in culina Grumionis

SHAMELESSLY UNPROFESSIONAL Culinary Adventures in Ancient Rome

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The best assassin is the one you don’t see.

Ant-Man joins Marvel’s Contest of Champions!

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Barley Soup

Another Apicius, via A Taste of Ancient Rome:

I was particularly fast and loose with this one. Trader Joe’s does not cater to ancient cooking enthusiasts, so many ingredients were substituted or left out completely. Sorry. Anyway, here are the ingredients I did use:

I’ll admit that I did not read this recipe nearly as closely as I could have, so there are some interpretive strayings here. I’ll quote steps from the Apicius recipe in italics, preceding descriptions of what I actually did. 

Step 1: Crush washed barley that has been soaked the day before.

OR buy Trader Joe’s 10-minute barley, forget to read the instructions thoroughly, and throw it whole into some water. 

Step 2: Place over a high flame. When it boils, add a generous quantity of oil, a small bouquet of dill, dried onion, savory, and ham hock, and let it cook until it becomes a cream.

OR add a generous quantity of oil, some shakes of dill from a jar, onion powder, thyme instead of savory, and a smoked ham hock. Since you forgot to crush up the barley like you were told to in Step 1, cook until it’s oatmealey. 

Step 3: Add fresh coriander and salt that have been ground together, and bring to a boil.

OR realize that you don’t have coriander, add salt by itself, and continue boiling because you never turned the burner off because you still aren’t reading the recipe very carefully. 

Step 4: When it has boiled well, remove the bouquet and transfer the barley to another pot, so that it will not stick to the bottom or burn. Stir out the lumps and strain it into the pot over the ham hock.

OR leave the spices in, since you never had a bouquet. Transfer the barley and ham hock to another pot, lumps and all, because you gave up on having a creamy soup a long time ago and you want it to be in a smaller pot so the ham hock is at least slightly submerged.

Step 5: Grind pepper, lovage, a bit of dried pennyroyal, cumin, and roasted seseli; moisten with honey, vinegar, defrutum, and garum.

OR grind pepper, celery seeds instead of lovage, a bit mint (not dry) instead of pennyroyal, and cumin. Remind yourself to google what the hell seseli is later. Dump in some honey, red wine vinegar, red wine (defrutum is reduced wine), and garum. 

(Smell check)

Step 6: Pour in the pot so that the ham hock is covered well.

OR “covered well”

Step 7: Bring to a boil over a low flame.

This one I can do!

After a few hours (god knows I didn’t check the time when I started - that would have been too rigorous of me), it’s tasting good! It has the same wine/vinegar/garum/honey mix that the apricots from my last post had, so it has a similar flavor, but much heartier. Nice and thick and hammy. The actual recipe probably tastes fine, too. 

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Gustum de Praecoquis (Apricot Appetizer)

Here’s an Apicius recipe, found in A Taste of Ancient Rome:

Apricot appetizer: Clean the apricots (young clingstone), remove the pits, and put them in cold water. Then arrange them in a pan. Grind pepper and dried mint, moisten with garum, and add honey, passum, wine, and vinegar; pour into the pan over the apricots, add a bit of oil, and cook over a low fire. When it boils, thicken with starch, sprinkle with pepper, and serve. 

As always, I stray from the actual recipe due to my laziness/lack of available ingredients. This time I left out passum, which is a kind of raisin wine. Turns out raisin wine is pretty hard to find, but! I have some grapes that are starting to dry up after sitting on my counter for a couple weeks, so I’m going to try making my own raisin wine with my own raisins! The fermentation should take another few weeks, so until next month, I’ll be using regular wine instead of passum in all the recipes that call for it. 

Anyway, here are my ingredients for the gustum:

The tupperware on the left is full of the garum I made last week. Again, there’s no passum so the Yellow Tail will be standing in, and I’m using red wine vinegar, because it seems to fit the theme. Here are my apricots all clean and pitted and arranged in a pan: 

Now for the sauce. My mint wasn’t dried, whoops. 

A taste test at this point shows that this mixture of things is far more edible than I expected it to be. I even added some more garum! In A Taste of Ancient Rome, Ms. Giacosa leaves out the vinegar because “it made the dish inedible” for her. I’m going for it anyway. Now we cook it:

And thicken it and serve:

Final verdict: after cooking, it makes a little more sense why the vinegar was left out in Giacosa’s modernized version of the recipe. It’s real tart, so I added some more honey, and now it’s not bad at all! The apricots got nice and soft and the mint flavor got much more pronounced after cooking. I probably wouldn’t jump at the chance to eat it under normal circumstance, but that may very well be my own fault for never following recipes correctly. 

