Let's start with beef, since the patty is the easiest part here, and also the most important part of the burger. The romans absolutely had beef. There are dozens of references to beef throughout greek and roman literature. In the odyssey, Odysseus kills some sacred cattle, and cooks the meat. I'm sure that in a big city like rome, it would be easy to come across some beef. Grinding beef by hand might be hard, but I'm sure our McRoman can pull it off, considering his need for a delicious burger. You can do that with a decent knife, but it'll be an absolute pain.

Next, we need cheese. Pliny, in his Natural History (XI, 96-97) talks about cheese. In chapter 97, he lists off a bunch of kinds of cheese, but what sounds good to me is his comment that "Goats also produce a cheese which has been of late held in the highest esteem, its flavour being heightened by smoking it." Smoked goat cheese would be nice on a burger, if a little off from traditional McDonalds.

Our greens are next. Onion is also mentioned in Pliny's text. IN book XIX, chapter 32, Pliny talks about onions. He mentions a few varieties of onions. The onions of Crete are known for "the sweetness of their flavour." Sweet onion is my preferred burger onion, so let's hope our McRoman can find that. However, he can certainly find some kind of onion. We're doing good!

Now for Lettuce. Once again, we're in luck! The romans ate lots of lettuce, and once again, Pliny has us covered. Chapter 38 of the same book is all about lettuce. He describes a bunch of lettuces, including one so large it could be used for a small garden gate! The footnotes in the translation seem to indicate this might be Sessile, or romaine lettuce, so we'll go with that. However, any lettuce will do here, so let's not worry too much about that. We got lettuce!

Pliny disappoints here with pickles. Despite devoting Chapters 2 - 5 of Book 20 to cucumbers as a medicine, and chapter 23 of book XIX to cucumbers as something to grow in your garden, Pliny doesn't actually mention that you can pickle cucumbers anywhere I saw. Columella' de re rustica (on agriculture), however, does. He states that you mix up "hard brine," which is heavily saturated saltwater, and vinegar (which was made from wine and spices), and then you add cucumbers and all kinds of other stuff. Your pickles will be giving your burger a real funky taste.

Mustard seed is also mentioned in Pliny. Apicus mentions mustard as well, and wants everyone to use it all the time. I didn't feel like crawling through more translations for all this, so I just went out and found someone else's adaptation of Apicus's mustard recipe. I linked it down below. The recipe is going to make a stone ground, strong flavored mustard. It's got some whole seeds, and is probably closest to modern brown mustard. This is strong artisanal stuff, so again with the funky taste and strong burger.

Bread is going to be expensive at the least. Modern flour is of great quality, historically speaking. Only the finest flour would have been fine and white. Off in Book XVIII, Chapter 26, Pliny talks about bread and risen bread. He says that "At the present day, however, the leaven is prepared from the meal that is used for making the bread. For this purpose, some of the meal is kneaded before adding the salt, and is then boiled to the consistency of porridge, and left till it begins to turn sour." That's sourdough - they have a starter culture, and then they would use it. It's not fed and kept like a modern sourdough culture, but it is decent starter yeast. The flavor from it will be inconsistent, and you'll probably have some grit from the grinding, but if your McRoman shills out all the cash he can, he'll get decent sourdough bread. This will not be a neutral flavored bun, and it's not going to look great. But you could buy some sort of small loaf at a bakery, so at least we have a bun.

Sesame seeds are also not the hardest. It's an old crop, and a quick search pulled up a JSTOR result on how the "seed was well known to ancient greek and roman authors." I'm sure our Ronald McRoman could walk on down to the market and buy a little thing of sesame seeds if needed. So he just needs to pay the baker to put a bunch of sesame seeds on the nicest small loaf he has before he bakes it. Easy peasy!

The romans would have had frying pans and griddles. The Royal Ontario museum of archeology has an article they published in the American Journal of Archaeology, which I found reproduced on The University of Chicago's website. It includes a number of illustrations of Frying pans and Griddles. They look not bad for frying.

In summary: Yes. we're going to burger town. But it's going to be gourmet, and not what we're used to. The biggest issue will be the beef, which is going to be a pain to butcher into ground beef. But it won't be that off from what you might get in a fancy hipster restaurant. I dunno how much this might all cost, sorry.

