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.
The outdoor triclinium was built-in, made of marble, cement, or stone, with soft pillows on top. A ledge built into the couch served as a cup-holder so wine was within easy reach. Sometimes the couches were built around a small pool so the food could float on trays, cooled by the water. Or dinner guests might climb up into a tower and enjoy the view; take a siesta on a sleeping couch in a small outdoor room after the meal; or have dinner in a tree house. Some wealthy Romans got out of the city altogether. Like wealthy people today, Romans had vacation houses at the seashore, on a lake, or in the mountains.
Their villas (Latin for “farmhouse”) were often within twenty miles of Rome so they could visit them easily and oversee their farms. Vacation villas were built for relaxation and to take advantage of the views. Pliny the Younger, a Roman author, had an estate with almost thirty rooms, including quarters for slaves. He called it “my little villa.” Eating and entertaining took place in two dining rooms and a banquet room. The main dining room had windows and doors that looked out over the sea on three sides. Glass was very expensive so windows were usually made of mica or were just holes cut in the walls and closed with shutters. The other dining room and the banquet room were in two separate towers.
The second dining room, with eastern and western exposure, faced a vineyard and a garden planted with rosemary bushes, and fig and mulberry trees. The banquet room had ocean vistas. Pliny was keenly aware of which windows got breezes and sun from which direction, at what time of day, and in which seasons. There was also an herb garden on the grounds, grain storage, and aboveground wine storage purposely placed near the furnace because the Romans thought smoke helped the wine age. The villa had built-in bookcases, a bathing room with two tubs, and a separate room next to it for applying bath oil. In addition, there were three public bath houses in the small town. State-of-the-art heating in the villa was provided by hot air generated in the furnace room and circulated into the rest of the house through pipes under the floor.
The food had to be outstanding to match such stunning surroundings. Underlying much of Roman cooking was a pungent fermented fish sauce called garum, a unique combination of salt, sea, and sun. It originated in Greece and was perhaps the ancestor, in a roundabout way, of Worcestershire sauce. The theory is that Romans exported garum to India in ancient times and then the British brought it back from India to England 2,000 years later. Garum was readily available commercially; here’s a recipe:
To compare: good quality garum cost twice as much as vinegar, the same as lower grade aged wine, and less than half of what top-quality honey or fresh olive oil cost. Approximately one pint of garum cost the same as one pound of pork, lamb, goat, or second-quality fish, and twice as much as a pound of beef. The expensive meats were chicken-one pound cost five times as much as one pint of garum-and goose, which cost more than sixteen times as much.
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