Round faced historian. Talked about Egyptians revering their “bread and onions” and Romans love for the countryside and agriculture. IIRC circa 1980’s.
Jacob Bronowski? (The Ascent Of Man)
My first thought was also Burke. Plan B would be Desmond Morris.
Maybe Terry Jones?
Hidden History of Egypt
Is David Attenborough round-faced? I’m bad at face shapes. Anyway, right time frame, and lots of ancient history.
Attenborough is natural, not ancient, history.
My thought. He also did similar histories of Rome and medieval England in which he tastes their typical diet; he liked Rome’s (chick peas, garlic, some cabbage) and Egypt’s okay but said the medieval English food was atrocious.
None of those. I recall vividly how he talked of a famous Roman wanting to retire to the countryside and grow cabbages. The more I think about the show might have been centered on the emergence of the early Christian church out of that era vs a specific overview of the Roman or Egyptian empires.
IIRC he was kind of balding.
Roman food was a lot more than that. A peasant would have eaten more corn ( wheat ) than Trimalchio, but there was plenty of variety by the late republic. Mediaeval English food was rather similar if you substitute peas for chickpeas: plenty of cabbage, onions and pastry.
Jones is a well-educated idiot who delights in feeble controversy. Weren’t our ancestors awful = sells books.
That would be the Emperor Diocletian. And he did,
Dan Cruikshank? He’s not that chubby (though he might have been chubbier in the '80s), but he does wear a fedora.
Most people get their ideas about what our ancestors ate [or even our modern foreign contemporaries for that matter] and their exercise [jumping to conclusions] at the same time. I like to point out that oenogarum and worchestershire sauce are damned near the same thing. Any ‘infodump’ recipe that is just a list of ingredients with no particular order or quantity can be made out to be ambrosia or absolutely the nastiest foulest stuff to pass a tongue in the world. If you point out to people that a lot of the foods they currently eat are pretty much nasty combinations of chemicals adulterating perfectly good fruits or vegetables they tend to get testy.
I have cooked foods from pretty much every era of western civilization and I can say that I could make you a meal of entirely Roman, or Persian, or Merovingian or Elizabethan Britain cooking and you wouldn’t think it was anything special. [for foods from that region of the world, obviously I can’t pass off a dish made with kataifa as British cooking]
It isn’t like our tastebuds are any different, we just tend to eat what was local to us when growing up - but mac n cheese is mac n cheese whether you call it mac n cheese or loseyns. Beef y-stewed is beef stew, and cheesecake is cheesecake - it just depends on if you make it with cream cheese or goat cheese. An amazing amount of the food we eat is simply the modern extension of a medieval recipe. You call it mini-meatloaf, I call it hedgehogs.
That’s him! Thanks!
And they’re all on YouTube if you, like me, are grudgingly literate.
I need to dig out my print copies of Testament and Ancient Lives for lunchtime reading, though the bastard didn’t reply when I sent him questions for my Booby Trap Staff Report. Romer and Hawass–they’re on my list. :mad: