Game cookery, Roman style

Philip Womack delves into antiquity to discover how our forebears prepared, cooked and served game meat, from boar to dormice

- Philip Womack

The Roman orator Cicero thought that being a cook was a disgraceful occupation. Despite cooking’s connections with the sacred — at a public sacrifice, celebrants would scoff the meat, leaving the gods to enjoy the smell — the skill was very much associated with the lower classes. No ancient Nigella dispensed advice on roasting dormice with a winning smile and a wink.

We don’t have much evidence from antiquity about how the everyday ancients actually cooked. There is quite a lot of food in the literature, ranging from the heroic to the ridiculous. When, in Virgil’s epic Latin poem the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas shoots seven stags to feed his men, they polish them off immediately. No hanging is necessary. The men flay the hides and chop up the carcasses. Some eat an early form of venison kebab. Others simply boil it.

Similarly, the heroes of Homer’s Greek poem the Iliad subsist on cattle they’ve raided from local towns. They do this despite being camped right next to the sea and a river. Perhaps they thought fishing was beneath them. They also season their wine with onions. An excellent pick-me-up before a day’s hunting and besieging. I dare you to try it next time you’re in the field. There’s room for homeliness, too: when Odysseus returns, after his long voyage, back home, we find a housekeeper putting out bread and olives.

Parody

Anything that smacks of decadence or excess was always suspect in antiquity. We can see this in one of the most remarkable things to survive from Latin literature: a marvellous parody of a late Roman feast. This is in Petronius’s