You eat Latin every day

Mensa meant, at Rome, the table food goes on. Romanian kept the word for the furniture at the middle of the house and carried it onward, into sayings and birthdays.

That the Roman table truly looked like a table stands in frescoes: the baker's counter in MANN 9071, loaves stacked on it, and the still life with bread and figs, set out on a slab.

Panis quadratus — the “squared” bread of the Romans — ran round and scored, to break in eight. In the bakery of Modestus, dozens of such loaves met the eruption and carbonized: blackened outside, the leavened crumb kept within.

The photograph shows one such loaf, in a museum: black, cracked, scored. Alongside, the bakery of Popidius Priscus, with its mills and oven — the bread factory of Pompeii.

Salarium comes from sal — the dictionaries say the link plainly. The tale of Roman soldiers drawing their pay in salt appears in no Roman source: Merriam-Webster says nothing in the word's known history supports it, and the classicist Peter Gainsford shows there is no evidence — the soldiers were paid in coin.

Salt itself fills Diocletian's edict: spiced salt carried a ceiling of 8 denarii the sextarius, the same as ordinary wine.

Conditum paradoxum — “the spiced wine, the surprising one” — runs thus: “mellis pondo XV in aeneum vas mittuntur… vini lenis sextaria XVIII”: fifteen pounds of honey into a copper vessel, then eighteen sextarii of light wine. The recipe adds pepper, mastic, saffron and roasted date stones.

In Vehling's translation: the honey and wine warm over a slow fire, stirred throughout, “add 18 sextarii of light wine” — and at the end the wine clears with charcoal.

Lingula meant “small tongue” in Latin and named the spoon, the ladle, the skimmer — every tool with a hollowed “tongue”. Romanian kept one alone and called it lingură.

The Romans ran several spoon types; the pictured one is a cochlear, sharp-handled — a cousin of the lingula, never the lingula itself.

Manducare meant “to chew”, and spoken Latin shortened the word to *manucare, the form “a mânca” starts from. In Romanian, the chewing verb became the eating verb: “a mânca” means, by DEX, “a mesteca în gură și a înghiți” — to chew in the mouth and swallow. Old Romania walked the same road entire.

Roman food itself shows in the Sala cattabia: “panem ex posca maceratum exprimes” — “the bread soaked in posca, press it out” — cheese, cucumbers, pine nuts, then “super frigidam collocabis et sic appones”: “set it on ice and serve it so”.