It appears that it was through contact with Egypt that the ancient Romans learned to make a soft and very white bread. Soon the pistores (bakers) began to bake a marvelous variety of breads, later procuring the tender grains grown in Sicily and in North Africa, which displaced the old spelt cultivated by this time only in the most isolated or mountainous regions and used by the country folk.44 Wheat was ground by mills operated first by elbow grease, then by draft animals.
At some point, bread making left the home and became public, and consumers became increasingly exigent. In the first century B.C., Roman bakers produced breads made of wheat, rye, and barley, and very white bread for the wealthy patrician tables; Egyptian bakers created the fashion of fine, white Alexandrian bread. Many different kinds of bread were produced: panis cibarius, secundarius, and plebeius, in increasing order of bran content, panis furfureus was for animals, while special bakeries produced panis militaris and panis nauticus for soldiers and sailors. There were breads flavored with milk, honey, wine, oil, cheeses, candied fruits, spices, and fragrant herbs. There was even a panis ostrearius made expressly for serving with oysters. Often bread was molded into the most imaginative shapes: the satirist Martial reports an obscene loaf, created to serve to the mistress of the wealthy host of a banquet.
It follows that the Roman pistor (baker) was a personage of rank, aware of his own importance. Evidence of this is the monumental tomb, worthy of a consul, of the baker Eurysaces, which can still be admired today outside the Porta Maggiore in Rome.
Then the barbarians arrived, but in Rome, as elsewhere, people continued to grind wheat and make bread. A myriad of mills ground wheat for the city. Those built on dry land, called mole terragne (land mills),45 were powered by the numerous watercourses that ran through the city; others were built on the banks of the Tiber.
The historian Procopius of Caesarea, in his Gothic War, provides the first mentions of the Roman phenomenon of the floating mill. The Goths besieged Rome in A.D. 537, but that was not enough, and they took the drastic step of cutting off the flow of water through the aqueducts. In addition to depriving the people of water, that action brought to a halt all the city’s mills. But General Belisarius,46 in charge of defending the city, had the brilliant idea of mounting mills between pairs of boats anchored to the banks of the Tiber, alongside the Tiber Island, where the current was fastest. For many centuries to come, mills on the Tiber were to be an integral part of the Roman landscape. They proliferated until, by the eighteenth century, they posed real impediments to river traffic, but they remained in use until the end of the nineteenth century, when people were still having their grain ground for home use.
The mills were anchored to a masonry pylon attached to the riverbank. The pylon also served as a sort of escalator by which to reach the mill, and its resilience helped absorb the movements of the mill when the river was high. The mill proper was contained in a wooden house atop a large boat anchored with ropes and chains. Between the large boat and a smaller one next to it were the wheels that propelled the mills by their movement in the water. The small boat, the barchetto, was also anchored with ropes and chains. It was not rare, however, for the fury of the floodwaters to rip the fragile boats from their moorings and smash them against the bridges or the riverbanks. Sometimes the owners were lucky and managed to drag their boats back to their moorings without too much damage.
Mill operations were strictly regulated. The cost, in 1597, to mill a sack weighing 450 to 500 libbre47 was ten bolognini.48 A great deal of flour must have been used if Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) forbade milling to all but the bakers in order to keep track of the city’s monthly consumption of wheat.
The millers had a guild whose charter dates to 1496. They were bound by strict laws, and the wheat collected by their delivery boys had to travel with proper documents. The guild also dictated rules on the use of the marrane, the streams that ran through the city. The owners of the mills mounted over the waterways were not allowed to damage the surrounding gardens during loading and unloading, and once a year, they were obliged to clean the riverbed. Numerous laws and regulations administered by the state reflect the importance of the mills to feed the whole city. For example, among them was one that prohibited the requisitioning of horses in service to and from the mills.49
The bakers, or fornai, belonged to another guild. The weight of the bread was set by law, and the charter of 1481, still preserved at the headquarters of the Confraternity of Bakers in Rome, imposed a boycott on mills that “replace or ruin the flour” by adding nonwheat flour. The bakers were not allowed to sell bread to osteria operators or to caporali (“corporals,” who were obliged to buy from special military bakers), and bread could not be baked on Sunday.
Bread was always one of the principal components of the common people’s meals, and some simple bread-based recipes still exist in the cooking of Rome and Lazio. “Interpreted,” as modern cooks say, and embellished, their popularity as the opener of a typical Roman meal, and sometimes much more, is growing steadily. We speak of course of the celebrated panzanella, humble pancotto, and the now ubiquitous bruschetta.
The humble slice of chewy Roman bread, toasted, rubbed vigorously with a clove of garlic, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil right from the press (frantoio), and sprinkled with salt lay long forgotten. On the rare occasions that anyone made it, it was as a snack, or for children, and in any case was more suited to country houses, where it could be easily made by toasting the bread in the fireplace. Bruscare means simply “to toast.”
Today it is back in fashion. There is not a trattoria or restaurant, however smart, that does not serve some type of bruschetta as an antipasto. In other words, bruschetta has become the acid test of the gourmand’s boundless imagination—though sometimes perhaps excessive or misguided. That humble slice of bread laden with such varied toppings and sauces has lost all sense of its poor origins, but in compensation it has risen to the honors of the most tasty and recherché recipes.
Pasta, however, at least ready-made dry pasta in the imaginative shapes we know today, has been around for centuries, but its broad diffusion dates only to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when machines and industrialization, and the lower prices that followed, aided its spread all over the country. There is no doubt that, quite early and not only in Rome, every housewife every day kneaded water and flour to make the dough that, cooked in a vegetable soup, would be the main dish of the daily menu.
Homemade pasta50 has been handed down with the generic name of maccheroni, but the infinite variety of shapes ranges from gnocchetti and small fusilli to thin fettuccine and spaghetti. Already in the sixteenth century, Rome had its University of the Spaghetti Makers (guild of vermicellari), which means that the production and sale of pasta was already widespread there among the middle classes. Pasta sellers opened their shops in the area around the Pantheon, where their memory endures in such street names as Via dei Pastini and Via delle Paste.
Before the tomato was widely consumed, even by the poorest residents—a phenomenon that dates from the end of the 1700s—pasta was dressed almost exclusively with grated pecorino cheese or fried pork fat, with perhaps the help of garlic or onion or herbs. The survivor of that type of seasoning in Roman tradition is the famous battuto, a base for sauces made of pork fat, onion, and herbs, which is used to add flavor to nearly all the ancient soups of Lazio.
Rarely could the poor afford the luxury of egg pasta, though it was quite common among the leisured classes. Beginning in the seventeenth century, culinary texts speak of angel hair, capelli d’angelo, a type of egg pasta cut too thin for human hands ever to have made it. These were, in fact, the specialty of certain nuns, whose convents often sent them as gifts to new mothers or to sick members of important families with a rather curious ceremony. An important scholar of things Roman, Gaetano Moroni,51 gives an amusing description. The bearers of the precious gift, preceded by the families of the nobles, ramrod straight in their elaborate uniforms, marched ahead of the gift: “And immediately afterward, brought in by numerous