blood sacrifices before eating meat-usually pork, their favorite. They also didn’t ritually purify the dining room after eating and before drinking wine because they didn’t wait until the end of the meal to drink.
They drank wine with their meal, a custom that is still observed in Italy today. At the end of the meal, which was prepared and served by slaves, guests might be offered silver toothpicks. When the weather was good, wealthy Romans dined outside-al fresco. Dining in one of these elaborate sunken or terraced gardens could be just as elegant as dining indoors. They might have ornamental flower gardens as well as food gardens, with separate landscape designers for each. Care was taken to grow special plants for bees-usually rosemary, thyme, and roses. Urns, statues, sundials, shrines, and altars decorated the gardens. Grapevines trained on an arbor or nets that kept birds in provided shade. Water pumped in from the aqueducts splashed in fountains, mosaic-lined pools, and ponds stocked with fish and ducks.
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