MEALS
The Romans took three meals a day. The first, eaten soon after rising,
was called the ientaculum, which primarily consisted of bread, plain
or seasoned. Lunch (prandium) was a simple meal, eaten
in the late morning, that usually consisted of unheated food such as bread,
fruit, nuts, cheese, olives, and salad in various combinations. Dinner
(cena) was eaten toward sunset. For the poor, this meal might
consist of puls (a wheat porridge served hot), various vegetables,
fruit, and very rarely, meat. If wine was included with the meal, it
would have been of inferior quality (fairly close to vinegar).
The wealthy, however, obviously enjoyed much more luxurious meals.
It would be impossible here to list all the possible foods that might be part
of a wealthy Roman's dinner, but the following menu will give you a general
idea.
- gustatio ("hors d’oeuvre"): boiled eggs, olives, salad,
etc.
- prima mensa ("first table" or "main course" ): some
kind of meat or fish, e.g., wild boar, chicken, sows udder, turbot,
etc.
- secunda mensa ("second table" or dessert): apples or other
fruit, oysters, snails, various pastries, etc.
Eggs were apparently a traditional hors d'oeuvre for the Romans, as apples
must have been a common dessert, for we have the Roman saying: ab ovo
ad mala ("from egg to apples"), which is the equivalent of our "from
soup to nuts."
Of course, such a meal would have been accompanied with a good wine.1
Note
1. Salt was nutritionally crucial to the Romans because
their diet, which consisted of cereals, vegetables, and boiled meat, was
lacking in sodium chloride. Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt
or given money to buy salt, hence our word 'salary'.
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