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MEDITERRANEAN KITCHEN

The more typical Roman cuisine, which is still making its influence felt in all the kitchens of the Western world, was several centuries in the making. Its beginnings were humble and austere. The first Romans were Sheherds and small farmers, holding a strip of territory along the Tiber. Like sheepo everywhere, those of the Romans needed salt, and their masters learned how to get it for them by evaporating sea water from the mouth of the river. When they began to make more salt than they needed for themselves and their sheep, they started a profitable export trade with the Greek settlements to the south and the Etruscans to the north. The early expansion of Rome and the subsequent development of the Roman Empire and its cuisine were based partly on trade in salt, which was for many centuries a precious commodity on which fortunes were founded. One of the principal higways leading out of Rome is still called Via Salaria, the Salt Road.

The staple dish of these first Romans was puls, or pulmentum. It was a kind of mush made from grain in those days usually millted or spelt, a primitive type of wheat, and sometimes chick-pea flour. Pulmentum could not have been a very inspring food, but it served to nourish the conquerors of the ancient world. It was the field ration of the Roman soldier, who recived daily about two pounds of the grain, which he roasted on a hot stone over his campfire, crushed, and put in his haversack. Whenever and wherever he might bivouac, the mixture was ready to be boiled into a more or less palatable gruel, which could be eaten as porridge or allowed to harden into a sort of unleavened scone, or cake. To this day the modern version of pulmentum, called polenta, can be eaten in either version soft (and heated), with about the consitency of mashed potatoes, or hard (and usually cold), when it can be sliced like a cake. As time passed, the basic ingredients of pulmentum changed. Millet and spelt gave way to barley; and when the Romans found barley too bland they replaced it with far, a more palatable kind of wheat than spelt. (In Brittany, cakes of coarsely ground grain are still called fars.). Today, made with corn meal, which was unknown to the Romans, polenta remains a national dish of Italy. The soft variety is equivalent to American corn-meal mush, and the ancient Romans often ate it like mush, with milk. Honey was sometimes added for invalids and cildren.

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