GUYS. THERE WAS DRIVE-THROUGH IN ANCIENT ROME. FINDING OUT THIS ALONE IS WORTH THE COST OF MY MASTERS IN HISTORY.
[From Daily Life of the Ancient Romans by David Matz]
*rolls up to the window* yeah gimme a number V combo
“I’ll have two number IXs, a number IX large, a number VI with extra ambrosia, a number VIII, two number XLVs, one with cheese, and a large goblet of wine.”
hail, I am Gaius Furius, welcome to Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives
“YEAH CAN I GET A FVCKIN VVVVHHH….VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVHHHHHHHHH…BVRGER?”
TL;DR - Yes, Ancient Roman cities had fast food outlets; No, they didn’t have drive-throughs because most vehicles were prohibited
except when making deliveries at set times
.
***
You just tagged me, and it pushed so many buttons, because our research for “Games” (optioned twice so far, though not produced either time) showed us that when it comes to comparing Ancient Roman eating habits with now - and particularly the US - the similarities are remarkable.
The usual name (though see below) was a “thermopolium”, meaning “Hot Food Here”, and archaeologists estimate there were about 300 thermopolia in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
This sounds like a lot, but lower-class Roman tenement dwellings (”insulae”) were usually just somewhere to sleep; there was no bathroom, no toilet and no kitchen. So besides their work all other parts of citizens’ lives, from bathing and eating to peeing and pooping, also happened away from home, in non-domestic facilities like public baths, public latrines (the Guilds of Fullers and Tanners thank you for your contributions) and eating-houses like thermopolia, tabernae and popinae.
The archaeologists think these three words may have been interchangeable, or subject to dialect variations, but saying that Ancient Rome had Diners, Drive-ins and Dives is as close to true as makes no never-mind. There were no Roman “fine dining” restaurants, since meals of that category would be eaten at home with invited guests as part of social networking, but though upper-class Romans looked down on the D, D-I & D establishments, there’s written evidence that they ate from them regardless.
Think of them as a cross between fast-food outlets, gastropubs and tapas bars.
Here’s a reconstruction:
Here are a few examples of real ones, all similar but each different:
Pots of prepared food were set in those counter recesses. I haven’t
found out if there was a way to keep it hot, but the design looks like
there might have been a charcoal brazier at one end sending hot air
through the counter-space on the same principal as a hypocaust (Roman
under-floor central heating), otherwise why make the counter of stone
rather than wood?
@dduane suggests it may be because old bricks and broken rubble were easier to
find, but IMO these were built with more care than just “because it’s
cheap”.
The second two have a side that obviously faces the street (they would all have done, it’s just more obvious in those pics) which is where takeaway would have happened. Customers wanting to eat in would have moved along the indoor side of the L-shaped counter.
———-
As for takeaway, it didn’t include Drive-In or Drive-Through as we’d know it. Roman cities were almost entirely pedestrian so Walk-In or Walk-Through was more likely, but there might be a certain amount of Stop-In-Front-For-Takeaway by hungry deliverymen, ignoring vulgar cries in Vulgar Latin along the lines of “get that bloody cart out of the bloody way!”
Even then it wouldn’t happen at peak times since, except for unusual circumstances, deliveries were restricted to and had to be completed within set hours before and after the business day. Roman writers including Martial and Pliny bitch about being woken at early o’clock by squeaky axles, braying mules and swearing drivers as fresh provisions arrived for sale.
This reconstruction shows the ruts in the road for cart-wheels…
…and these are the real thing, which along with the frequent crossing-stones restricted what size of vehicle could enter the city: local delivery wagons drawn by a single mule, yes, out-of-town heavy freight drawn by a yoke of oxen, no.
There’s a longstanding chicken-and-egg argument over what came first, carts making ruts in soft lava rock, or ruts cut into rock to control carts. Since ruts of the same size (supposedly recycled in the Industrial Revolution as the size of Standard Gauge railway track, YMMV on that) appear on roads in other parts of the Empire which aren’t made of soft lava rock, my two sesterces is on deliberate cutting.
———-
Okay, so what kind of food did these places serve? Those keep-hot pots (dolias) would have contained vegetables like onions, carrots, leeks, cabbage, etc., also stews of beans, lentils,
fish and some cheap kind of meat; since this was poor or at least not-rich people’s food, that meat would have been
the inner bits most modern diners don’t want to know about. Not that organ meat worried the Romans; they were nose-to-tail diners in the way that was common throughout history until about 150 years ago.
This 1st-century terracotta relief supposedly shows a basic meal of fish, bread (top left), possibly cheese (bottom left) and an egg (bottom right); there’s a knife (top) and spoon (bottom) to eat with, a cup and a pannier for drink. So far so good.