Sources:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3Ddedication

https://honest-food.net/wild-game/sauces-for-wild-game/ancient-roman-mustard/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4254846?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/AJA/25/1/Roman_Cooking_Utensils*.html

I'm not a historian, and I did all this off of some basic research and my middle school latin classes. Please don't ban me / delete this.

Oh snap, I'm late to the party on this one. Let's talk about some McCaesar's, shall we?

First, let's discuss the basic components of a cheeseburger and what those entail. Some of the modern stuff (like heavily sugared buns), we'll obviously pass over, but we will be talking about what our ancient cheeseburger will taste like - and how it'd probably be pretty damn delicious, but with a bit of Roman flair.

So most basic of the basic ingredients:

• buns
• cheese
• beef patty (possibly two if you're like me and eat more than your body weight in a day I mean what)
• salt and pepper

However, if you just make a burger with those things, it's going to be a boring burger. What makes the burger delicious isn't just its beef and cheese, but its toppings. Today, those include ketchup, mustard, mayo, and, oftentimes, some sort of mystery sauce. The Romans didn't have access to tomatoes, so we'll go ahead and skip that one, but not only can we get everything else, I think we can replace the ketchup and still have things taste just fine. Some other toppings'n'stuff are tomato (again), lettuce, onion, butter, and garlic (powder, used for seasoning).

But we don't want any old McDonald's burger - we want a real burger.. So can we make Gordon Ramsay happy with readily available ingredients in Rome? I'm gonna go ahead and say absolutely.

First off, I'm gonna go ahead and start with a quote from Cato the Elder who, among being a cantankerous old coot who liked hating on Carthage, wrote an entire book about how great cabbage is, as well as giving us this delightful quote:

“Of this last kind of comparisons is that quoted from the elder Cato, who, when asked what was the most profitable thing to be done on an estate, replied, “To feed cattle well.” “What second best?” “To feed cattle moderately well.” “What third best?” “To feed cattle, though but poorly.” “What fourth best?” “To plough the land.” And when he who had made these inquiries asked, “What is to be said of making profit by usury?” Cato replied, “What is to be said of making profit by murder?”

(Cicero, De Officiis)

That is to say, the Romans loved beef and recognized the amount of money that could be made in the proper care and raising of cattle. While grain is what everyone talks about being mass produced for the Roman people, it was a poor man's food (as shown by the constant grain subsidies that were in place to feed the people of Rome, not to mention the actually massive shipments coming in from across the Mediterannean). But the beef was not only high quality (I'll refer you to the non-cabbage related portions of Cato, written in the 2nd c. BCE), but it was certainly not a rare commodity. That being said, I'm not sure that the beef was particularly cheap - it's tough to nail down prices (and I'll see if I can do some side research into estimates for you, but since we don't even know for sure how much wheat cost....I'm digressing), but meat was meat, and the majority of Romans (the poor) did not have enough loose change to commit to it. That being said, other (more contemporary) authours talk about cows nonstop, and if you'd like to know more about cattle breeds, what they might have looked like, and what they were good for, I'd be happy to provide sources. For now, know that there were many, some were renowned for their meat, and some for their cheese.

And oh my, did the Romans love their cheeses. Cows are versatile creatures, and they offer a variety of substances that were useful for this endeavour - meat, cheese, and butter. Now, the Romans weren't themselves heavy users of butter (Apicius avoids it in all of his recipes, and the Romans themselves seem to have seen it as a weird German thing), preferring olive oil or other fats, but it was certainly theoretically available. If you can make a good cheese, you can make butter. So we can certainly check off the butter, the cheese (probably way better cheese than you'd get with most burgers, honestly), and the beef quite easily.

Salt is one of those things that everyone likes to misunderstand - there's a trope that the word salary came from the Roman soldiers being paid in salt, which has no real basis - but hey, the Romans themselves were unsure about where their word salarium came from. Either way, the Romans had salt, and they greedily held control over their salt supplies. One of those mines was at one of Rome's major ports in Ostia, giving easy access to the resource.

