Page 39 - SYTYGIB: Ancient Rome
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FANCY THAT!
Italy . . . the home of pasta: spaghetti, ravioli, penne, right? Wrong! Back in ancient Rome, you were very unlikely to find pasta on the menu. There may have been something a bit like lasagne, but the huge variety of pasta shapes that we love to MUNCH today hadn't been invented yet. So
if you were after some ancient Roman macaroni cheese or spaghetti bolognese, you'd be fresh out of luck.
Although you couldn’t have ketchup, there were other sauces available. For instance, a popular ingredient in Roman cooking was garum, a strong sauce made from . . . erm, fish entrails. That’s right, the oOZY gUtS from inside a fish. But hey, the sTiNkY StUfF was probably used to disguise the flavour of meat that was starting to go off. So that’s all right then.
mmmm
You know what this burger needs? Some disgusting sauce made with sloppy fish intestines. Then it would be AMAZING!
Dormouse, sir?
I'm in a beans mood.
Most ordinary people ate simple food rather than dormice. While the rich had kitchens and slaves to cook for them, the poor didn’t have such things and would instead buy hot food from bars, called thermopolia, in the streets. Their diet would have mainly consisted of bread, beans, lentils and a little meat.
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diet