How It Started

I was maybe 5 years old when I first helped my mom make dinner. My Mom had just come home from a long day of work and was focusing on cooking the pasta, and needed an extra pair of hands to work on the salad. I was standing idly by watching when she gave me that first responsibility. I picked up a tomato and was instructed to wash it off quickly before cutting it. I dried the tomato off and then laid it onto the cutting board, where my mom then handed me the knife. I put my small hands onto the grip of the knife, and my mom put hers over mine, guiding me through the motion of cutting and teaching me the basics of wielding this tool. I then picked up the small pieces of freshly cut tomato and placed them into the bowl with the rest of the other vegetables. Looking over the bowl, standing on my small red stepstool, and seeing all these little parts come together to make a beautiful finished product was when my love of cooking truly began. Not only as an activity in which many things become one, but also as an activity in which I could spend time and connect with my mom, bringing us closer in a similar way to how the vegetables all mix together in the salad.

The summer before heading into 7th Grade, I was cooking with my mom one night, and she asked me what language I would be taking in the fall. I was faced with the daunting options of Spanish, French, Chinese, and Latin, and previously to this point had not given the idea much thought. I remembered a couple of weeks prior how a friend had mentioned to me that he would be taking Latin in the fall, and then suggested I do the same. He told me that it helped for a small part of the SAT and was “ fun”. Thus, when my Mom asked me that question while cooking, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Latin.

As I progressed through the levels of Latin each year, slowly getting better and better, we started to focus on the culture of ancient Rome more and more. Thus, stemming from my love of cooking and Latin, a question arose about what they ate back then and the cultural significance of it.

This question is the center of Eats Antiquity, an exploration into the food culture of ancient Rome. Over the course of this project, I will be researching ancient Roman cuisine, exploring what people of different social classes and ethnicities in Rome would eat, while also diving into the stories of those making the food.

I myself will be cooking these meals and dishes, to the best of my ability, and then giving them an overall review of my opinion on them. I say to the best of my ability that many of these recipes, as you will see, are quite vague in the instructions, and in some situations, the ingredients that are referred to no longer exist or are unknown. Because of this, I will have to make some creative decisions, inferring and basing it off research as to what something could have meant, or what an ancient ingredient could be today.