Pangiallo – yellow bread
In the Latium region to this day, one of the typical Christmas cakes is the so-called yellow bread – pangiallo. Its roots go back to the era of the Roman Empire.
The world of ancient Romans abounded in a number of amazing curiosities and information. The source of knowledge about the life of the Romans are mainly works left to us by ancient writers or discoveries. The Romans left behind a lot of strange information and facts that are sometimes hard to believe.
In the Latium region to this day, one of the typical Christmas cakes is the so-called yellow bread – pangiallo. Its roots go back to the era of the Roman Empire.
One of the favourite delicacies of the ancient Romans was snails fattened with milk. Varro or Pliny the Elder mention that rich Romans enjoyed snails from their own farms.
Cream recipe by Marcus Gavius Apicius, a gastronome from the times of Octavian Augustus and Tiberius.
The late-Roman Codex Theodosianus, which is a collection of Roman laws, mentions that a Roman soldier should be equipped with a buccellatum ac panem, vinum quoque atque acetum, sed et laridum, carnem verbecinam, or “hardtack and bread, wine too and vinegar, but also bacon and mutton”(VII.4.6). Hardtack, vinegar and mutton were to be enough for two days, and then the soldier was to use bread, wine and bacon.
In 1930 in Herculaneum there was excavated from the ground bread (pane), dated to 79 CE. In 2013, the British Museum asked chef Giorgio Locatelli to recreate a recipe for a Roman loaf of bread.
What is for us today ketchup or mustard, for the Romans was garum. Garum was an addition necessary in exquisite Roman cuisine.
It appears in most of the recipes preserved in the work “De re coquinaria” of Apicius.