Our musical accompaniment for today is Musica Romana: 

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We are back! with more garum!

Hello again, everyone. It’s been a long while, but now I find myself on summer break with a bit more free time than during the school year, a well-equipped kitchen, and some lovely new cookbooks that some wonderful people gave to me as presents: 

So I’m going to try to get back into this. And what better way to start than with garum?

The first time I made garum went alright. I wanted to try fermenting it this time (A Taste of Ancient Rome has a recipe that only requires a week of sitting in the sun), but there are cats around who’d probably want to eat it before it was ready, and smells that we and the neighbors would have an unhappy time dealing with. It likely wouldn’t have gone well, so I went with another cheat-recipe, also from A Taste of Ancient Rome, sourced from Geoponica, a 10th century agricultural compilation.

If you wish to use garum immediately, that is, not to expose it to the sun but instead to cook it, do this: prepare a brine salty enough than an egg will float in it...Put the fish in the brine in a new earthenware pot, add oregano, and place it over a flame sufficient for the liquid to reduce gradually...Then let it cool, and filter it several times until it becomes clear. 

As ever, ratios are apparently irrelevant, which makes things more challenging for me. Here’s our ingredient lineup: 

I’m using canned anchovies because I had some handy. 

Now let’s float an egg:  

Wooh! Unfortunately, I didn’t have any new earthenware pots around, so a metal saucepan will have to do. In go our fish and oregano: 

How much fish? How much oregano? Irrelevant! Dump it in and move on! Here it is after about an hour of simmering: 

The fish are mostly liquified. It smells pretty good (and very strong) at this point. A taste test determines that it is, indeed, REAL salty, so I might end up diluting it later. Now we strain it through a cheese cloth and save it for our future Roman cooking adventures. 

That’s all for now - let’s hope for better pictures next time, taken on something other than my phone. 

I’ll send us off with some classic Roman tunes:

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Lucullus

My sister recently lent me The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher, which, besides featuring the most poetic food writing I've ever read, has a lovely little chapter on Ancient Roman eating habits. As much as I'd love to simply post the book's full text for you to read, I will try to remain concise:

Fisher mentions Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a general and politician from the late Republic: Besides being a prolifically successful military leader, conqueror of the eastern Roman territories, quaestor in 89-88, consul in 74 B.C. and governor of Cilicia (a region in Asia Minor) during the Third Mithridatic War, Lucullus was most famously a lover of food. 

Lucullus, perhaps the truest epicure as we now think of one, was undoubtedly the most refined. He set the pace. Other Romans, like Trimalchio's vulgar prototype, might give banquets whose success depended upon the leaping of three naked virgins from a great crusted tart. It was Lucullus who gave his carefully chosen guests the exquisite compliment of letting them watch their next course die!

Unlike Apicius, who was driven to suicide after running out of money to pay for his parties, Lucullus was well-funded by the spoils of his military victories. While he was not staging grand conquests or carrying out his legislative duties, he lived a busy lifestyle as a generous patron of arts, sciences, and social entertaining. 

At his dinner parties, guests were assigned to different rooms, where they were served food and surrounded by decor of a quality dependent on their social status/relationship to the host. Less distinguished partygoers dined on relatively inexpensive fare around relatively simple furnishings, while

in the Apollo Room, where only his very intimate or important guests were invited, [Lucullus] spent one thousand dollars for each person. 

Here he entertained most frequently, with the most precious foods laid upon tables now solid ivory, now silver or carved tortoise shell. For ordinary guests goblets of inlaid gold did well enough, but in the Apollo Room glasses hollowed from great gems were used with nonchalance. 

I'm almost sad to say that Lucullus is more well known for the indulgent novelties in his Apollo Room than his academic patronage or military prowess. Tellingly, he is now remembered in the english word "lucullan," which is used to describe extreme luxury. 

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"Fish Pickle"

I hesitated to write about this recipe, because the website where I found it doesn't cite its sources. Then I figured "to hell with academic integrity!" and decided to go for it anyway. 

