Ancient Roman “Paella“: Street food from antiquity?

You might have heard of the recent discovery of the thermopolium in Pompeii by archaeologists: a street food shop with remains of duck bones, pork, goat or sheep, fish and snails still intact in its cooking pots. The combination of these ingredients might seem strange to us, but just think of paella (without the rice, though). Further analyses of the contents are not yet finished or published. So far we don’t know, for example, what kinds of vegetables were part of that dish. Fortunately for us, there is an extremely similar ancient Roman dish described in Apicius’ recipe collection that we can recreate: “GUSTUM VERSATILE“ (Apicius Liber IV.V) The dish is astonishingly tasty, especially, I think, when combined with rice, which is historically rather incorrect: rice was known to Romans but was a highly prized exotic luxury.