Friends, Romans, countrymen .. . lend me your rotting fish sauce
WITH his rosy cheeks and nose, and a crown of laurel leaves drooping over one eye, former political journalist John Sergeant looked like jolly little Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, as he tucked into an ancient feast on Pompeii’s Final Hours: New Evidence (C5).
A game soul, whether strutting the pasa doble on Strictly or bartering in a Naples marketplace, John munched fried sea urchins and braised moray eel — with plenty of red vino to slosh the taste away.
he did blanch at the thought of bulls’ testicles stuffed with pepper and herbs. Apparently this delicacy was a great favourite in Pompeii — but then, the decadent Romans drenched every meal in lashings of garum, a sauce made from rotting fish. Anything would taste better than that.
Noble as Brutus, John held his nose and chewed a mouthful of cobbler. ‘i wouldn’t have it every night,’ he muttered.
it’s an astonishing thought that Julius Caesar conquered most of the known world, when he must have been suffering from chronic indigestion. imagine what the Romans might have done if they’d invented the pizza a couple of thousand years earlier.
this hour-long archaeological romp was the first of three surveys of life in the shadow of Vesuvius, set to continue tonight and tomorrow.
the ‘new evidence’ in the title came from computer X-ray scans of some of Pompeii’s famous casts. these detailed figurines were created by the 19th- century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who injected liquid plaster into the cavities where Roman bodies had been buried by ash in the volcanic eruption in AD79.
Fiorelli’s casts are the most moving and tragic death masks ever made. Every plaster corpse is writhing in agony, suffocated by poisonous gases. For 150 years, the victims’ skeletal remains have been locked in their cases. it is only now that the technology exists to examine the bones without destroying the casts.
What the first Ct scans revealed swept old theories away. One figure long believed to be a man appeared, in fact, to be female. Another, thought for decades to be a male gladiator in his prime, turned out to be a teenage boy. Presenters Bettany hughes and Raksha Dave didn’t make enough of these dramatic finds. the Ct results were held back to the end of the hour, so that the discoveries were inevitably rushed.
Don’t blame John Sergeant, though. While the others were in the lab, he was still polishing off his meal of eels and urchins. Say what you like, this man believes in doing his research.
After that, he’d probably welcome a few days of starvation. the powdered soups and shakes fed to four slimmers by Dr Javid Abdelmoneim in The Big Crash Diet Experiment (BBC1) looked worse than any classical culinary torture, though. to challenge conventional wisdom that brief bursts of intensive dieting rarely bring long-term results, Dr Javid had his guinea pigs living on 800 calories a day for nine weeks.
All lost plenty of weight. But it was the switch to healthy-eating afterwards that seemed to bring the best results.
the show had plenty of useful advice for dieters. Don’t pretend fast food is ‘addictive’ — greasy take-aways are just a bad habit. Only eat in the dining room, never on the sofa . . . or in bed. Remember, burger bars are in the cynical business of selling you empty calories.
Follow those rules, and you might not need the powdered shakes. Or the foul fish sauce.