It was to Pompeii that Romans came for partying—to gamble, to find girls, to eat and to drink. And both visitors and residents were well catered for. Hospitality was a cornerstone of the town, if not the wider empire.#4009•
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Of course, different periods saw different influences, but one can make three generalizations: the Ottomans shared dishes; the Ottomans drank milk (from horses, as well as from goats and cows); and the Ottomans consumed a lot of vegetables. A seventeenth-century visitor described Ottomans as "milk-drinking barbarians"; a nineteenth-century observer wrote that it is "in the preparation of vegetables [that] the Turkish cook expands all his art"; a French traveler considered "the great plenty of fruits, salads, and among the rest of cucumbers half ripe, together with their stalks, a dyet very proper to break a French horse's belly"; and a sixteenth-century German talked of the vegetables he came across as "all eaten raw like cattle do."#4010•