Don't look on me.

Today, I’ll be making an Etruscan dish - which is preserved through Roman cuisine through to modernity! The simple testaroli - a rudimentary ancestor to the pasta that we know and love today!

In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!

Ingredients (for two servings) ½ cup plain flour ½ cup wholemeal flour 1 cup water pesto

Method

1 - Prepare the Batter To begin with, we need to make the batter. To do this, toss a half a cup of plain white flour into a bowl, along with some wholemeal flour. Mix in an equal amount of water, to form a thin slurry.

2 - Oil the Pan and Make the testaroli When the batter is ready, pour a ladleful into a pan that’s been oiled with olive oil. Spread this into a very thin layer, by tilting the pan around. Cook the thin layer of batter for a minute or two over a high heat, or until the edges start to firm up. Don’t cook it all the way through! Flip it over and let the other side cook for another minute or two.

When it’s done, you can eat it as is! Serve up warm with a dollop of pesto - that you ideally would have made following my recipe for it. This serving - technically speaking - isn’t testaroli, but actually placenta (pronounced plakenta) which is a Roman dish prepared in the same way. It’s likely that this evolved from Etruscan assimilation by the Romans in the Bronze Age.

3 - Cut Testaroli For a more modern testaroli, place your dough disks and dissect them with a knife. Score them a few times with a sharp knife, before cutting them at an angle, so you make a bunch of thin dough-diamonds.

4 - Cook Testaroli

Toss your dough diamonds into a pot of boiling water, and let them cook away for a few minutes. Since this is fresh pasta, it won’t take too long to cook. Drain them using a colander or a slotted spoon, place them into a bowl, and serve up warm with a large dollop of pesto!

Archaeologists in the ancient city of Pompeii have discovered a remarkably well-preserved skeleton during excavations of a tomb that also shed light on the cultural life of the city before it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD 79.

A skull bearing tufts of white hair and part of an ear, as well as bones and fabric fragments, were found in the tomb in the necropolis of Porta Sarno, an area not yet open to the public that is located in the east of Pompeii’s urban center. The discovery is unusual since most adults were cremated at the time.

Roman bird

* House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii

* c. 30-35 CE

* MANN: "Exhibition "Myth and Nature" 2016