Aside from the reservoir known as the "Underground Water Palace," Justinian had prepared more than ten similar water-storage and grain-storage sites throughout the city. Yet famine still came.
Bread had to be baked before it could be eaten. When the dead outnumbered the living, the survivors were either busy burying the dead or did not know how to bake bread. Under such circumstances, even sufficient grain reserves could not meet the needs of the entire city.
Bread dough needed time to ferment. If it was baked before it had fully fermented, the texture would be much worse, and not everyone knew how to make dough rise.
Yet pasta was not prepared in only one way. Horace, a poet who lived in the first century BCE, had brought back to his homeland a dish of leeks, chickpeas, and noodles cut into strips, boiled together. The Travels of Marco Polo, written in the fourth century, recorded how Eastern noodles were made, inspiring cooks of that era to try making noodles from flour.
But few modern people knew that ancient wheat and modern wheat were entirely different varieties. Like watermelons, it had become completely different from what it had originally been.
From a biological perspective, ancient wheat had only fourteen chromosomes, while modern wheat had forty-two.
For cooks, however, many ingredients had to be added before it could achieve the relatively smooth texture Marco Polo described.
There were plagues and earthquakes then. Who had the mood to fuss over such things?
While the whole nation starved, French nobles remained in their salons, holding glasses of wine and sympathizing with the suffering of the poor.
Shakespeare wrote in "Love's Labour's Lost": "The fame pursued by kings and all men alike is forever inscribed upon our tombstones, granting us immortal glory amid the shame of