A depiction of ancient Roman pizza has recently
been unearthed in Pompeii but is it really pizza? Well kind of and kind of not. Either way I'm going to do my best to recreate this 2000 year old dish long buried beneath the ashes of
Mount Vesuvius. So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we prepare Pompeii and pizza this time on Tasting History. So just a couple weeks ago archaeologists working in region 9 of Pompeii uncovered this fresco showing a silver tray with a leaven flatbread with topping along with assorted fruit and a goblet of wine. Now the style of this painting is called xenia which comes from the Greek word that referred to a sort of social contract between
hosts and guests part of which was an offering of food to the guests, and the ancient Roman author Vitruvius wrote about this style of art in the first century BC. "When the Greeks became more luxurious, and their circumstances more opulent, they began providing dining rooms, chambers, and
storerooms of Provisions for their guests, on the first day they would invite them to dinner, this is why artists called pictures representing the things which were sent to guests 'xenia'." So even 2000 years ago there was art history so figuring out exactly what is depicted in this xenia is a little tricky. The archaeologists are fairly certain on some things like the wine, bread, pomegranate, dates, and the fruit of the strawberry tree or corbezzolo which is
the national tree of Italy, and despite its name has nothing to do with strawberries but then there are also some more less obvious things like these items in front some have said that they look
like mushrooms though based on the art style it's probably more likely that they are some sort of
nut but who really knows. Now when it comes to the pizza and its toppings well it's kind of anyone's guess. Maybe that's cheese, maybe bits of fruit? What's definitely missing is tomatoes as those
wouldn't even show up in Europe for another 1500 years and if there was cheese it's very unlikely
that it was anything like today's mozzarella so while it may have some of the hallmarks of a
pizza I don't think it's going to be available for delivery anytime soon. Now some scholars have suggested that one of the ingredients that probably is on this bread is sort of pizza like insofar as it is a kind of spreadable cheese and that was called moretum so that's what I'm
going to be making today. Now there are several ancient recipes for moretum one of which includes
pine nuts and is probably the precursor to pesto but my favorite recipe actually comes from a
poem because if you've watched this show you know I love recipes in poetic form. The poem often attributed to Virgil is called fittingly 'Moretum' and is really quite long so I'm just going to
read the parts that are recipe-like. "Digging in the earth, he pulls up four heads of garlic; then he desires the parsley's graceful foliage and the stiffness-causing rue, and trembling on their
slender thread the coriander leaf, and when he has collected these he sits before the fire and loudly asks his wench for the mortar. The garlic bulbs he rinses and strips then throws into the
hollow stone. On these he sprinkles grains of salt, and cheese is added then he introduces the herbs... the reeking garlic with the pestle breaks, then everything he crushes all alike. His hand in
circles moves, until the the ingredients lose their separate colors and out of many colors comes one neither wholly green, nor shining white... Then drops of Athena's olive oil he adds and pours
a little of his sharp vinegar and again works the mixture together." Like I said there's a lot more to it sometimes with erotic undertones but that is the recipe portion of the poem. Now something interesting is that the motto on the United States Great Seal "E pluribus unum"
from many one comes from this poem. Of course instead of referring to 13 colonies becoming one country here it refers to the different colors of ingredients being combined to make a new color so a little different, and it's always interesting how language can do that. You know really be used in very different ways. Same language, very different meaning. German has a lot of these words and phrases like kummerspeck which literally means grief bacon but refers to the excess weight that you put on from emotional eating, and I'm learning different idioms like that with a little
help from today's sponsor Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world and you can get started speaking a new language in as little as three weeks with the ease of their 15-minute lessons, and I'm actually brushing up on my German because I am planning a trip to Vienna in September and I you know want to be able to at least read the signs while I'm
over there and that's something that I love about Babbel. One it's kind of geared toward things like
travel and getting you ready for a trip, but it's also a wonderful way to brush up on a language
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regardless this is how you make it. You'll need two small heads of garlic, and I know he says four but I'm guessing he's making a massive amount of this because two is going to be very garlicky. A large handful of parsley, a large handful of cilantro or coriander leaf, a small handful of rue. If you can find it it's not something you're going to just be able to pick up at the store. [Jose] is growing it in [his] garden so I do have some fresh rue. You can get the dried kind online, I'll put a link
to that in the description. Though if you or anyone going to be having this is with child do not eat the rue. It is not good. In fact if you just don't want to have it at all or you can't find it just use celery leaf, it's similar. One teaspoon of salt, 10 ounces or 280 grams of white
