In AD 79, a baker put his loaf of bread into the oven. Nearly 2,000 years later it was found during excavations in Herculaneum. The British Museum asked Giorgio Locatelli to recreate the recipe as part of his culinary investigations for the cinema production 'Pompeii Live from the British Museum'.
RECIPE:
INGREDIENTS:
600g biga acida (sourdough)
4 tsp sugar
4 tsp salt
c. 500ml water
500g spelt or buckwheat flour
500g wholemeal or plain flour
METHOD:
Mix the wholemeal and spelt flours together, and pour this on to your work surface. Create a large depression in the centre.
Dissolve the salt and sugar into the water. Mix the sourdough into the flour bit by bit, pouring it into the well you’ve just created. Once the sourdough is roughly mixed, begin to pour the water into the well slowly, mixing gently with your hands. Mix until all the water is gone, and any excess flour is incorporated into the dough. You will end up with a rough ball.
Start kneading the dough gently, folding it back on itself so it can ‘take in’ some air. Knead for a few minutes until you can form it into a smooth ball.
Flatten the ball slightly as in the video, and transfer it to an oiled baking tray. Cover it, and leave it to rise for 1.5-2 hours in a warm room. While you’re waiting, perhaps investigate some other ancient recipes to enjoy your bread with!
The next two steps are optional, but if you’re going for historical accuracy here, they’re a must. Cut a piece of string long enough to go round your risen dough, with a bit left over to tie a knot. Wrap the string around the sides of the dough, pull it tight so it makes a lip around the side, and tie a knot to secure it.
Now, take a knife to score the top into eight equal segments. Real loaves from the Roman period were often stamped too. If you want, now’s the time to add your own stamp. It could be your initials or whatever you want, but bear in mind that your stamp must be oven-proof, and will need to be weighed down during baking with something heavy (like baking beans wrapped in foil).
Bake for 30-45 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius (around 400 degrees Fahrenheit). Keep an eye on your loaf so it doesn’t come out looking carbonised like the one from Herculaneum!
Let it cool and enjoy your Roman bread!
HISTORY:
In response to the many interesting, thoughtful and sometimes amusing comments we've received for this video, we've asked Paul Roberts, the curator of our Pompeii exhibition 'Life and Death in Herculaneum', to give us the academic background:
It was one of the Romans’ great boasts at table that they could serve white flour bread at fine banquets (at normal tables they might well have eaten poorer grades of wheat or other grains, such as spelt or barley, and even beans, lentils or chestnuts.)
You will see that Giorgio scores the loaf: I’ve examined lots of the loaves and I am convinced that they are scored. It's important to remember that the loaves survived because they were carbonised. They have, in effect, shrunk somewhat from their original form, because of the loss of liquid on exposure to the sudden blast of heat form Vesuvius - conservatively estimated at 400 degrees centigrade. All other foodstuffs - figs, beans, grain etc are noticeably smaller than they ought to be - and there is no reason the same shouldn’t be true of bread.
This could explain why the scoring and the stamp seem implausibly clear - in effect they may have contracted to a smaller (and in the case of the stamp, more legible) form. This carbonisation must, I think, be taken into account and means the loaves when complete and fresh from the oven may have looked very different from how we see them now - not just in colour.
13 июн 2013
