Roman food?

Question

did the romans eat pasta ?

Answer 1

Contrary to popular belief, Marco Polo did not discover pasta. The ancient Italians made pasta much like we do today. Although Marco Polo wrote about eating Chinese pasta at the court of Kubla Khan, he probably didn't introduce pasta to Italy. In fact, there's evidence suggesting the Etruscans made pasta as early as 400 B.C. The evidence lies in a bas-relief carving in a cave about 30 miles north of Rome. The carving depicts instruments for making pasta - a rolling-out table, pastry wheel and flour bin. And further proof that Marco Polo didn't "discover" pasta is found in the will of Ponzio Baestone, a Genoan soldier who requested "bariscella peina de macarone" - a small basket of macaroni. His will is dated 1279, 16 years before Marco Polo returned from China.

Answer 2

The Romans did eat something like the pizza, only they called it a picea, they got that from the Greeks. It was a flat disk of bread, topped with olive oil, herbs and olives. One thing is what the majority of the people ate, like onions, and what the very wealthy ate, like nightingles tongues. Of course the Roman Emperors offered banquets where people ate like pigs. Check the link for some Roman recipes.

Answer 3

I don't think so. But maybe.

Dried pasta was familiar in the Mediterranean area in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,  and also was mentioned in Genovese documents. The first traces of dry pasta in Europe came from Sicily, where documents of the twelfth century tell of something like a factory of dry pasta, localized in the area of Palermo. From this site the pasta (called itrjia) was then exported to other regions of southern Italy.

We know about rich Romans eating whole plates of peacock tongues.

One complicated meal involved stuffing a chicken inside a duck, then the duck inside a goose, then the goose inside a pig, then the pig inside a cow, and cooking the whole thing together. Sometimes they would send slaves running up into the mountains near Rome to get snow, so they could have slushies even though there were no refrigerators!

Here are some recipes of that time:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/ethni...