The recipe reads as follows:

3 oz, drained and washed, canned tuna or salmon, or unsalted sardines or unsalted anchovies

1 T white wine

1 T vinegar

1 T olive oil

1 small garlic clove, crushed

1/4 t rosemary, ground

1/4 t sage

1 mint leaf, finely chopped

pinch of basil

In a mixing bowl, thoroughly combine all ingredients. 

I used tuna, white wine vinegar, and made a nice tuna salad. Having no absurd flavor combinations to complain about, it went over very well.

Because of the title of the recipe and because the Ancient Romans obviously didn't can tuna, I wonder whether there's some way I could pickle some fish myself for a more genuine attempt at this recipe. I'll look into it, dear readers, and then I'll get back to you. 

I'm afraid I don't have any pictures to show you or amusing recipe misinterpretations to tell you about, so this post will be short. Try the fish pickle, everyone!

Musical Accompaniment

Musica Romana

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Fictionalized Livy On Feasting and Literary Criticism

"Boy, do you know how Pollio has built up his reputation? Well, he's rich and has a very large, beautiful house and a surprisingly good cook. He invites a great crowd of literary people to dinner, gives them a perfect meal and afterwards casually picks up the latest volume of his history. He says humbly, 'Gentlemen, there are a few passages here that I am not quite sure about. I have worked very hard at them but they still need the final polish which I am counting on you to give them. By your leave...' Then he begins to read. Nobody listens very carefully. Everyone's belly is stuffed. 'The cook's a genius,' they are all thinking. 'The mullet with piquant sauce, and those fat stuffed thrushes and the wild-boar with truffles - when did I eat so well last? Not since Pollio's last reading, I believe. Ah, here comes the slave with the wine again. That excellent Cyprian wine. Pollio's right: it's better than any Greek wine on the market.' Meanwhile Pollio's voice - and it's a nice voice to listen to, like a priest's at an evening sacrifice in summer - goes smoothly on and every now and then asks humbly, 'Is that all right, do you think?' And everyone says, thinking of the thrushes again, or perhaps of the little simnel cakes: 'Admirable. Admirable, Pollio.'"

- from I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Sorry for the inactivity! There will be a new (or rather, very old) recipe coming soon.

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Garum, recreated by Heston Blumenthal

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Libum

This recipe is from the PBS website, where they've posted some modern adaptations of Roman recipes from A Taste of Ancient Rome by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa and The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger. Libum is described as a "sacrificial cake" made for household gods using the following method: 

Libum to be made as follows: 2 pounds cheese well crushed in a mortar; when it is well crushed, add in 1 pound bread-wheat flour or, if you want it to be lighter, just 1/2 a pound, to be mixed with the cheese. Add one egg and mix all together well. Make a loaf of this, with the leaves under it, and cook slowly in a hot fire under a brick.

And the modernized version:

1 cup plain, all purpose flour

8 ounces ricotta cheese

1 egg, beaten

bay leaves

1/2 cup clear honey

Sift the flour into a bowl. Beat the cheese until it's soft and stir it into the flour along with the egg. Form a soft dough and divide into 4. Mold each one into a bun and place them on a greased baking tray with a fresh bay leaf underneath. Heat the oven to 425° F. Cover the cakes with your brick* and bake for 35-40 minutes until golden-brown. Warm the honey and place the warm cakes in it so that they absorb it. Allow to stand 30 minutes before serving.

*The Romans often covered their food while it was cooking with a domed earthenware cover called a testo. You can use an overturned, shallow clay pot, a metal bowl, or casserole dish as a brick.

The modern version is much more clear and detailed than all the recipes I've made so far, so you may be ready to assume that I actually followed the instructions this time. But no! I used dried instead of fresh bay leaves and I drizzled the honey over the cakes instead of soaking them, just to maintain my consistency in taking liberties with source material. 

Here is my dough. Having only three ingredients, it wasn't too difficult to make. 

Here are my liba, each covering a bay leaf. As a testo I used another one of these aluminum pans. 

And here is a baked and honeyed libum, sitting on top of the Game of Thrones board game (or, The Board Game of Thrones). 

The cakes were densely doughy and would have been very bland without the honey. Though the bay leaves added a nice aroma, they didn't have a noticeable affect on the taste. Despite these shortcomings, I'd say libum is the most agreeable Ancient Roman food I've tried so far - nicely uncomplicated, with no unfamiliar flavor combinations. 

