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Stuffed Dormouse and Fish Gut Sauce: The Flavors of Pompeii
Some dishes from the Roman town would be familiar to us today. Others may sound repellent.
OXFORD, England — A starter of stuffed dormouse, anyone?
The dish was a delicacy in ancient Rome. It was prepared by gutting the mouse, filling it with pork mince, and baking it. The dormouse had previously been fattened in a special jar that had tiny ledges molded inside, so it could run around before it was slaughtered. One such jar is on view in “Last Supper in Pompeii,” a new exhibition that runs through Jan. 12, 2020, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Pompeii is perhaps our most important window into ancient Rome. When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, this ordinary Roman town was buried under superheated ash. The heat killed the townspeople almost instantly, even as the ash preserved their final moments for all time, offering us a glimpse into the everyday life of ancient Romans — including what they ate, and how they ate it.
Food was a crucial part of Roman culture; Pompeii alone was surrounded by some 80 farms and vineyards. Meals were served in frescoed dining rooms, but also in bars and restaurants, and offered to the gods.
Dormouse is one Roman specialty that has persisted: It is still served in Croatia and Slovenia. As the exhibition demonstrates, the food and culinary culture of ancient Rome endure in myriad other ways, too.
“People used to modern Italian cuisine would be very surprised by ancient Roman food: No tomatoes for a start, and no pizzas and pasta,” said Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, in an email. Yet, she added, “There are some underlying continuities.”
“The seafood from the Mediterranean is a major element in both,” Professor Beard said, noting that Roman cesspit excavations had revealed widespread consumption of sea urchins. “So too are olives and wine.”
The 300 objects on display in the exhibition range from the banal to the beautiful. There are wine jugs and kitchen utensils, chamber pots and tiny toothpicks carved from bone.
One fresco shows a well-preserved sign for the Phoenix tavern, one of Pompeii’s many places to eat out. A typical Pompeian tavern might have served grilled pork, chicken or goat with bread and vegetables, said Paul Roberts, the exhibition’s curator, who heads the Ashmolean’s antiquities department.
Elsewhere is a reconstitution of a dining room, or “triclinium,” in which wealthy Romans reclined on a three-sided masonry couch at meal times. Meals eaten there might start with eggs, olives, savory pastries, and sometimes dormice. Then came seafood: An exquisite mosaic in the exhibition shows a goggle-eyed octopus surrounded by countless other varieties of fish and crustaceans. The main course was meat, mainly pork, goat or sheep, and it was followed by fruit: grapes, apricots, plums, peaches and pears.
The woods around Pompeii were filled with grazing pigs, and one is on display at the Ashmolean, in the form of a replica of a cast that was produced by pouring plaster into the cavity it left in the ash. The animal lies on its side with its mouth open, no doubt emitting one final squeal. Pig meat was served hot in tavernas and homes, but also cold, and the Romans also ate a lot of sausage, Dr. Roberts explained. The present-day Italian fondness for prosciutto and salami has ancient roots.
“The essential Mediterranean diet has not changed, and will never change,” Dr. Roberts said. “Wine never dies out, bread never dies out, and olives continue.”
The other essential legacy of Roman times is “the love of food, the culture of food, the fact that food is your be-all and end-all,” he added.
At its height, the Roman Empire stretched all the way from Egypt in the southeast to Britain in the northwest. Roman conquests introduced plenty of foods to previously foreign territories, such as Britannia (Britain), which is the focus of a section of the exhibition. These included cabbage, cherries, rabbits, chickens, but also plums, pears and eating apples, said Dr. Roberts; even beer came from breweries started by the Roman legions in Germany.
Some other aspects of Roman dining might sound unsavory. One is a pungent fish sauce called garum, that was put on everything, including desserts. The condiment was made by leaving the uneaten parts of a fish — gizzards, gills, heads, tails, fins — in a vat to ferment for two or three weeks.
“The smell would have been indescribable,” said Dr. Roberts, who said he has sampled Roman-style garum. “But oddly enough, when you draw off the liquor from this, it tastes delicious, and doesn’t taste fishy.”
Ms. Beard agreed that garum must have been tastier than it sounded. “People usually say ‘yuck,’ and students planning Roman banquets always have trouble with it,” she said. “But maybe it was more like some Thai or Vietnamese fish sauces, which are excellent.”
Garum was dispatched all over the Roman Empire in stoppered bottles. You can see a branded bottle in a mosaic in the show: It’s from the house of its maker Scaurus, a fish-sauce tycoon who became one of the richest people in Pompeii.
The most repellent aspect of Roman food culture was, paradoxically, the kitchens themselves. They were “hot, stuffy, dark and smelly,” said Dr. Roberts — mainly because the toilets and latrines were there, too, sometimes right beside the cooking area. Slaves poured everything from food waste and broken crockery to the contents of chamber pots directly into the latrines.
“The Romans didn’t understand the connection between hygiene and health,” he explained. They had no awareness of “the concepts of germs and cross-infection.”
Yet they did have a strong awareness of death itself. The act of eating was accompanied by reminders of mortality, and symbols of skeletons were sometimes used to decorate feasting cups, and dining rooms themselves. Toward the end of the exhibition is a mosaic found at the center of a dining-room floor in Pompeii that now looks uncannily prescient: It depicts a full-length human skeleton holding a wine jug in each hand.
“The two worlds of death and the banquet, the table and the grave, were never far apart,” reads the exhibition wall text. “The message is very clear: Carpe diem — seize the day. Enjoy the delights of the banquet while you can.”