However IMO what it may show is a kitchen table in the classic cookery demo top-down view. Those two fish are about to be cut up using the
knife (top centre right with a curved horn(?) handle and possibly a sheath) then cooked in the pan on the right. There’s a spoon to stir and taste (bottom right), and the egg, bread and cheese(?) are either other ingredients or meant to accompany the pieces of cooked fish when they go into the bowl at top centre left.
Okay, I’m guessing; but it’s a fair guess. :->
Fast food would also have included bread, fresh and dried figs and other fruit, olives, cheese, honey, shellfish, eggs raw and hard-boiled, dried and smoked meat and fish, olive oil and, inevitably, garum, the (in)famous Roman fish sauce to which the entire Empire was addicted. They had FACTORIES to make the stuff though like tanneries, they were built well away from human - or at least wealthy - habitation.
Internet pages delight in focussing on the “Ew, rotted fish guts!” aspect; the Romans for their part would have looked at tomato ketchup and said “hang on, tomatoes are deadly nightshade in a party frock” before falling on them with delight because Ancient Roman recipes suggest a real fondness for sweet-sour. Anyway garum’s not rotted, it’s fermented with lots of salt like Worcestershire and Tabasco.
You know how modern foodstuffs are packaged in distinctive containers so you can spot them easily? Garum did it too.
Some Roman fast-foods were surprisingly familiar: kebabs (meats grilled on spits, including more inner bits); pizza (more of a foccacia or flatbread, drizzled with oil, sprinkled with herbs, topped with cheese and / or bits of meat or smoke-cured salami); burgers (grilled chopped-meat patties using yet more inner bits) and hot-dogs (various sausages including the famous Lucanian Sausage, smoked pork with herbs and pine-nuts).
We don’t know if Roman bakers produced small loaves - what we’d know as buns - for the sausages and burgers; it’s more likely that if eaten modern-style, they’d be
seasoned with pepper and a dash of garum, then rolled in a flatbread wrap
or put into a split section of the standard Roman panis quadratus loaf, like these on a Pompeii fresco…
…or this actual loaf, somewhat overbaked by Mount Vesuvius.
As mentioned before, there was no ketchup, but there were several kinds of mustard from mild to pungent, including ones made with water, wine, vinegar, honey and of course garum.
The Romans didn’t have popcorn (like tomatoes, maize was still an Atlantic Ocean away) but roasted crunchy chickpeas - in new leek’n’garum flavour! - were a direct equivalent.
Some of what follows is known historical fact; some of the rest is logical extrapolation from research for our “Games” project.
01010101010101010111-deactivate asked: All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?
I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.
But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.
There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.
This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.
So is the German submarine U-55.
She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.
The second torpedo hits the engine room.
Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.
The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.
She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.
The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.
Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.
There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.
This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.
And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.
There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.
U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.
HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.
She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.
U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.
Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.
But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.
The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.
The Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle, Alyson Publications, inc, 1992:
[“The next morning I went down to the drugstore (the same one where I had found The Well of Loneliness) to get a cup of coffee and bought the newspaper and started looking for the police reports, where most arrests were reported in the paper. My father religiously read the police reports, so I knew he was going to find out about it if it was in the police report. It wasn’t there, and I was so relieved. Then I turned to see what the news of the day was and the headline said, “64 Women, 1 Man Arrested.” There were all kinds of remarks about what kind of bar it was, about the sign saying “no males allowed.”
That night we had to go to court and I discovered then that they had raided every gay bar in New Orleans. It was like a big cleanup. I had never seen so many gay people in my whole life; I had no idea that there were so many gay people. It was really exciting! I almost forgot to be scared about whether I would be convicted or not. My case was dismissed, but I think that set me free in some way.
EB: Were the other cases dismissed?
DL: I think they were. There may have been instances where people were found guilty of something: usually the charges were things like “wearing the clothes of the opposite sex” for drag queens and for butch lesbians, or “no honest, visible means of support.” It was true; most of us didn’t have any honest, visible means of support. If you chose to dress in such a way that clearly identified you as gay, it was impossible to get any kind of straight job, assuming you would want one. Most often all of these charges were dismissed when you came before a judge; I don’t know why particularly, except that I believe the arresting was intended as a kind of harassment— when it was intense enough it drove people away.
Some of us didn’t have any other place to go. We were just caught every time they happened to walk in when we were there. Whereas for other people, just being there in that bar was one of the riskiest things they’d ever done in their lives. If they even witnessed an arrest, even if they didn’t get taken in, it was usually sufficient to scare them away for years to come. You see how this kind of stuff works to limit what kinds of risks people take. When I look back at that now, I am really amazed that people were persistent; I really wonder why I was unconscious that I was part of a resistance.
You can guess what happened to the lives of all those women as a result of that raid. Most of them were closeted, were from New Orleans, many of them living with their families and with jobs. I think they thought they were pretty safe there in that bar. It was probably shocking to them to get included in that sweep.
