Ancient Web: A 1993 Usenet Cook Reconstructed Roman Dinner

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An ancient Roman dinner sounds daunting until a stranger on the early Internet tells you what to substitute for the fish sauce and how long to bake the pears.

Read the Antique Roman Dishes collection.

The preserved document opens with a name, email address, and timestamp: Micaela Pantke, July 22, 1993. It presents dishes from De re coquinaria, traditionally associated with Apicius, translated into English from a German-language edition prepared by Robert Maier.

The first useful section is a vocabulary list. Pantke explains caroenum, a concentrated grape must; passum, a sweet reduced wine; liquamen, a salty fish sauce; and other ingredients unfamiliar to the modern supermarket cook. Her suggested replacements sometimes involve salt, ordinary mint, and common kitchen herbs.

A cookbook passed through several languages

The table of contents includes Roman-style burgers called isicia omentata, melon dishes, fish soufflés, a pear casserole, chicken with herbs, stuffed dates and sweet egg dishes. Each entry offers ingredients in familiar quantities and ordinary kitchen directions.

Pantke is frank about the limitations. She admits uncertainty about translating particular herbs, notes that ancient recipes don't always specify temperatures or cooking times, and describes some substitutions as educated guesses. This makes the document valuable as a record of interpretation rather than a facsimile of ancient cooking.

The Carnegie Mellon-hosted page contains plain-text separators, capitalized dish headings, conversion tables, and an old academic email address. Its format resembles a mailing-list document preserved on a web server, not a contemporary food blog.

There are visible encoding artifacts and stray characters in the surviving rendering. That imperfection is part of the document's present condition and a reason not to assume every recipe is reproduced flawlessly.

The date belongs to the original electronic posting, not necessarily the first moment this particular university web URL existed. Its preservation value lies in retaining both the instructions and the voice of someone enthusiastically translating a classical source for other Internet users.

Explore the 1993 recipes and explanations.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.