! Good day from Rome! I hope you like Roman bread recipes and rabbit holes because we’re about to go down a deep one. It’s time to revisit the
Most of us at some point in our lives have seen images of these iconic loaves of ancient Roman bread as they were represented in frescoes or as artefactual evidence itself at the 2, 000-year-old Roman town of Pompeii. In 1862, 81 of these circular loaves were excavated from a large industrial oven at the Bakery of Modestus at the site and since then these beautiful examples of ancient food preparation and food culture have intrigued bakers, archaeologists and food historians alike.
When I published my first article and interpretation for a Panis Quadratus recipe in September of 2017 here on Tavola Mediterranea, the response was overwhelming and wonderful. Readers from all corners of the web and all areas of culinary and academic backgrounds chimed in to offer their thoughts and theories on how this iconic bread was made and which kitchen implements may have been used to create its intriguing and unusual form. What was the loaf made of? Why was the loaf sectioned into 8 or more pieces? What tools were used to create its forms and features? These questions prompted conversations on sites such as Hacker Newsand on the Tavola Facebook page, and via email and comments on the original post’s page. This topic and some of my work was then featured on Atlas Obscuraand on Simon Morton’s ‘This Way Up‘ (RNZ) after the initial article was circulated online. The overall response prompted me to do some further research and experimentation in an attempt to try to get closer to understanding the process that went into making this stunning bread and recreating it as true to its original form as possible. But it wasn’t easy. This recent process of research and experimentation has been a veritable bread-nerd rabbit hole, a process that depleted wheat supplies in the state of California, and a process that saw an army of bread overtake my home like a scene out of
Adoreum: The Newly Discovered Flatbread Fresco Of Pompeii
This process also allowed me to understand how the ingredients behaved with water and starter, how these loaves may have been formed, and how these loaves could have been made efficiently and in high volume during the height of the Empire. This article will delve into some of my new research, experimentation, ideas and theories and will quite possibly take us one step closer to understanding how the
) was made and what tools and ingredients were used to make it. So, if you’d like to go down this rabbit hole with me, get some grain from your
) were the two most frequently used grains in Greek and Roman cooking with barley yielding almost 9 times more supply than wheat itself making wheat somewhat of a luxury grain. While the Roman province of Egypt was the prime supplier of wheat to the Empire for many years, wheat was also being shipped in to Rome and its surrounding settlements from Pontus and Sicily.
The $1000 Cookbook That Will Change The Way You Think About Bread
Professional bakers in Rome, and in Pompeii, did not exist until the 2nd century BC and it is suggested that this advancement in specialized crafts has everything to do with the appropriation of Macedonia for the Republic by Aemilius Paulus. It is also suggested that Pliny the Elder’s reference to Greek knowledge of leaven indicates that yeast likely became a component of Roman bread-making during this time as Greek bakers were employed in Roman settings: “
” (Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis – Book XVIII-26(11)). This also suggests that the advent of leavened bread-making by the Romans in the 2nd century, despite the feelings of disgust or impurity that ‘putrefied and rotten dough’ invoked in many, brought bread to a whole new level of social and dietary significance.
At this critical point in Roman history, bread was the backbone of the Roman daily diet. Commercial bread-baking began to emerge and the role of baking meager flat-breads on the home hearth moved from the hands of women in the household into the hands of the men who ran commercial bakeries. These commercial bread bakers (
Baking And Bakeries In Pompeii
) were powerful men in Roman society; and the bakeries themselves are incredibly telling and sensory environments. Bread required massive quantities of wheat, fire-wood, and slave and animal labour to produce a daily supply to feed approximately 12, 000 people. Donkeys walked in circles tirelessly, for hours on end, rotating the industrial sized quern-stones (grain-mills) that ground the wheat; slaves did the same if animal labour was not possible. A kneading apparatus was also employed that featured rotated wooden bars that paddled dough just like our modern Kitchen-Aid mixers do only with human or animal strength to power it. The ovens were fired from dusk until dawn and enough grain had to be imported from within the region or from provincially confiscated territories to supply the Roman people with their daily bread. Bread was prepared daily, in high volume, sometimes in the home but mostly in commercial bakeries run by a
): a veritable trade-union of powerful bakers who were likely looked upon as a Roman version of the ‘Hoffa teamsters’ of the day. The men who controlled the bread and the commercial ovens often ran for office or influenced civic elections themselves. A common saying of the day was to say that a baker ‘gave good bread’, ‘bonum panem fert’, which meant that he could be a trusted community member or a potential civic official.
To understand the power that bakers once held in Imperial Rome, all one has to do is stand in the shadow of the enormous tomb of master baker,
Bake Roman Bread With This 2,000 Year Old Ancient Recipe
, that was erected outside of Porta Maggiore in Rome during the 1st century BC. The monument, which is often touted as being garish and overdone, is a beautifully rendered structure that visually and textually summarizes the accomplishments of a respected Roman baker and his baking enterprises. The construction materials used to build the monument also incorporates actual circular bread-kneading bins as a part of the structure. At the top of the structure is an epitaph that reads as follows: ‘
’ which translates into English as: ‘This is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor, it’s obvious!’. In addition to the epitaph, a band of marble reliefs line the top of the structure that beautifully demonstrates the stages of Roman bread production in a commercial bakery setting.
In this setting. In 1862, the Bakery of Modestus was excavated under Guiseppe Fiorelli and produced 81 intact and semi-intact loaves of bread that were abandoned
Bread Of The Ancients
In a large oven when the original bakers fled the bakery, and the town itself, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. 76 of these 81 loaves were the circular, 8-wedged variety that we see frequently on display in the museums and in publications about the site.
De Luca (1863) conducted an in-depth study of the loaves and some of the finds at The Bakery of Modestus and notes that the wedge divisions on the top of the loaf are relatively even in relation to each other, they’re convex, and the divisions between them were created by ‘something sharp’ and with the application of pressure. De Luca also remarks that a central ‘sag’ is common in the loaves with a hole-like indentation that is not perfectly circular or centred. He suggests that the horizontal rim around the external edge was created with several slashes of a knife as he felt that that contour was not even or created with one single motion. De Luca also notes that the exterior of the bread is a darker ‘brown’ with the inside crumb appearing to be lighter in tone. The density of the crumb is also less than the crust demonstrating some cavities in the crumb than can be found in leavened breads. The loaves, on average, measured 20 cm in diameter but fluctuated, due to composition, oven-spring, or spreading, anywhere from 18 cm to 22 cm (7 inches – 8 2/3 inches).
Complementing some of this form-related archaeological data at Pompeii in a very useful way are a group of 25 bronze pans that were found
I Present The Panis Quadratus! A Truly Old Recipe Dating Back To Ancient Rome. Seen Often In Frescoes And Sculpture, And In Specimens Of Carbonized Loaves From Pompeii And Herculaneum.
At the 2, 000-year-old site that is located fifteen kilometres north of Pompeii. These pans were interpreted as being pans that were used for forming bread and pastries, not for baking them, by Amedeo Maiuri (1958). This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the loaves excavated at The Bakery of Modestus were not found to have been baking in pans in the oven that they were excavated from but rather were found resting on the oven floor.
, a small grain mill was excavated at the Bakery of Modestus that contained a large amount of unmilled grain. Physical (visual) and chemical analysis of the carbonized grains revealed that all of the grain found in this mill was ordinary bread wheat (
‘ is the most commonly used term for this bread when referred to in English. It wasn’t fabricated by academics or classicists, though; it is
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