Nobody Cooked At Home In Rome

Most Romans never cooked a meal in their lives. Not once. The city had a million people and almost none of them had a kitchen. Most Romans lived in cramped, wooden-framed apartment buildings where open flame meant the whole block burns down — so cooking was effectively banned. If you wanted a hot meal, you went outside.

And outside, the city had an answer for that. On nearly every block: a thermopolium, a masonry counter with ceramic jars of hot food sunk into it, menus painted on the walls, customers eating standing up in the street. Rome invented fast food two thousand years before the drive-through.

Despite dining out for each meal, there was almost zero variety in flavor because everything they ate — rich and poor alike — was covered in a fermented fish sauce so pungent it had to be made outside the city walls. The Romans called it garum. Seneca called it something less polite. We might call it umami.