Literacy online teachers package

Online teachers packages Introduction Pre-visit activities Museum activities Touch the past Living in the past Roman recipes Telling the story Shops and shopkeepers Stories to tell Read all about it After your visit

Roman recipes

Purpose: For younger and less able children : to have recipes read aloud to them.
For older and more able children: to work independently, copying recipes with an understanding of the format

Gallery: Roman London

Suggested time: 10 minutes

Keywords: Instructional texts, Recipes, Headings, Lists, Bullet points

Background information

The Roman London gallery includes room reconstructions which show how wealthy people lived in Roman Britain. The reconstructed Roman kitchen and the larder to the left of it contain a wide variety of foods which the Romans ate. The kitchen also shows the range of cooking pots and saucepans that were used. Cooking utensils were often similar in shape and function to the ones we use today.

Much of the food and everyday pottery was supplied locally. The ‘amphorae’ or jars would have been filled with essential cooking ingredients such as fish sauce and olive oil. Very small amphorae would have contained dried fruits transported from as far away as Palestine. In large houses, food would have been cooked using charcoal-fired ovens like the one in this kitchen. Poor people would have cooked over simple hearths like the one in the craftworker’s room set earlier in the gallery.

Our knowledge of Roman food comes mainly from the work of Latin writers such as Apicius, who wrote a cookery book in the first century AD. Diet varied with social class. For most people the staple foods were coarse bread and bean or pea pottage or porridge. The rich ate a wider range of foods; meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit and delicacies such as milk-fed snails and stuffed dormice. Two of the most important ingredients in Roman cooking were ‘garum’ and ‘liquamen’, strong fish stocks used to flavour both sweet and savoury dishes.

Activities and questions

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	Reconstructed Roman kitchen

Look at the range of foods displayed in the larder and discuss the ingredients for Roman recipes. Which foods do the children recognise, and which are unfamiliar? Which are still used in cooking today? Look at the foods displayed in the kitchen and again discuss which are familiar or not to the children. Discuss the labour-saving devices in the kitchen, such as the ‘mortarium’ which was used with a stone or wooden pestle for grinding foods (the children can touch one of these). Encourage the children to look at the pots, implements and containers in the kitchen. Discuss how food would have been cooked in this kitchen, over slow-burning charcoal, amongst the embers or in the oven below, which was heated by lighting a fire inside and then raking out the ashes.

Ask the children to make a list of some of the foods on display (the spellings of unfamiliar words can be checked in dictionaries back at school). Look at the booklet on Roman food (on the left-hand side of the kitchen display). Read some of the recipes and look at the ingredients Roman cooks used. The children may be surprised or horrified by dishes such as stuffed dormice or by the ingredients of ‘garum’ or ‘liquamen’! If there is time, they could write down a recipe or two to take back to school, making sure they copy the recipe format.