At the beginning of February, Queen’s Grant Latin teacher Ben Henkel undertook an unexpected lesson with his Latin students: they made fresh pasta together. If asked what they might eat in modern day Rome, most people would probably imagine a huge bowl of pasta with marinara sauce.  

The ancient Romans did eat pasta as well as many of the staples of what we call the “Mediterranean diet” today, but their pasta would have looked a little different than what we eat in modern Italian restaurants. “Technically, the Romans didn’t eat what we would consider pasta,” says Henkel.  “They used spelt flour instead of semolina, which did not exist in the Mediterranean world.”