You eat Latin every day

Mensa meant at Rome the table food goes on — but also the feast, and the offering table. The vulgar form mesa, which the Appendix Probi corrects («mensa non mesa»), went onward and gave, via -a > -ă, our masă. No canteen, no metaphor: the continuity is itself the point.

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.

In the oven of the bakery of Modestus (VII.1.36–37, Pompeii) 81 carbonized loaves waited out AD 79, every one leavened; Giuseppe Fiorelli lifted them from the ash in 1861. “Panis quadratus” means no square loaf: it is bread divided into quadrae — round, slightly flattened, with radial scores, most often in eight.

One Herculaneum loaf still carries its baker's stamp, legible: the loaf of Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus. The photograph shows such a fossil loaf, in a museum: black, cracked, scored.

The Latin salarium — “official pay” — derives from sal, “salt”: the etymology is solid. The mechanism is not: the idea that Roman soldiers drew their pay in salt “has no basis in ancient sources” (Merriam-Webster). Pliny (NH 31.89) ties salt to pay too, but without detail (the quote, at Merriam-Webster); soldiers were paid mostly in coin, the stipendium in three yearly instalments (Gainsford).

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.

Latin lingula had several meanings, including ‘little tongue’ and ‘spoon’. Dictionaries trace Romanian lingură to this Latin form. This page does not reconstruct the steps by which its pronunciation changed.

Romans used several kinds of spoon; the one pictured is a sharp-handled cochlear, another type of spoon.

Manducare meant “to chew”, and in speech the ns cluster simplified to *manucare, the form “a mânca” starts from (DEX gives manducare, DER reconstructs *manucare). 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”.