ABSTRACT
In the fourth or fifth century ce a collection of recipes from unknown writers was compiled under the pseudepigraphical name Apicius. Interestingly, six of the recipes in the collection recommend dishes for good digestion. To determine whether the foods mentioned by ancient writers were common or exotic, this chapter compares the food remains found in the archaeological record with literary and technical treatises of the first and second centuries ce. One of the earliest methods used in archaeological excavations for identifying the layouts of Roman gardens was taking root casts. Making casts of plant roots involves filling the voids left by biological remains in the hardened lava and soil with plaster. Seventy-seven foods were identified in the archaeological record, and Galen wrote about sixty-nine of them. The foods Galen did not refer to were specific classifications of fish and shellfish, which might have been implied when he wrote generally about these foods.
