Did the Romans use honey?
Short answerTrue
Extensively, and mostly in savoury cooking. The surviving Roman recipe collection uses honey with fish sauce, vinegar and spices far more than in anything a modern reader would call a dessert.
A cuisine we can read
Most ancient cooking has to be inferred. Roman cooking does not, because the recipe collection known as Apicius survives. Honey runs through it — balancing salt and acid in sauces, glazing roast meat, preserving fruit, and sweetening wine — in the sweet-sour-salt register that later European cooking largely abandoned.
Roman agricultural writers approach the same subject from the production end. Columella treats an apiary as a component of a profitable estate, discussing siting, hive materials and how much of the harvest to take.
Whose cooking, though
Sources
- De re coquinaria (Apicius) — Compiled in its surviving form in the fourth or fifth century CE · Historical text
- De re rustica (Columella) — Rome, first century CE · Historical text
- Naturalis Historia (Pliny the Elder) — Rome, completed around 77 CE · Historical text
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.