Much has been written about the ancient Roman diet, but very little attention has been paid to Roman sweets and desserts and even less to their dessert pastries. Yet, Roman pastry chefs appear to have been every bit as advanced as those of the 21st century.
Because Greek was the primary language for much of the empire, and many surviving texts for Roman food history were written in Greek rather than Latin, much of what is known today about the Roman kitchen is synonymous with the later Greek kitchen. The names of pastries, cakes and biscuits are often Greek.
The sources for Roman dishes range from pure cookbooks such as Apicius, a Latin collection of recipes from the 4th or 5th century CE, to the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, a Greek dialogue from the 3rd century CE that just so happens to take place at a banquet and occasionally touches upon food and drink.
Ingredients and Tools for Roman Dessert Pastries
The Roman kitchen lacked many of the ingredients today closely associated with pastry making and dessert baking. Many cooks today would be lost without refined sugar, but the Roman baker would not have known what to do with it. He used honey, which lent its flavour to whatever dish he was making.
Nor would the Roman pastry chef have used butter. Butter was known to the Romans, but primarily used as a salve rather than an ingredient in food. Fat in baking would rather have come from a variety of soft cheeses, washed carefully with fresh water to remove the salt in which they were preserved.
Though the Romans were familiar with sourdough they had no easily accessible leavening agent for cakes, such as baking powder, but they could still produce light cakes that rise slightly when baked. The trick was to beat eggs well and use a high egg to flour ratio.
That today indispensible baking tool, the rolling pin, appears to have been unknown in the Roman era and dough was probably stretched by hand. There is, however, some indication in the ancient sources that they had a tool similar to the cookie press.
Roman Baklava, Sponge Cake, Danishes, Doughnuts and Cookies
The placenta was a pastry made from many layers of thinly stretched dough, made from cheese, egg and flour. The pastry spread cheese between the layers and topped the completed dish with honey. The end result would have been similar to the baklava so popular in the eastern Mediterranean today.
The sometimes elaborate Danish pastry also has a Roman forerunner. This artistic pastry, known as spira, was made from the same type of dough as the placenta. The bottom layer was coated in honey, but instead of adding more layers the chef rolled the dough into rope with which he created spiral patterns on top of the honey. The interstices were then filled with honey and cheese.
The enkythoi was an ancient precursor to the modern sponge cake. It is attributed, in the writings of Athnaeus, to the Lydians in Asia Minor. This simple cake consisted of stiffly beaten eggs, honey and flour.
The doughnut too has ancient Roman precursors. Known as a globi, and named for its round shape, it was a pastry made from equal amounts of cheese and flour. The globi was then fried in a bronze dish full of either animal fat or oil, depending on the cook’s preferences.
A curious derivation from the globi was a fried cookie of sorts, called encyta. It follows the same recipe as the globi, but was pressed through a tube into equal shapes, as if though using a modern cookie press. In this shape, the doughnut-cookie was then fried and served with either honey or a mixture of honey and wine, presumably for dunking or as glazing.
The Romans also had many types of sweet biscuits. Glykinai were biscuits sweetened with wine, enkrides were biscuits fried in olive oil and dipped in honey, and itrion were thin biscuits made from sesame seeds and honey.
Roman Pastry Baking at Home
Those interested in recreating ancient Roman recipes will find that there are many books available, such as Mark Grant's Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens and Ilaria Gozzini Giacossa's A Taste of Ancient Rome.
Sources
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae.
Cato, De agricultura.
Leon, E.F., “Cato’s Cakes” in The Classical Journal, 38:4 (1943), 213-221.
Smith, E.M., “Some Roman Dinner Tables” in The Classical Journal, 50:6 (1955), 255-270.
Solomon, J., “Tracta: A Versatile Roman Pastry” in Hermes, 106:4 (1978), 539-556.
Emma Oxenby Wohlfart - E P Wohlfart decided at age 14 that she was going to move to Scotland for university. Once there, she often sat in class thinking to ...
