3 day rations

[Carlton Bach]

BTW, does anyone have a recipe for Buccelatum? And, what is the Latin word for "sour wine" (I believe the Greek is "ozous".) What wine and vinegar mixture would you use to make it??

'sour wine' is a common translation for 'acetum' which, in other contexts, is also rendered as 'vinegar'. The military drink often also rendered as 'sour wine' in older translations is 'posca'. Which is which requires checking the source text, unfortunately, though more modern translators are often kind enough to leave 'posca' standing.

Since I don't drink alcohol, I usually make my posca with a few tablespoons of mild red wine vinegar to the litre of water.

As to the bucellatum recipe - how authentic do you need or want? What I usually do is:

1 cube (1.3 oz, roughly) active live yeast
500g whole wheat flour
1 tsp salt

if desired, fennelseeds, savory, or other herbs.

STir the yeast into a cup of warm water. Combine flour and salt in a bowl. Add the yeast and water and start workling the dough, adding warm water as needed (usually about another cup, or a little less) and knead, knead, knead (that is the point I thank the heavens for owning a KitchenAid). You can tell the dough is finished when a depression of the surface made with a finger slowly rises again when left alone). Cover and leave to rise in a warm place. Punch down when risen, transfer to a flat, round pan and leave to rise again until doubled (you can score the surface, but for making bucellatum it's not really necessary). Once doubled, place in an oven at 225°C. Reduce heat to 200°C after 10 minutes, then to 175°C after a further 20. The bread takes 30-50 minutes to bake.
Now remove it from oven and pan and let it cool. Then slice into about a finger's thickness and arrange these on a griddle in a single layer. Dry in the oven az 75°C until hard and brittle all though.

This version is quite pleasant and rather classy. If you feel more manly, just use plain flour-water-paste withoiut leavening and bake it at 175°C for the first go, then dry at 75°C. That stuff is genuinely unpleasant, but has excellent keeping qualities. Of course, for higher authenticity you should use sourdough cultures rather than yeast (yeast use as a leavening is assumed for Celtic, but not Roman, bakers) and stone-ground flour.

As a side note, travel 'biscuit' throughout the Med is shown in art as ring-shaped loaves big enough to carry over a stick. Sort of monsterbagels. I can't track this back to Roman days, but I wouldn't exclude the possibility that that's what their bucellatum looked like.