He rises very early, gropes his way to the hearth, and stirs the embers into flame: then takes from his meal-bin a supply of grain for three days and proceeds to grind it in a hand-mill, knead it with water, shape it into round cakes divided into four parts like a "hot-cross bun," and, with the help of his one female slave, to bake these in the embers.

He has no sides of smoked bacon, says the poet, hanging from his roof, but only a cheese, so to add to his meal he goes into his garden and gathers thence a number of various herbs and vegetables, which he then makes into the hotch-potch, or _pot-au-feu_ which gives the name to the poem.

This bit of delicate genre-painting, which is as good in its way as anything in Crabbe's homely poems, has indeed nothing to tell us of life in an insula at Rome; but it may serve to show what was the ordinary food of the Italian of that day.[51] The absence of the sides of bacon ("durati sale terga suis," line 57) is interesting.

No doubt the Roman took meat when he could get it; but to have to subsist on it, even for a short time, was painful to him, and more than once Caesar remarks on the endurance of his soldiers in submitting to eat meat when corn was not to be had.[52] The corn which was at this time the staple food of the Romans of the city was wheat, and wheat of a good kind; in primitive times it had been an inferior species called _far_, which survived in Cicero's day only in the form of cakes offered to the gods in religious ceremonies.
The wheat was not brought from Italy or even from Latium; what each Italian community then grew was not more than supplied its own inhabitants,[53] and the same was the case with the country villas of the rich, and the huge sheep-farms worked by slaves.

By far the greater part of Italy is mountainous, and not well suited to the production of corn on a large scale; and for long past other causes had combined to limit what production there was.