This content explores the ancient Roman fast-food culture, specifically focusing on "thermopolia" (eating houses) and a recipe for "cocleas" (ancient Roman snails), revealing insights into daily Roman life and culinary practices.
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In today's world you can find all sorts of fast food: hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza, Chinese,
something they try to pass off as Mexican food,
but rarely will you find snails on the menu
but it seems that wasn't always the case.
Just last month in Pompeii, archaeologists revealed what
is essentially a fast food restaurant with the remains of food still in some of the containers
and one of those tasty treats was escargot.
So today we're making cocleas, ancient Roman snails,
and we'll take a look at what visiting one of these Roman restaurants might have been like,
and see why they had a bit of a seedy reputation.
This time on Tasting History.
Now this Pompeian restaurant called a thermopolium is not the first to be excavated.
In fact there are around 90 in Pompeii and Herculaneum alone,
but it is exquisitely preserved
and gives us lots of clues as to what would have been eaten on that fateful day in 79 AD.
Duck, goat, fish, pig, and of course snails.
Now we don't know exactly how the snails were served there
probably as some sort of stew with other ingredients but for our purposes we are going
to make a recipe from the Apicius De Re Coquinaria
for a very simple fried snail.
Cocleas. Snails:
Fry with pure salt and oil.
Baste snails with silphium, garum, pepper, oil.
Nice and simple. Now the snails
served at the thermopolium probably didn't have silphium, because it was a very expensive ingredient
and by the time that the recipe was actually written several hundred years later silphium
was extinct, maybe. I actually did a whole episode on that that I will link to in the description but
for our purposes we will substitute with asafoetida which has been considered a common substitute even
as far back as ancient Rome. So for this recipe what you'll need is:
one to two dozen snails.
Now if you have live snails that is fantastic. That's actually what this probably would have been
but in a lot of places including where I live, live snails are actually really hard to find even even
out in the garden we just don't really have a lot of snails here, so I am using canned snails that
iI got at my local fine French foods provider and even Anthony Bourdain says they pretty much taste
the same so that's what we're doing.
1 teaspoon of salt.
2 tablespoons of olive oil for frying ,
and a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of olive oil for basting,
a half teaspoon of asafoetida,
one and a half teaspoons of garum or colatura di alici, or really any kind of fish sauc,
and i'll put a link to colatura di alici and to asafoetida in the description,
and one teaspoon of ground pepper.
So first if you have not subscribed to Tasting History make sure to do that before we get started
and hit that little notification bell so you never miss an episode and now let's make our baste.
In a small bowl with the quarter cup of olive oil add in the asafetida the garam and the pepper
and mix it up then set it aside then put a small pan over medium heat and add the rest of the olive
oil and the salt once the oil is heated toss in your snails so if you have live snails great
just take the open part the face of the snail i guess and put it onto the bottom of the pan
but if you don't, if you are using canned snails which is what most people are probably going to use,
they've already been cooked. They've been boiled so you're really just heating them up.
Either way the process is pretty much the same.
After about two minutes pour the basting liquid
over the snails and let them cook for another four or five minutes stirring every once in a while.
Now while those saute, let's pour a glass of wine
and imagine ourselves a trip to the thermopolium.
So let's say you're living in ancient Rome.
You're sitting on your couch feeling a little peckish, want a little nosh.
Now if you're wealthy you would just have you know your cook
whip you up some parthian chicken in the kitchen but if you're like most people you don't have a kitchen,
and you don't probably have a cook either.
If you're a plebian or just don't own a villa,
then you probably live in something called an insula, or an apartment building for lack of a better term,
and so your only recourse is to go out to eat.
Luckily just as the ground floor of my New York apartment
used to have a wonderful Thai restaurant so did the ground floors of insulae.
Though not Thai restaurants usually but Roman restaurants or thermapolia.
So that term thermopolia or singular thermopolium
basically means a place where hot stuff is sold,
and the term wasn't really used that often in ancient Rome itself.
