Andrew Donnelly (Texas Tech University) "Et grandes fumabant pultibus ollae: Foodways, Tradition, and Nostalgia at the Cusp of Empire"

Talk description:

The Romans love of puls--porridge--is analogous to an American fondness for chicken soup. Soup, of course, is an expression of love poured carefully into a bowl. It reminds you of grandma, and care given to you on a sick day home from school. It nourishes the soul. And this perception has been deliberately nurtured, and developed in part due to successful advertising campaigns based on nostalgia. Though expressed in different terms, Romans understood puls to be a foodstuff that restored and reminded one of simple, pure living. This food is often associated with the olla, the rounded cooking pot described by Michel Bats as "the vessel par excellence of Roman cuisine after the Bronze Age.” This paper scrutinizes the use of the olla and the porridge it produced, arguing that our textual evidence for Roman love of this meal is largely born from a similar sense of nostalgia, a manufactured understanding of the past formed by authors such as Cato, who stressed simplicity and fidelity to a somewhat imagined past as Rome was evolving into a Mediterranean power, and later accepted as fact by later authors such as Juvenal, for whom a pan-Mediterranean empire was the norm and the concept of puls as a necessary staple of a traditional, rustic Roman home had become reified.

Short Bio:

Andrew Donnelly is assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. His work focuses on textual and archaeological evidence for cooking and changing patterns of foodways in imperial and Late Antique Italy. He is currently working on a monograph on this topic and recently co-edited a volume on the relationship between sauces and identity.

This talk will not be recorded and will not be available on Zoom.