Musical Accompaniment

I've been forgetting my musical pairings! To make up for it, here's a poor-quality recording of a live performance by Synaulia: 

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The Silk Road Gourmet is hosting an Ancient Roman cookoff, featuring homemade garum and photography that far outshines my own:

Entry 1: Pullus Frontonianus

Entry 2: Two Sauces for Fowl and a Patina of Asparagus and Grouse

Entry 3: Patella with Sardines and Garum

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Laridi Coctura "Attempt" #1

This was my first attempt at a Roman meat recipe, so I chose the least complicated one I could find (one that didn't call for calf's brains or pig's vulva), then interpreted it very loosely: 

Cover [bacon, salt pork] with water and cook with plenty of dill; sprinkle with a little oil and a trifle of salt.

Essentially, this is a recipe for bacon boiled with dill. However, I had four pork chops in the fridge that needed getting rid of, and I'm no stranger to taking liberties with Apicius's recipes, so I went ahead and used the directions only as inspiration, figuring a cut of meat from the same animal as bacon would be close enough. And because no one likes boiled meat, I fried my pork in oil after rubbing it with dill ("plenty"), salt (maybe if I put salt on a cut of pork, it will become "salt pork"), and pepper (because I know those Romans liked their pepper).

The end result was very tasty, though not at all the intent of the recipe writer. 

I've come to terms with my tendency to stray from my source material. Partly I feel a vengeful sort of disrespect for Apicius and its ambiguous phrasing, but in a more scholarly way, I understand that it was written for professional cooks who were familiar with the culinary conventions of their time, and who were themselves granted license by the lack of detailed directions. As Vehling puts it, "plainly, Apicius was no writer, no editor. He was a cook," so in the spirit of Apicius's own cookery, I believe my alterations are justified. 

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Ab urbe condita!

Today, April 21st, is the anniversary of the founding of Rome, our favorite ancient city. Coincidentally, it's also my birthday! The fates wanted me to be a classicist, I suppose.

I deeply regret the lack of posting that has been going on here, so I will try to cook something nice and celebratory tomorrow. 

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Dulcia Domestica

"Dulcia Domestica," translates nonspecifically to "Homemade Sweets." In this case, the "Dulcia" are stuffed, candied dates: 

Little home confections (which are called dulciaria) are made thus: little palms or (as they are ordinarily called) dates are stuffed - after the seeds have been removed - with a nut or with nuts and ground pepper, sprinkled with salt on the outside and are candied in honey and served.

I used pine nuts this time, but I'd like to try making these with almonds, which would fit so nicely inside the dates. 

Here are my dates, stuffed and salted. I went easy on the pepper, because I still need to adjust to this honey/pepper combination that appears in so many Roman recipes. 

And here they are after being candied (if you count them, you'll find that they multiplied). 

I am usually a failure when it comes to candying, but this was not too difficult a process. The recipe doesn't provide any temperature ranges or time limits, so I was able to improvise in my eager and unskilled way: I heated the honey until it was thin and rolled the dates around in it, removing them after only a few minutes because I didn't want them to harden too much after cooling. 

I was quite pleased with the results. The dates were very sweet, but the filling helped temper that and the salt, as always, made everything more tasty. 

Afterward I played around with the leftover honey, which soon started to look like this:

I candied some of the extra pine nuts and then had a splendid time trying to clean the pot. Overall, good fun!

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Leges Sumptuariae

At several points in the history of Roman Republic, "Sumptuary Laws" were passed to regulate the number of guests and types of food consumed at gatherings, as well as limit expenditures on clothing, jewelry, and other immodest displays of wealth. To preserve the morality of Roman citizens (and in the process, lessen the drain of lavish spending on the economy), certain emperors - among them Caesar and Augustus, tried to place restrictions on celebratory eating

Vehling notes some methods of enforcement:

Imperial spies and informers were omnipresent. The market places were policed, the purchases by prospective hosts carefully noted, dealers selling supplies and cooks (the more skillful kind usually) hired for the occasion were bribed to reveal the “menu.” Dining room windows had to be located conveniently to allow free inspection from the street of the dainties served; the passing Imperial food inspector did not like to intrude upon the sanctity of the host’s home.

