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In ancient Greece, the
Athenians believed that mealtime afforded an opportunity to nourish
the spirit as well as the body. They reclined on couches while
eating and accompanied their repasts with music, poetry, and
dancing. The Greeks provided a philosophical basis for good living,
Epicureanism. It held that pleasure was the main purpose of life;
but pleasure was not intended to imply the self-indulgence that it
connotes today. The Epicureans believed that pleasure could best be
achieved by practicing self-restraint and indulging as few desires
as possible. Today the epicure is defined as one who is “endowed
with sensitive and discriminating tastes in food and
wine.”
The ancient Greeks
practiced moderation in all things, but the Romans were known for
their excesses. Ordinary citizens subsisted on barley or wheat
porridge, fish, and ground pine nuts (edible pine seeds), but the
Roman emperors and wealthy aristocrats gorged themselves on a
staggering variety of foods. They staged lavish banquets where as
many as 100 different kinds of fish were served, as well as
mountainous quantities of beef, pork, veal, lamb, wild boar,
venison, ostrich, duck, and peacock. They ordered ice and snow
hauled down from the Alps to refrigerate their perishable foods, and
they dispatched emissaries to outposts of the Roman Empire in search
of exotic delicacies. Mushrooms were gathered in France, and the
Roman author Juvenal, writing in the late first and early 2nd
century AD, describes a dinner at his patron's house where mullet
from Corsica and lampreys from Sicily were served.
Yet, whereas the
Romans placed great value on exotic delicacies, they were not
gastronomes in the true sense of the word. The term implies a
sensitivity and discrimination that they lacked. The unbridled
appetites of the Roman emperors and nobles often carried them to
wild extremes. The emperor Caligula drank pearls that had been
dissolved in vinegar. Maximus reportedly consumed 60 pounds of meat
in a day, and Albinus was alleged to have eaten 300 figs, 100
peaches, 10 melons, and vast quantities of other foods all at a
single sitting. Lucullus was an immensely wealthy man who
entertained so lavishly that his name became a symbol both for
extravagance and for culinary excellence.
The vulgarity and
ostentation of Roman banquets were satirized by Petronius in the
Satyricon, written in the 1st
century AD. A former slave named Trimalchio entertains at a
gargantuan feast at which the guests are treated to one outlandish
spectacle after the other. A donkey is brought in on a tray,
encircled with silver dishes bearing dormice that have been dipped
in honey. A huge sow is carved and live thrushes fly up from the
platter. A chef cuts open the belly of a roast pig, and out pour
blood sausages and blood puddings. |