cheese. I'm using fresh sheep's cheese. That's hard to say fresh sheep's cheese, but you can use any kind that you want to. He's not that specific but it does need to be white because he is specific about that. Then one tablespoon of olive oil and one tablespoon of white wine vinegar. So first peel your garlic and chop it up. Then chop your herbs and then he says to crush the garlic in a
mortar but he must have had a huge mortar because just those two cloves half filled up my mortar so
I very quickly switched to a food processor and I suggest you do the same. Then add the salt and the cheese, there is no way this amount of cheese would have ever fit in my mortar. Then add in the herbs and blend until as he said the white of the cheese and the green of the herbs have become one, e pluribus unum. Finally add the olive oil and the white wine vinegar and blend until smooth. Then set that aside as we make our bread. Now exactly what this bread is, is very hard to tell but it does seem that there is a depiction of it without toppings in another fresco from Pompeii, and it looks as if there's maybe some sort of trench running around just inside the edge of the bread possibly to keep the food from falling off like a pizza crust. Those breads were sometimes called mensae or singular mensa and would be similar to the trenchers of the Middle Ages. They were just there to kind of hold your food like a plate. In fact it means table, mensa meant table and these
tables are referred to in another Virgil poem called the 'Aeneid'. In it the hero Aeneas is given a
prophecy that he will establish a new city but not "Before a deadly famine has come upon you, and the guilt of our blood drives you to gnaw round the edges of your tables, to put them between your teeth and eat them." We'll flash forward and he and his men are now in Italy and they're eating a rather meager meal of some fruit piled atop bread, and then they start eating the bread and Aeneas
realizes "Look! We are eating even our tables!... This is our home." So in a way Italy was founded through the eating of pizza. Now to make this version of ancient Roman pizza what you'll need is one cup or 250 grams of active dough starter. Mine is from whole wheat but you can use a regular batch of sourdough starter either will work. Two cups or 475 milliliters of warm water, four cups or 500 grams of whole wheat flour, three tablespoons of olive oil, one tablespoon of salt, and two tablespoons of honey. Start by whisking the salt into the flour and then add your starter and the water. Combine these until somewhat Incorporated and then add in the olive oil and the honey, and work the dough for two to three minutes until everything is well combined. Note that you are not going to be kneading this dough like you would a traditional bread because you don't want it to puff up too big, it's still got to be a flatbread. Once it's become a nice cohesive dough put a little bit
more olive oil on the top and coat the dough. Then set a damp cloth on top and let it rise, and
you want this to rise rather slowly. It's going to kind of depend on how active your starter is, but at least 4 hours up to overnight like 10 or 12 hours would actually be preferable but it'll probably need to be in a cool place to do that in the refrigerator overnight will work but
eventually it will double in size, and then don't punch it down again like you would a normal dough but just gently take it out of the bowl, and put it onto a lightly oiled surface. Now we're going to form this into a circle and you can make one giant pizza but according to the Mosaic it looks like it's like more of a personal pan pizza so I divided my dough into fourths and then formed
those into circles, and you can use your fingers to make that sort of trench around the edge of the circle, and then put a little bit of olive oil in there to keep that part from rising as much as the rest. Now you can bake these on a baking sheet but if you want to more mimic that ancient Roman oven style then you can put it on a hot pizza stone in your oven, either way you're going to heat the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit or 260 Celsius, and then take that round piece of dough and set it on the stone. Now I very quickly realized that my ability to move round dough from one place to another into the oven is lacking so I quickly started putting some parchment underneath
the dough just better to transfer it then you can bake it for like two minutes and then the parchment will just come right out, and you can finish baking it on the stone for another eight
minutes, and while it finishes in the oven let us look at what else the archeology of Pompeii can teach us about ancient Roman baking. "A cloud from the mountain was ascending... [my uncle]
was now so close to the mountain that the cinders, which grew thicker and hotter the nearer he
approached fell into the ships, together with pumice stones, and black pieces of burning rock... The courtyard which led to his friend's apartment was so nearly filled with stones and ashes, that if my uncle lingered any longer, it would have been impossible for him to have made his way out." That was Pliny the Younger describing the hours before his uncle Pliny the Elder died a victim of Mount Vesuvius. He had gone there to save some friends of his who were trapped and could only get out by sea, and being the commander of the fleet in the area he had ships. Now Pliny the Elder did escape that Villa as it filled up with ash and pumice but he died soon after on the beaches from noxious gases coming down from the mountain. But little did he know that that ash that was burying his friends villa along with the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, well that ash would also preserve those places better than perhaps any from the ancient Roman world. Cold comfort to him but a boon for us 2,000 years later who can learn so much about ancient Roman life from
