To better understand the distant past, it can help to taste and smell it.
TODAY THE BREAD IS CRISPED black as charcoal, and run through with cracks. A baker had kneaded and shaped the squat, round loaf, known as a panis quadratus, and slid it into an oven one day in A.D. 79, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. We all know what happened next.
Over the last couple of hundred years, since the ash-shrouded cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered, dozens of these loaves, carbonized by the sudden, searing heat of pyroclastic flows, have turned up. They’re relics of an astounding disaster, but there’s something intimate and familiar about them that collapses time and distance. You can imagine the routine of mixing and rolling the dough, the smell of fermenting starter, the sound of a perfect crust cracking under your thumb.
That scene had lodged itself in Farrell Monaco’s mind when she volunteered at the seemingly endless archaeological site last summer, with the Pompeii Food and Drink project. Monaco, who chronicles her adventures and research in ancient food on her blog, Tavola Mediterranea, helped document features there related to eating—from a restaurant to a small peasant kitchen to altars where animals were sacrificed. “If you gave me a huge research grant and a lifetime supply of water and sunscreen, you’ll likely find me camped out, alongside Enzo the stray dog, in one of Pompeii’s 35 bakeries,” she wrote.
Each morning, Monaco picked her way across the site early, before it was beset by throngs of tourists. These walks, she says, stoked her imagination. She wondered about daily routines from 2,000 years ago, when the volcano was of little immediate concern and bakers and cooks fussed to fortify the busy city. What smells drifted from ovens in the morning? How did lunch taste? In pursuit of answers, Monaco decided to recreate a panis quadratus and bring the past into her kitchen.
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