Salvete amici! The season of stew is upon us and I couldn’t be happier! Up here in the northern hemisphere the days are growing cooler, nighttime is arriving earlier, and people are starting to naturally shift into the ‘home cocooning mode’ that tends to start as autumn sets in. During […]
Salvete amici! It’s officially autumn and summer is over but I’m okay with that! Really I am. I had a wonderful summer this year working at Pompeii with the Pompeii Food & Drink Project, eating out at Caupona, snorkelling over a 2,000-year-old Roman villa at Baia, and eating my way […]
Salvete Amici! Non semper erit aestas….It will not always be summer. Alas, winter is coming…. just like it always does. And just like that we’ll put the bathing suits and flip-flops away for another year and get out our woolens and fire-wood instead. But that’s okay! Because good things come […]
**This article and the ongoing research has been updated further here: Baking Bread with the Romans: Part III – The Panis Strikes Back and here: The Panis Quadratus – The Key Ingredients: Pompeii Bread with Poppy Seed, Fennel and Parsley ** Friends, Romans, Baking Enthusiasts: Lend me your ears! …. Who […]
Give us this day our daily bread — and a good bread starter is what we need to make it. But what’s a bread starter, you say? A bread starter, pasta madre, or levain, is what we have used to make bread for millenia long before active dry (instant granulated) baker’s […]
Okay, before I even start with a brief historical introduction to this recipe I am going to start by telling you to take a deep breath and open your minds and hearts to potatoes on pizza. First of all, as North Americans or Britons or anyone else that lives outside […]
Friends, Romans, Countrymen: Lend me your ears… and your culinary curiosity… because this week’s ancient recipe is a very unique one. It’s Cato the Elder’s recipe for ‘Libum‘ from “De Agri Cultura” and it is, quite literally, like nothing I have ever tasted before and it is delightful! It’s almost […]
This summer I had the privilege of working on the Pompeii Food & Drink Project (PFaDP) for its final field season. For those who are not familiar with the project, Dr. Betty-Jo Mayeske and a team of archaeologists and historians have been painstakingly working at Pompeii (Pompei, Italy) for 17 […]
Last summer was one of the greatest summers that I’ve ever spent in Rome. I had the pleasure of working at an archaeological site, Monte Testaccio, in Testaccio, excavating and cataloguing thousands of amphorae potsherds with ArchaeoSpain and CEIPAC (University of Barcelona). More importantly, however, I had the pleasure of working […]
A time-honoured recipe for Calabrian Ricotta Balls – Polpette di Ricotta Calabrese, just like nonna used to make.
The culinary use of lemons is often limited to garnishes, desserts or liqueurs. But this citrus fruit can do so much more than simply flavour water and liquor and it was eating and cooking in Ravello, Italy, that taught me this. The Amalfi Coast isn’t just home to beaches, sun […]
Cheese. By God if there is a food product that I cannot get enough of, it is cheese. I was asked a very interesting question once: If I was forced to give up one of these two foods: chocolate; or cheese… which would it be? There was no question in my mind. I’d happily […]
About the author:
Farrell Monaco is an award-winning Classical archaeologist and food-writer whose research centers on food, food preparation, and bread in the Roman Mediterranean. She writes regularly on the role of food and food preparation in Roman daily life on her site, Tavola Mediterranea, and publishes in both English and Italian. Farrell has also written exclusively for Atlas Obscura and BBC Travel. Her work has been featured prominently by National Geographic, Popular Science, The Atlantic, the BBC, The Guardian, The Economist, Esquire Magazine, SAPIENS Magazine, Verve Magazine, Saveur Magazine and Milk Street. In November of 2020, Farrell co-produced, wrote and presented a video on the history of the date palm fruit with The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA).