Back at home, I was just dismissing it by saying “Well, I just went to see what kind of bar it was and it happened to be that night.” My father didn’t pursue it, but my brother, who was a year younger than I, was really freaked out by this. When I had gotten out of reform school, he had this girlfriend whom he was really crazy about and could hardly wait to have me meet her. I did meet her, and gradually she began to follow me around and to take my side in the arguments we had and stopped seeing him. What I discovered later was that everybody in the neighborhood was speculating that I was a lesbian and they literally did follow us around and peek in windows to see if we were kissing. I think he was angry about this kind of stuff when here I got arrested in this bar and it’s real clear that I was a lesbian. He became hostile and we had a really bad fight in which I was hurt and that’s when I left home.
I was hurt real bad and I called up this woman whom I had been seeing from the Goldenrod and told her what was happened and she said, “Take a cab and come over.” I wound up living with her for a while. Actually I wound up living with her off and on for a year and a half.
But then I was free. The cat was out of the bag. I didn’t have anybody that I had to worry about anymore and I could go ahead and explore whatever it was I wanted to do. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do to make a living; I didn’t even think about it. I had lived in a family or in a number of families where nobody was really in a profession. I guess my godfather, who was a merchant seaman, was the most in a profession of anyone that I knew. The only person that I knew that went to college was my mother— somebody famous from her hometown had put her through college. So I didn’t have too many notions about what I was going to do. I always knew I wasn’t going to get married, but I didn’t have any plans about what I was going to do to take care of myself.
Then I began dressing up and wearing these clothes that were taboo before. I had already had short hair, but now I really began to go at it, and I got a crew cut and blue suede shoes like Elvis Presley was singing about.“]
Les statues meurent aussi (Ghislain Cloquet,
Chris Marker & Alain Resnais, 1953).
Statues also Die is a good film for those interested in art and museums. Commissioned and partially paid by Présence Africaine it was released in 1953. The film shows how the treatement of African art (called Art Nègre at the time and considered simpler) and Colonialism erased African cultures and denied African and Black people the dignity of their past. It was forbidden as in the ‘50 French still had colonies in Africa, it was allowed on 1963.
Although there were planes used against the miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain, it is not true that this was the first time planes were used to drop bombs on American soil against Americans.
The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes.
Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history.
Ask yourself why neither was taught to you in school. Also ask your local school board.
so after a couple days of scrolling through old social registers from the 1910s and 1920s, i think i have finally amassed the ultimate list of utterly insane old money names. i am going to use every single one of these as an alias in one way or another, starting with marmaduke corbyn and miss elinor vandegrift
Okay, here’s the thing though. It isn’t a question of if. They existed and this is exactly what they did.
After the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941 and Germany subsequently declared war upon it, Great Britain recommended several steps the United States should take in order to safeguard their ships from Nazi u-boats. Recommendations included sailing ships in convoy (preferably with escort, but records proved ships in convoy without escort were still safer than ships sailing alone), if a ship had to sail on its own, it should avoid known navigation routes and markers, and towns and cities along the East Coast should adhere to strict blackouts at night. These recommendations came from the previous two years of experience in which u-boats absolutely ran wild in the North Atlantic and North Sea, obliterating British shipping. This period of time was referred to by Nazi u-boat captains as “The First Happy Time”.
Despite British warnings, the United States was slow to follow them and impose restrictions. Ships continued to sail along marked navigation routes and run standard navigation lights at night. Boardwalk communities along the coast were only requested they turn off their lights at night and the cities weren’t even asked that because they didn’t want to offend the tourism, recreation, and business sectors.
Blacking out coastal communities would have made it infinitely harder for Nazi submarines to find and sink targets. A ship running with no lights is still visible against the backdrop of a lit city.
Conversely, a dark ship running against a dark coast is virtually invisible.
But because citizens living on the coast refused to adhere to wartime suggestions for amenity reasons, merchant ships sailing up and down the East Coast became sitting ducks of u-boats. The US government did not begin strictly enforcing blackouts until roughly August 1942. By then, the Nazis had been given 8 months to run rampant along American shores. This time period was referred to by u-boat captains as “The Second Happy Time” or “American Shooting Season”.
By August, Nazi u-boats had sunk 609 merchant vessels, totaling 3.1 million tons and costing thousands of lives, mostly of merchant mariners performing their essential jobs.
By comparison, only 22 u-boats were sunk.
While the failure of coastal blackouts were not the sole reason the Nazis had such success during this time period (the Navy was slow to implement convoys and remove notable aids to navigation along the coast), I do not think it can be argued they did not contribute significantly to such great loss of American lives.
Okay I was like there is no WAY that there was a period called “the happy time” cause of the amount of shipping sunk, but this checks out. Source
In an effort to share a little black and queer history during this turbulent Pride month, here’s a comic about one of my favorite musicians, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Don't give up. Unless you have to for a little while. Then don't panic. CONTAINS: Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, Critical Role, History, Current Affairs, Space, Cats, and Etc. Adult.
