When I told my students that we would be studying Roman food processing and technology, they were super excited. Teenagers like to eat! It all started way back a the beginning of the semester, and nothing went as planned.
Way back in August, after we painted, crashed, and then reconstructed little gardening pots to learn about potsherds in archaeology, we decided to recycle our pots for growing seeds. We had a plan in place to grow Roman herbs that we could use for our food unit in December. It all started with a book I had picked up in England when I visited in 2023 to do a self-directed tour of Roman Britain (see my Website here). Ryley's Roman Gardens and Their Plants intrigued me because not only were the illustrations beautiful, but they also contained information about the uses of each plant and their origins. I've also long been a fan of archaeologist Wilhelmina Jashemski's plant root casting in Pompeii. If you haven't heard of her work, look here for fascinating information about how archaeologists identified plants long gone from the gardens of ancient Roman cities. Before we ate Roman food, I wanted the students to have a little bit of information about how the Romans grew that food. What better way to learn than to do!
After a short presentation on Roman gardening (in which I told the students that to remain authentic to Roman methodology, I had saved my poop to use as fertilizer for our project - don't worry, they only believed me for a few seconds until I couldn't hold back a smile), the students used their pots to plant celery, parsley, fennel, oregano, thyme, sage, basil, etc. Here's where the plan went awry. A certain woodworking volunteer (who may or may not have been my dad) was supposed to deliver some raised gardening beds to our school. Unfortunately, he didn't get them to us in time before our little sprouting seeds died. Luckily, at this time in the year, my students were caught up in catapult design so they weren't too disappointed.
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| Seeds sprouting into Roman herbs |
We picked back up with our food unit in late November in a lesson on wine production and tasting. Now...before you think I actually serve wine to middle school kids, just know that I tell them to tell their parents that. Just for a laugh. We use grape juice. I make mulsum (honeyed wine) by boiling the grape juice and dissolving the honey into it. Which reminds me...have you ever read Apicius' recipe for
mulsum? The amount of honey needed boggles the mind and has to be wrong, but I digress. Recipes are a great way to introduce the students to the Apicius tradition.
After a lesson on wine production technology, the students taste the "wine," to which we add different seasonings found in Apicius: pepper, coriander, and toasted barley. The students really enjoy this experience because they think peppered wine will taste terrible. (It doesn't!) I grind the ingredients fresh in my classroom mortar and see if they can guess what they are by the smell. How many lessons do we teach where the nose and the tongue do the learning? Not enough!
Next up, it's Roman bread - so many archaeological sources for bread and grain grinding technology! And I can't write this post without thinking of the amazing Farrell Monaco, experimental food archaeologist, who has covered
panis quadratus and many other ancient bread recipes and techniques. You should read
her blog regularly if you're interested in exarc. For our lesson, we followed her recipe for
Cato's grape must biscuits.
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| A ball of Cato's grape must biscuit dough |
Since I wanted to have the kids create their own food as much as possible, I had to divide up the recipe into 25 parts per class. I'm glad I enjoyed math as much as I did in high school and college - I needed it! It was around this time that my classroom sink decided to be clogged which required us to take not one but two trips to the hall bathroom for hand-washing sessions. It's times like these that I'm grateful for our custodian, Mr. Chris, who is the G.O.A.T. anticipating what we need to make our classes work. Before mixing our ingredients, we studied the harsh conditions that enslaved people and animals endured in the grain mills. To see what grinding grain was like, the students ground different grains in mortars with pestles - not exactly like the ancient method, but the hardness of the grain was a surprise to them. We used a little of the ground-up grain in our biscuit recipe.
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| Grinding grain is hard work. |
Our next lesson was all about Roman bread ovens and how they worked. We studied the Tomb of the Baker and ovens that were excavated in Pompeii. It was then time for the most exciting lesson of the unit: baking our biscuits in hand-made ovens. I learned to make these surprisingly effective cardboard ovens in Girl Scouts - they work SO well. The kids lined the inside of large copy-paper boxes with foil to protect the cardboard from heat. Then, we placed metal pie pans filled with charcoal underneath them. Over the charcoal, we rested the biscuit pans on recycled soda cans filled with water (for weight). If you've never seen one, take a look at
this video. The simple technology in these ovens simulates the Roman ones easily. Parents helped to get the charcoal lit and ready to go while the students prepared their biscuits for baking. We had SUCH a good time! But we weren't done learning.
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| Baking Cato's grape must biscuits in our cardboard ovens. |
Our last lesson was one I adapted from a participant in last summer's nerd camp:
The Ancient Olympics and Daily Life in Ancient Olympia: A Hands-On History. I co-directed this K-12 Summer Institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities last July, and one of the best things about it was inspiring and guiding the teacher participants in developing their own hands-on history lessons. One of those participants, Catherine Daun of Cicero Preparatory Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona, did a
wonderful lesson on Roman cheesemaking. I enjoyed it so much that I promised myself I'd use aspects of it in my Roman Tech class this year. It was a perfect addition to our food unit! Making the cheese was so much easier than I expected - basically, boil some milk and then add vinegar as a coagulant at the end. The curds appear as if by magic, floating to the top of the whey. After learning about Roman cheese-pressing technology, the students pressed their own cheese right in class before seasoning it and eating it on their biscuits.
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| Squeezing some cheese |
Now, I'm sitting here watching them take a short test on our food unit. They had to write about what foods and drinks they would serve at their own Roman dinner banquet. It was a scene! We now transition to our big experimental archaeology unit on
ancient Roman leather shoes, starting in January. I'm almost too tired. Almost.
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