Salsamola (sometimes written as mola salsa) is the latin for “salted meal.” It was a combination of salt and ground farro which was kept on the table in every Roman home, and was part of every Roman sacrifice or offering to the gods. The main source on the subject seems to be the late Roman literary critic, Servius. Servius was one of Rome’s last generation of learned pagans before Christianity became the only legal religion of the Empire, and I suspect that it is for that reason that he took the trouble to explain what salsamola was. In his age, for the first time, that knowledge could no longer be taken for granted.
In my kitchen, there are things whose presence I take for granted. I don’t mix my salt and flour together, and I don’t make ritual use of them. But I count on them being there, as I do with that other sacred substance, olive oil. If I run out of any of them, it is a two-fold crisis; firstly that I am missing something absolutely vital to the kitchen (in Roman terms, the hearth) of our home; but secondly that their presence in the home is so constant that it is difficult to remember to purchase them at all.
That is what interests me here; those things which are taken for granted. The truly everyday things in life are invisible to the historian, because they are invisible, on some level to those who use them. But making the invisible everyday of another time, visible to ourselves “doth tease us out of thought” (as Keats puts it), and replaces the sheen of awe in the world, not for only for the distant other, but also for ourselves.