Pepper, on the other hand, is not a naturally occurring European resource. However, by 1 CE (thanks for that date, gives me the excuse to rant about Roman trade networks), trade with India was booming. After the subjugation of Egypt in 31 BCE, the Romans subsumed the Ptolemaic trade routes through the province, driving the previous levels of trade to a fever pitch, a trade explosion which continued for over 200 years. Where trade had previously been slow, with as few as twenty ships making the trip, the Romans used their military as a workforce to create the necessary infrastructure for intensifying trade with the East; over a hundred ships were soon making the annual journey to India.^1 Where enterprising merchants had previously only been able to travel at night, heavily stocked with water and in constant fear of banditry, the Romans built and fortified roads, water stations, and the trading cities themselves. Shipyards were built in an attempt to support the failed invasion of Arabia in 26 CE, which were easily converted to civilian use afterwards.^2 This large-scale rise in infrastructure created a fertile environment for a wave of consumerism to sweep the Roman world, with demand for Eastern luxuries and spices increasing dramatically among those with disposable income. Those imports ranged from places as far apart as Madagascar and Vietnam. The primary partner of Rome in this sea trade, however, was India. Trade ports ranged across the subcontinent, each one offering a different selection of trade goods, the most common of which was pepper.^3 Other imports included varied types of luxury wood, precious stones, frankincense and myrrh, and textiles such as cotton and silk. Indian imports quickly became central to Roman life, with recipes and medicines commonly using exotic spices, such as malabatrum or the especially unhelpfully described “ispicam Indicam.”

I've provided a few sources at the bottom for further reading on this, since there's honestly a vast wealth of information discussing Roman trade and how quickly and deeply it was tied to Rome - it quickly became the big business in the Roman empire, with individual shiploads being valued in the millions of sestertii. MacLaughlin's book is an excellent one, and Lytle is a magnificent researcher when it comes to near eastern trade (and ancient fishermen). But I digress.

By this time, pepper would have been readily available in multiple types, and wouldn't be too terrifically difficult to come by. Garlic, too, is a native herb to Europe, Asia, and beyond, and would not have been rare or even worth special commentary for its difficulty to find. Fear not, your beef patty will be perfectly seasoned, assuming that you're a decent chef and/or have access to YouTube so that you can do a quick search on Gordon Ramsay's burger. The onion, too, was incredibly popular in all sorts of things, from cooking to medicine, and your request to put onions on this concoction would have been met with approval from whomever you were commissioning. That and the fact that it wasn't hard to come by, so it would have been reasonably cheap. Overall, by the way, this burger probably would cost you a pretty penny. Probably not those 30 pieces of silver, but certainly something that you would see at an Epicurean feast.

A suitably motivated Roman could have cobbled together some approximation of the modern cheeseburger.

We must assume, first, that this Roman was wealthy enough to own a house with its own kitchen. The great majority of the city of Rome's inhabitants lived in insulae (apartment blocks) with rudimentary, if any, spaces for culinary preparation, and simply bought most of their hot food from the many "fast food" stalls lining the major streets.

But if our Roman had a kitchen in which to prepare it, beef was available from butcher stalls in certain markets - an inscription mentions a bubularius (beef seller) near the Roman Forum (AE 1991, 287). It was probably customary for the butcher to have a few choice cuts prepared for customers (as seen in this famous relief), and our hypothetical burger-loving Roman could easily purchase enough beef for a burger.

Since the Romans regularly ground meat for sausages, our Roman would have had no trouble grinding the beef and cooking it. In the collection of recipes traditionally attributed to Apicius, in fact, there actually is a recipe for isicia omentata, sometimes described as a proto-hamburger. The recipe, according to a rather antiquated online translation, is:

"Finely cut pulp of pork is ground with the hearts of winter wheat and diluted with wine. Flavor lightly with pepper and broth and if you like add a moderate quantity of myrtle berries also crushed, and after you have added crushed nuts and pepper shape the forcemeat into small rolls, wrap these in caul [that is, intestinal membrane], fry, and serve with wine gravy." (2.1.7 - for a modern take on the recipe, see this page).

Ground beef, in short, would have been no trouble.

Cheese was abundant, and sold from stalls throughout the city. Lettuce, grown in market gardens around Rome, was also easily available - Apicius has a whole chapter devoted to lettuce-based recipes.

The Romans knew how to pickle vegetables (see this chapter in Apicius), but I'm not aware of any evidence that they regularly pickled cucumbers. Onions, however, were used in many dishes.

As for the bun - bread was of course widely available, and Apicius has a recipe for honey cookies with sesame seeds. I don't think, however, that the Romans regularly ate buns sprinkled with sesame seeds.