those sites. From the city's gladiators, to its brothels, to of course its food, and speaking of brothels and food 'Hic habitat felicitas', here dwells happiness. Sometimes translated as here dwells good fortune and those words are inscribed along with of all things a phallus and then hung above not a brothel, but a bakery because happiness indeed, bread is good fortune. Bakeries or pistrina are all over the archaeological sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum about 35 having been found so far. One of the most famous is the bakery of Modestus which when excavated in 1862 included 81 loaves of abandoned bread, the baker having fled the city with his baking still in progress. These loaves were the panis quadratus perhaps the most famous bread of ancient Rome which is depicted on several frescoes from Pompeii, and is made of eight sections formed by four lines hence the quadratus, and I did an entire video on this bread way back when I like first started the channel, it was just a few months in so I'll put that and you'll have to forgive the fact that I'm pretty sure I have no facial hair in that video. Now another famous bakery is that of Popidius Priscus and it's because his mill room where he has his giant millstones is so well preserved. He had four large millstones made of basalt lava and these were usually turned by donkeys. There's actually an ancient Roman poem called 'The Golden Ass' by Lucius Apuelius Africanus that describes this process. The poem is about a man who happens to get turned into a donkey and then it's his first person narrative of life as a human turned into a donkey and at one point he gets sold to a miller and walks in to one of these rooms with the millstones. "There numerous beasts endlessly turned millstones
of different sizes, not only by day but all night long the ceaseless turning of the wheels perpetually made flour... I was harnessed to the largest wheel, my head covered with a sack, and I was given a shove along the curving track." There are occasions where it was people doing this
back-breaking work though usually the stones would be quite a bit smaller, either slaves or the impoverished people who would just do anything for any kind of work. Even one of Rome's most famous playwrights Plautus was reduced to doing this work after he lost all of his money in a shipping accident. He would take a hand mill, a kern, and go door to door ask asking people if they had any grain to be milled. But regardless once your grain was milled you could make it into dough, and at the bakery of Popidius Priscus this was done in the next room over where he had massive mechanical paddles that would do the kneading. In fact at his and other large bakeries there was almost nothing done by hand except for the shaping of the loaves, and putting the stamp on them. These were sometimes
called signakculum, and were like putting a logo on your product but less for advertising and more for quality control, especially if it was bread that you were really, really proud of you didn't want other people's inferior bread to be confused with your brand so you put your
stamp on there and say this is Max's bread. Now giving out quality bread was very, very important,
not only for your business but it could even get you into public office. There are numerous pieces of graffiti in Pompeii that are endorsing people for public office, and one says "I beg you to elect Gaius Julius Polybius to the office of Aedile. He gives good bread." Other election graffiti in the city includes endorsements like "The chicken vendors request that you elect Epidius and Suetius as duovirs." And of course these cities bakers and millers got in on the endorsements as well because together they were very strong and influential groups almost like trade unions of the day and it really reminds me of that wonderful scene in the first season of the show Rome. The guild of millers uses only the finest grains, true Roman bread for true Romans." Just like this true Roman bread that should be ready to take out of the oven. So once baked remove the bread and make sure it's got a nice color on the bottom, and then let it cool just for a moment before you spread your moretum on top. Remember to use just a little bit because it
is very, very garlicky my entire house smells like garlic right now. Then you can top it with things like white cheese dates pomegranate or whatever else you thought you saw in the fresco, and here we are the pizza of Pompeii. Now again they probably would have just taken pieces
off of here and just eaten them at first you know take a date or pomegranate or whatever and eaten it, and then finish the bread and dipped it with some cheese and everything but I did a little slice just cuz why not. Here we go. Hmm. So garlicky. Like- to the point of spiciness, when you have so much garlic but its actually delicious but it is garlicky. I actually
want to just try the bread because it does kind of overwhelm. I put too much garlic on there, or not too much garlic- too much, too much of the moretum. Hmm! That bread is so flavorful, true Roman
bread for true Romans indeed, or for true Maxes. But I also think that like if you have
it with other things- I'm trying to- you can't see this. I'm trying to grab a- I've got some cheese on there, the moretum, and some pomegranate. Mhm, that sweetness cuts through. That's the way to do it. Now one thing that you'll notice is not on this is that ancient Roman condiment garum but I am finally making the the long version of garum, it is currently in my backyard. It doesn't smell as bad as I would have thought, it's slowly digesting itself, fish in salt. So that video will probably be out in the in the fall I'm thinking because it does need a couple more months in this in this hot sun, but yeah and I recently made a t-shirt with "You had me at garum" so I'll put that link in the description and I'll see you next time on Tasting History where I will have probably eaten all four of these and will
be a few pounds heavier.
