Grab-and-Go Breakfast

Wherein we breakfast a little like the Romans: with bread, but without belching.

Breakfast is seldom a luxurious meal filled with slow-cooked dainties. In fact, if you look up the most common description for breakfast foods, you’ll find our strong preference for “grab-and-go” items: something we can snatch and shove in our food holes as we race to work or school. Cereal, toast, whole-grain bars or yogurt—it really doesn’t matter so long as it requires minimal faffing about in the kitchen.

Ientaculum? I Just Eat’Um

The ancient Romans were the same. Their ientaculum, or meal taken around sunrise, was usually eaten on the run as the Romans began their day. The first-century CE poet Martial gives an example of the “up-and-at-em” nature of the Roman ientaculum when he encourages a reader, “Arise, already the baker is selling boys their breakfast.”

The primary food for a Roman breakfast was also similar to ours: bread. For those who couldn’t stop at the local baker for a fresh loaf, bread left over from the previous day was dipped in wine to soften and flavor it; some people spread honey on the bread to make the ancient equivalent of a breakfast pastry.

The morning bread was frequently supplemented with other food in the home: a handful of olives or raisins, perhaps a bit of cheese or even a little meat. Martial, quite the food (and other things) snob, sniffed about the vegetables eaten by manual laborers, “Beets are wholesome, but oh so bland—Breakfast of carpenters, you understand.”

While such simple food made up ientaculum for most Romans, the wealthy could live it up in higher style. J.P.V.D. Balsdon tells us Vitellius (third in the “Year of the Four Emperors” (69 CE)) was a grotesque example:

Only that gourmand of all time, the emperor Vitellius—who, thanks to emetics, wolfed down three or four good meals a day and was sometimes drunk and stuffed by lunch time—turned the ientaculum into a serious meal. On his way out to assume the post of commander of the army of Upper Germany in A.D. 68, ‘at pothouses and inns…he was unusually affable to travellers. Every morning he asked them if they had had breakfast, and gave a great belch to show that he had breakfasted himself.’

So when in Rome—or Poughkeepsie—do like the non-imperial Romans do: gobble down some bread on your way out the door, but keep your burps to yourself.