It should be possible to procure all the major ingredients in some not-too-alien form. Beef, cheese, bread, sesames, salt, and lettuce were all available to a wealthy Roman. But there are some important economic considerations of this enterprise I’d like to address.

Price indexes are an attempt to characterize the price of many different goods into a single value. The reason why they are complex is that it is difficult to construct “reasonably” a relative weighting of many different things. Part of the reason the Economist proselytizes the virtues of its Big Mac Index is that it erases all the vagaries of finding compatible weights. It’s a way to cut the Gordian Knot of reconciling the differing index baskets of goods which are at least as plentiful as national statistics bureaus across the Earth.

When you inject 2000 years of economic transformation into this process, you strain the assumptions of this comparison strategy. The Roman Empire in 1AD was as highly monetized a society as existed on Earth, meaning a surprisingly large portion of economic transactions were conducted in money. But this was only a relative phenomenon. Large swaths of the population engaged in partial or total subsistence agriculture. Many transactions, especially among the poor, were conducted in barter or payment-in-kind. And a large portion of the labor force were slaves. So when you only watch “money” you are examining only a specific slice of total economic activity.

All these issues in the Roman Empire became much more serious after the inflationary problems of the Third Century and then the economic straight jacket of the Reforms of Diocletian. But even in 1AD looking at prices only tells you the cost weighting of only the relatively well off. (Especially if you consider that preferences really are not homothetic, but let’s not get too far gone into theory.) So while you could perhaps set your mind to constructing a Big Mac Index for the Roman Empire, you should keep in mind just how little it will tell you about their economic world.

Less important aside: the bun would be really hard to make. They had plenty of wheat, but modern refined flour is a fairly novel occurrence. They’d probably have to make something much more porous or much more dense.

If you want a relatively recent paper probing Roman prices, I’d suggest this. It has a decent literature review, and covers many of the reason why this is such a hard question.

Well, let's look at Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria which was done in the late 300's CE. So almost four hundred years off your indicated time period but let's play it loose.

First, hamburger meat. He devotes one chapter to all kinds of minced dishes from fish to poultry and red meat. The red meat of choice is pork instead of beef. There are comparatively few beef receipes in the collection, which would suggest beef would not have been widely consumed at this time. As for the mincing method, chopping the meat finely seems and pounding it in the mortar to be the way instead of grinding. He also describes kind of patty made from the chopped crab meat which is then fried, so mince + patty + cooking would be a known thing, too.

Pickles would be easy peasy as well. He describes cucumbers with pepper, pennyroyal, honey, broth and vinegar and in another recipe pickled beets. So pickled cucumbers could also plausibly be a thing even if he does not explicitly have them.

Mustard is also mentioned in several places as an ingredient, as is lettuce and onions.

Cheese is also a very old dish and Romans had all kinds of cheeses. soft fresh ones and hard aged ones. Varro describes both in De Re Rustica.

As for the bun, Romans did a lot of bread. However, I don't know if any of the many versions of bread they had were actually bun sized. Also the Roman leavening would not yield the fluffy and airy texture of the modern bun.

So I'd say the ingredients would have been available at 400 CE.

A follow up question for when this is answered: if it is possible to make one, would it be possible to mass-produce? I’ve heard of Roman “fast food”, so the concept was there, but if someone went back in time with the knowledge to do so, would it be achievable to get a Roman McDonald’s chain up and running?

A few years ago I spent a week cooking my way through the history of the hamburger in order to write an article on the subject for Smithsonian Magazine, so I have some first-hand experience with some of what we're talking about.

There is a recipe in Apicius (4th Century Roman cookbook) that is very burger-like. Meat chopped up and formed into a patty and cooked. I reproduced it and found that manually mincing meat with a knife is a huge pain and takes a very long time. If you wanted to simulate the actual texture of modern ground meat, you couldn't. I've tried. You'll get something that is sort of in the same ballpark as ground beef but isn't exactly the same thing.

Hamburgers were invented roughly simultaneously in various places in the US because of one important piece of technology that suddenly became available: The mechanical hand-cranked meat grinder (or "food chopper" as it was initially billed). Once it was advertised in the Sears catalog, sales took off.

Anyway, my point is that you really need a mechanical meat grinder to make burgers practical. They didn't have those in Rome in 1 AD. Although if someone had the idea and was very wealthy, there were skilled metal workers who could theoretically have made such a device.

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