A single meal in Rome is a lesson in Italian history

Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV presenter of New Scandinavian Cooking, food columnist for a couple of Norwegian papers as well as formerly for the Washington Post, Andreas Viestad’s belt has many notches. He lives between Oslo and Cape Town and for 25 years has been a regular visitor to Rome. His favourite restaurant there is La Carbonara, by the Campo de’ Fiori, and he has had the strikingly good idea of writing a foodie history of the world by examining a single meal eaten there.

Early in the narrative we get a few lessons in geography, economic history and even contemporary mores. For example, at La Carbonara Viestad notices that some of a group of young friends at a nearby table have made do with simple pasta dishes while others have ordered the expensive grilled sea bass. ‘The tradition when eating out is to pay the Roman way, pagare alla romana, which involves splitting the bill equally without calculating precisely who has eaten what.’

Viestad’s dinner begins with bread. It’s light, fluffy and has a crisp crust and doughiness that yields the right amount of resistance when you chew; it’s made in the old bakery next door, with its complicated system where you order here, pay there and collect the bread somewhere else, showing the receipt. Rome’s geography meant it had limited farm land but a rapidly increasing population, and it quickly became dependent on imported grain, with the river allowing it to build ‘an advanced trading system’. Grain that can be stored without spoilage can also be taxed, distributed freely as rations when the populace is feeling squeezed or disgruntled, and used to feed an empire. One ship can carry hundreds of tonnes, whereas oxen might ‘cover 12 miles (19km) per day at best, and 22 pounds (5kg) of your load would have to be used as fodder’.