Archaeologists use it now to kind of describe a
whole collection of eating houses.
Caupona, stabila, popina, and tiberna
were all manner of places that you could go get food.
Some were more like fast food joints,
some like a wine bar you could sit down and have a meal,
and then some had rooms attached like the taberna,
where you could stay over for the night.
In fact the term taberna is where we get the term tavern, hm.
So even if you don't like the thermopolium in your bulding,
that's okay because you got options kid.
You just take a little stroll down the via
and before too long some proprietor will come out like a carnival barker and entice you into their establishment.
And really where you end up that evening kind of depends on what you're looking for.
Both food-wise, and entertainment-wise because some of these places would offer gambling even though
it was illegal or adult entertainment, not that gambling isn't adult, but you know what I mean and
we'll actually discuss that a little bit later.
But when it came to the cuisine each place would kind
of advertise what they had on frescoes and they would lay it out kind of like a buffet.
Like the Piccadilly when I was a kid, which I thought was a really fancy place because they had a fountain
indoors and gave you little Andes mints with the check.
Turns out it was not fancy at all but I still liked it.
But in ancient Rome instead of warming trays they would use something called
dolia which were terracotta containers that would slip into the counter and in those dolia
besides those foods that I mentioned earlier archaeologists have found:
oysters, chicken, nuts, dried meats bread and sheep stew.
So you got a lot of options,
and of course with your meal you might
partake in a little bit of wine in fact at the thermopolium discovered last month or uncovered
last month they found a wine vessel that had dried fava beans at the bottom and you're probably
wondering who puts fava beans in their wine?
And I'll tell you because Apicius lets us know.
"To make white wine out of red wine. Put bean-meal... into the flask and stir it for a very long time
The next day the wine will be white."
I really want to try doing that one of these days and see if it works.
Supposedly it also works with egg whites but for some reason that actually grosses me
out more than dried fava beans.
Anyway another drink that you might enjoy is called conditum
or spiced wine, and Apicus has a recipe for that which says,
"Spiced honey wine which keeps forever...
given to people on a journey."
And maybe if you're lucky you're drinking that cup of wine beside a
future emperor of Rome for as Suetonius wrote of the great emperor Claudius,
" Now pray who can live without a snack,
and then he went on to describe the abundance of the old taverns
to whom he himself used to go for wine in earlier days."
Though supposedly he ended up ordering many of those
establishments closed in 41 AD,
but doesn't seem to really have stuck because a few years later
Cassius Dio writes of Claudius's son the emperor Nero,
"He indulged in many licentious deeds both at home and throughout the city...
he used to frequent the taverns and wandered about everywhere like a private citizen...
although he spent practically his whole existence amid tavern life,
he forbade others to sell in taverns anything boiled save vegetables and pea-soup ."
Now before you ask no he does not go into any further detail about the prohibition of boiled foods
even though I would have really liked to know more about that, sad.
But even with some high class clientele frequenting these establishments
they tended to have kind of a bad reputation especially
those that had rooms attached and especially when those rooms were rented by the hour.
As Seneca says, "Virtue is a lofty quality... pleasure is low, slavish, weakly, perishable;
its haunts and homes are the brothel and the tavern.
You will meet virtue in the temple the marketplace and the senate house..."
How convenient that Seneca spent much of his life in the senate...
hm!
But it wasn't just the holier-than-thou crowd that looked down on these public eating houses
in fact the satirist Juvenal paints these places in a rather unflattering light.
In one story about the general Laternus going to an all-night tavern he says,
"Caesar - send! But look for your general in some great tavern.
You will find him reclining with some common cutthroat in a medley of sailors and
thieves and runaway slaves.
Among executioners and cheap coffin-makers and the now silent drums of the priest of Cybele,
lying drunk on his back.
There there is equal liberty for all -
sharing of cups - nor different couch for any, or table set aloof from the herd."