Of course, no liked being told what and how much to eat, so these laws were hardly ever obeyed. Ostentatious opulence among the elite classes had come to establish itself as a social convention, and loopholes were frequently exploited: food inspectors were easily avoided, prices were lowered to meet spending limitations, and the lawmakers themselves set a poor example by neglecting to reduce their own expenditures. The seemingly thorough enforcement described above was carried out halfheartedly, in practice providing little hindrance to citizens and their social displays. 

Sumptuary Laws were rewritten and reinstated numerous times during the Republican period, yet always failed to serve their intended purpose. They were short lived and largely ignored, ultimately acting as a testament to the attitudes of the Ancient Romans toward wealth, indulgence and ostentation. 

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In Ovis Hapalis

Well, this was disastrous. 

"In Ovis Hapalis" pretty much means "Soft Boiled Eggs." [SURPRISE CULINARY LATIN LESSON: "ovis" can also mean "sheep," but thanks to noun-adjective agreement, it's clear that this is not a recipe for mutton. "Hapalus" is a 1st/2nd declension adjective, and "ovum" (egg) is 2nd declension, while "ovis" (sheep) is third declension. "In" takes the ablative case, which gives us "hapalis" and "ovis" (eggs), while the ablative of "ovis" (sheep) would be "ove." I'm not sure how one would go about making "soft boiled sheep," anyway.]

Before making this recipe, I had never cooked or eaten a soft-boiled egg in my life, which presented my first challenge. I read a very detailed article on Serious Eats about "making the perfect soft-boiled egg"; it told me to boil my eggs at exactly 180 degrees fahrenheit for exactly five minutes, which may have been more helpful had I a reliable thermometer.

The second challenge lay in the recipe's vagueness. Roman recipes rarely provide exact quantities or very detailed instructions, so this is something I'll have to get used to. Here's Vehling's exact wording: 

In Ovis Hapalis

Serve pepper, lovage, soaked nuts, honey, vinegar and broth [garum].

Challenge three: I don't know where to get lovage. I've read that celery seeds can be used as a substitute, but I didn't have any, so I did what any devoted professional would do and ignored its presence in the recipe. I am not proud. 

Challenge four: "Vinegar" is a pretty broad term. I just used what was handy.

Here is our lineup; the tupperware contains my homemade pseudo-garum.

All these things, so innocent and tasty, turn into a nauseating monstrosity when combined, something that looks and smells not unlike aging cat food. I feel a little guilty about posting pictures because I don't want to subject you to the sight of this, but for educational purposes:

Thanks to my inability to estimate water temperature, my eggs were under-boiled and fell to gooey pieces when I tried peeling them (my dad later informed me that soft boiled eggs aren't meant to be peeled - alas, he was too late!). They looked even more pathetic and unappetizing when topped with the cat-food-sauce, so I thought I'd be funny and style them with a piece of toast. 

And like a true Roman, I ate it. I ate it all. It tasted like vinegar, shame and salmonella. The toast was nice, though. 

I understand what went wrong, I now realize that there is a more practical way of eating soft boiled eggs, and I have come to terms with the fact that Ancient Romans were accustomed to flavor combinations that offend my delicate, modern palate. I might never really understand how anyone ever thought a mix of honey/pepper/vinegar/fish-sauce would be a good idea, but I'll be damned if I don't keep trying.

Appropriately Somber Accompaniment

Synaulia's "Neniae"

Neniae by Synaulia on Grooveshark

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Vehling on the Death of Apicius

To elaborate on my last Apicius post, here's a more detailed account of Apicius's suicide from the introduction to Vehling's De re coquinaria: 

[M. Gavius Apicius] spent his vast fortune for food, as the stories go, and when he had only a quarter million dollars left (a paltry sum today but a considerable one in those days when gold was scarce and monetary standards in a worse muddle than today) Apicius took his own life, fearing that he might have to starve to death some day.

This story seems absurd on the face of it, yet Seneca and Martial tell it (both with different tendencies) and Suidas, Albino and other writers repeat it without critical analysis. These writers who are unreliable in culinary matters anyway, claim that Apicius spent one hundred million sestertii on his appetite—in gulam. Finally when the hour of accounting came he found that there were only ten million sestertii left, so he concluded that life was not worth living if his gastronomic ideas could no longer be carried out in the accustomed and approved style, and he took poison at a banquet especially arranged for the occasion.