Pompeii Set the Table: What the Dead Left Behind

There is a bakery in Pompeii where the bread is still in the oven.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Carbonised loaves, scored across the top in the Roman way — each one divided into eight portions, stamped with the baker's name so that if a loaf went missing in the chaos of the market, everyone would know whose hands had made it. When Vesuvius came down in AD 79, Modestus the baker had just loaded the oven. The fire that preserved him also preserved his work. Nearly two thousand years later, archaeologists pulled out eighty-one loaves and counted them. Someone had been feeding people, right up until the moment the world ended.

I think about this more than is probably healthy.

I think about it because food — the act of feeding people, the daily decision to nourish rather than to take — is the most persistent human impulse we have. More persistent than empire. Alexander of Macedon built the largest empire the ancient world had seen, stretched from Greece to the edge of India, died at thirty-two, and within a generation his generals had carved the whole thing into competing kingdoms. Nothing remained coherent. But the bread in Modestus's oven remained. The everyday act of making something to eat outlasted the grandest architecture of conquest.

Historians and archaeologists working through the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been cataloguing a world that was, by any measure, gastronomically serious. There were one hundred and fifty-eight thermopolia in Pompeii — the Roman equivalent of a street-food counter, a hole-in-the-wall with a stone counter fitted with terracotta jars, each one containing a different preparation. Lentils. Spiced wine. Salted fish. Olives in brine. The archaeologists found residues of duck, pork, fish, snails, and beef in these vessels. They found traces of flavourings. They found evidence of the kind of daily, unheroic, absolutely essential cooking that sustains a city and never receives a single line in the official histories.

This is always how it goes. We remember the emperors and forget the cooks. We remember the generals and forget the women grinding grain before dawn. The historical record is a long exercise in misplaced attention.

What the excavations at Pompeii force us to confront — and what I find genuinely moving, in the way that only the collision of the ancient and the intimate can be — is how little the fundamentals have changed. A Roman street vendor selling spiced lentils from a counter on a warm evening in a port city is not so different from a vendor selling pastizzi on a Valletta street corner, the pastry still warm, the ricotta still yielding. The Mediterranean table, in its bones, is a continuous tradition. It absorbed the Romans and the Arabs and the Normans and the Spanish and the British and it kept going, adjusting, incorporating, refusing to be entirely displaced.

My mother made a dish she called imqarrun il-forn — baked pasta, dense with meat sauce and egg, the kind of thing that requires the whole afternoon and rewards you completely. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers, in a chain of transmission that goes back through layers of occupation and influence to a time when the island sat at the crossroads of everything that moved through the Mediterranean. When I eat it, I am eating Roman garrison food adapted by Arab spice traders and passed through Norman kitchens and French-influenced Sliema households until it arrived, improbably, in my mother's oven in the 1980s. Food is not just culture. It is the most durable form of archaeology we have.

The Pompeii evidence confirms something that anyone who has spent serious time in food history already knows: the ancient Mediterranean world ate with sophistication and pleasure and something that looked very much like joy. They had fast food and fine dining and everything in between. They had food stalls that catered to the poor and elaborate dinner parties where the host's status was measured by the extravagance of what he served. They had strong opinions about garum — the fermented fish sauce that appears in virtually every Roman recipe that survives, the ancient ancestor of every Worcestershire sauce and fish sauce and anchovy paste in your kitchen right now, whether you know it or not.

Garum. I want to sit with this for a moment, because it is one of the great examples of the Fallow