Now if you think just visiting one of these places gives you a stigma
imagine what working in one does.
The sixth century Code of Justinian when laying out the nuptial policies of the elite dictates
"We forbid the marriage of senators with women belonging to the classes... slaves, the daughters of slaves... actresses,
and their daughters, the daughters of tavern -keepers of proprietors of houses of prostitution,
and of gladiators; or women who make their bodies articles of merchandise."
So the barmaid gets lumped in with prostitutes and actors. D:
Now when I read these castigations of the Thermopylae I wonder
if they're not being a little elitist, just as I am when I mock Taco Bell even though
I sure do love a Crunchwrap.
Could the people eating in these restaurants really be so crass?
Well, lucky for us
they actually left us an indication of their nature in their own words.
There is graffiti carved all over ancient Roman structures,
but some of the choicest adorns the walls of the thermopolium.
Now some are innocuous enough like this bill affair from a bar near the maritime baths
Some nuts...? Coins. Drinks: 14 coins; lard: two coins;
bread: three coins; three meat cutlets: 12 coins;
four sausages: eight coins. Total 51 coins.
And another showing some patrons to be most admirable chaps,
"We two dear men, friends forever were here.
If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus."
And if you are sensitive at all I would stop there.
Now I'm not going to read the most baudy of the graffiti
found around ancient Rome because it gets pretty raunchy, but I am going to put a link in the
description to where you can peruse if you are so inclined but for the PG-13 crowd I give you
these and in the voices that I imagine they were written in.
"Apelles the chamberlain with Dexter,
a slave of Caesar, ate here most agreeably and had a screw at the same time."
"Two friends were here.
While they were, they had bad service in every way from a guy named Apaphroditus.
They threw him out and spent 105 and a half sestertii most agreeably on whores."
"We have wet the bed, host.
I confess we have done wrong.
If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot."
That is so not an excuse...
Now I do love the rather pithy boast found at the Caupona of Anthictus.
"I screwed the barmaid."
One of my favorites is actually a dialogue between two mortal enemies it seems
Severus: Succesus, a weaver, loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris.
She, however, does not love him
The more he begs, the less she cares. His rival wrote this. Goodbye.
Successus: Envious one, why do you get in the way?
Submit to the handsomer man and one who is being treated very wrongly and good looking.
Severus: I have spoken. I have written all there is to say.
You love Iris but she does not love you.
So maybe some of these places less resemble the Mcdonald's and more the tavern from Tangled
but in all honesty with my teeny, tiny kitchen back here it still probably beats cooking at home,
this coming from the guy with a cooking show. >_>
Speaking of which
let's try those snails. :D
So after a few minutes you can remove the snails from the heat and either put them onto a salad or eat them plain,
or stuff them back into the shells for a little bit of culinary theatrics.
Then go ahead and pour whatever sauce is left over on top and serve.
And here we are cocleas, ancient Roman escargot.
Look at this cool little spoon I got it's like shell and kind of pointy at the end, so for scooping out
mussels or whatever you can use a fork.
Honestly, you don't even need to eat them in the shell
it's more for the theater of it. It's pretty,
but what you do want to make sure to do is eat them right away,
because nothing is more disgusting then cold snails.
Yeah, here we go.
You really get the flavor of the snail more than you would with like a
modern french escargot which really you're getting the flavor of butter and garlic and there's
nothing wrong with that, but this the other flavors are really quite mild.
I mean you can taste that
interesting asafoetida flavor which is kind of garlicky, kind of oniony, but hard to place but
it's not overpowering you're getting more of the flavor of the snail which which is interesting.
there's there's a brininess to it because of the of the garum it's not salty it's more briny.
That said I would stick with the garlic and butter of modern day escargot.
I'm gonna eat most of these but I would rather go with escargot.
So make sure to follow me on Instagram and Twitter
and even TikTok now where every few days I post Facts by Max,
which are little historical anecdotes that usually don't have anything to do with food,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
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