The Recipes: Delicious Roman dishes

At Tastes Of History we regularly prepare and cook recipes that have survived from the Roman Iron Age. Most of these may be found in a manuscript collection known as “Apicius”, a form of cookbook that really only lists the ingredients for dishes that may have been served at high-status dinner parties. The idea of including quantities, timings and method of cooking did not occur until Eliza Acton produced one of Britain's first cookery books aimed at the domestic reader. In “Modern Cookery in all its Branches…”, published in January 1845, she introduced the now-universal practice of listing ingredients and giving suggested cooking times for each recipe.

A related post, Fast Food or Dinner Party?, includes some of the more popular and frequently prepared Roman-era dishes we have offered visitors the chance to sample during our cooking demonstrations. This time around, however, over the August bank holiday weekend (2025) the people of Leodis (Leeds) [1] were invited to step back in time and experience the atmosphere and excitement of a day at the Roman games. Hosted by the Royal Armouries Museum, Tastes Of History’s mission was to offer visitors a chance to sample period recipes of the sort we believe may have been available at public spectacles.

Our first offering is a soup of barley and vegetables that may well have been included in the diet of gladiators. Their largely meat-free diet is mentioned in Pliny’s Naturalis historia (“Natural History”) XVIII.72 where he refers to gladiators as hordearii, or “barley eaters”. The nickname highlights the central role of barley in their diet which, as research at a gladiator gravesite in Ephesus, Türkiye has shown, was predominantly vegetarian, rich in carbohydrates and low in animal proteins. Significantly, such a diet met the energy demands of rigorous training and combat as carbohydrates are the body’s preferred energy source, especially during high-intensity activities.

A lentil pottage and spiced mushy peas are two further meat-free dishes but, like the recipe above, they do use the ubiquitous fish sauce know to the Romans as liquamen or garum. For those who do not know, garum is a fermented fish sauce used in the cuisines of Phoenicia, ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage and later Byzantium. Albeit a milder more subtle variant, liquamen is a similar preparation such that at times the terms were used interchangeably.

Either way. like modern fish sauces such as Vietnamese Nuoc Mam or Thai Nam Pla, it provides an umami flavour due to the glutamates present within.

Some years ago we worked alongside the team from IWC Media on “Britain's Most Historic Towns: Chester” to produce a Roman dining experience for host, Prof. Alice Roberts, and her guest West Cheshire Museums curator, Liz Montgomery. As a pescatarian Prof. Roberts was delighted by the following recipe for prawn balls in hydrogarum. Perhaps you will be too. The hydrogarum, its modern counterpart being a “court bouillon” designed for poaching, is simply flavoured with celery leaves and pepper.

For the carnivores, the following two dishes are greatly enhanced by their respective sauces. The first, “Pork in a Pine Nut Sauce”, produces a satay-style dish where the pine nuts, found widely across the Mediterranean world, replace the peanuts of Asian versions. The second sauce is a remarkably good sweet and sour dipping sauce excellent for roast or poached chicken pieces.

Apart from garlic cheese (moretum), the recipe for which can be found here, the final offering is deep-fried honey fritters to sweeten the menu and provide a deliciously sticky treat.

From Tastes Of History, vale and bon appétit!

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Endnote:

1. The Roman name for Leeds in West Yorkshire is given as “Leodis” (or Loidis) in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, AD 731). ▲