food

When Le Ménagier de Paris (1393), a medieval household manual detailing a woman's proper behavior in marriage and running a household, was newly translated and republished as The Good Wife’s Guide: a Medieval Household Book by the Cornell University Press in 2009, its collection of recipes – including one for bochet – became easily available to the general public...

Introduction

The vertical monolithic olive mill of the type of mola olearia which, like the Roman trapetum, first appeared during the Hellenistic era and spread all over the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, surviving until the 20th century 1 .

Bottle gourds, which are thought to have originated in Africa, have been collected and cultivated in Italy since antiquity for the making of vessels and utensils, as well as food, musical instruments, and fishing buoys. Columella and Pliny the Elder both write extensively about the uses of bottle gourds, yet the importance of this vegetable in antiquity is notably absent from modern scholarship...

Most of the population of Roman Italy was poor, whether they were the poor who were constantly in search for food and shelter, or the temporarily poor who were artisans or shopkeepers but could fall into poverty at times. In classical literature, pleasures of the mind were favoured over pleasures of the body. Epictetus wrote that only stupid men spent time dwelling on matters of the body such as eating...

Introduction

Anus iacere vidit epotam amphoram, Adhuc Falerna faece ex testa nobili Odorem quae iucundum late spargeret. Huncpostquamtotisavidatraxitnaribus: «O suavis anima. quale te dicambonum Antehacfuisse, tales cum sintreliquiae?» Hoc quo pertineat, dicet qui me noverit.

In Romania, in recent years, numerous cultural events and projects have been developed to reconstruct some aspects of everyday life from the past, or to promote archaeological sites (Ardeleanu, 2012, pp.72-73). One of these sites is the Porolissum Archaeological Reserve (Sălaj County). It includes an important prehistoric centre (with discoveries from the Neolithic Age, Bronze Age, Hallstat, and...

Earth ovens may relate to different ancestral cooking techniques, serving specific needs and functions. In eastern and south-eastern Australia, they were a significant element of a thriving pre-colonial Aboriginal culture. However, today it is extremely rare to find such structures well preserved. Based on archaeological and historical records...

The international workcamp in Calafell

The workcamps in Calafell are coordinated by the Fundació Pere Tarrés, a non-profit organisation of social action devoted to the promotion of leisure education and volunteering among other objectives, and the municipality of Calafell is one of the organisations that support these workcamps. So far La Ciutadella Ibèrica has held three of these projects (2010, 2012 and 2013) with international volunteers being the core theme of the activity.

For a BBC program in 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler tasted a reconstruction of the Tollund Man’s last supper, which turned out to be a tasteless mush. This led him to announce: "I believe that the poor chap of Tollund committed suicide because he could stand his wife's cooking no longer!"...