Apicius 5.6.3: Beans in Mustard Sauce

Right, 'cause I need another hobby blog. Anyway, this one is for ancient Roman cooking, specifically from Apicius, a collection of Roman recipes probably dating to the first and second centuries C.E. A few Christmases ago I got a copy of Apicius: A Critical Edition With an Introduction and English Translation by Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, which is a very lovely and useful edition, with lots of additional material concerning ingredients. I also have an old Dover copy of Joseph Dommers Vehling's translation from 1936, though I hear his Latin is kind of on the iffy side. Not reading Latin myself I would not know.

I suppose I should mention I am in no way a historian; my training's in art, actually, and I am merely an interested amateur who thinks this stuff is pretty cool.

I started cooking recipes (or rather, guessing how to assemble loose lists of ingredients) from Apicius years back and had a lot of fun doing it; while obviously there are a lot of very familiar New World ingredients not present in them (for example the ubiquitous tomato), and while it certainly has its own, well, vibe (they were surprisingly fond of sweet-and-sour sauces), it still has to me a very Mediterranean feel to it. And I love Mediterranean food.

Given that these recipes are, as I said above, really just lists that only rarely give amounts or proportions there is a lot of room for interpretation and someone else making the same recipe may very well come up with something quite different.

So let's start, then.

I picked Apicius 5.6.3, because I liked the idea of green beans in a mustard sauce. Here is the recipe with the rest of the little chapter it's in with Grocock and Grainger's translation following. I included the other recipes in the chapter because the recipe I'm looking at refers back to the previous ones.

VI. FABACIAE VIRIDES ET BAIANAE.

[5.6.1] fabaciae uirides: ex liquamine oleo coriandro uiridi cumino et porro conciso cocte inferuntur.
[5.6.2] aliter: fabaciæ fricte ex liquamine inferuntur.
[5.6.3] aliter: fabaciae ex sinapi trito melle nucleis ruta cumino; ex aceto inferuntur.
[5.6.4] Baianas: elixas minutatim concidis. ruta apio uiridi porro aceto oleo liquamine careno uel passo modico inferes.

5.6 GREEN BEANS AND BAIAN BEANS.

5.6.1 Green beans: serve cooked in a dressing of liquamen, oil, green coriander, cumin, and chopped leek.
5.6.2 Alternatively: fry the beans and serve them in liquamen.
5.6.3 Alternatively: serve the beans (cooked) in some pounded mustard, honey, pine nuts, rue, cumin; serve with vinegar.
5.6.4 Baian beans: boil and chop finely. Serve in a sauce of rue, green celery, leek, vinegar, oil, liquamen, caroenum or a little passum.

Oddly enough that third use of the word fabaciae, beans, has a ligature for the ae, æ, while the other instances don't. I assume that's directly after the manuscript they were transcribing from, as is the lowercase (uncial, I'd guess).

Anyway, so after a bit of research (okay, Wikipedia) it looks like what I'd call green beans (string beans) are New World, and so would have been unknown to the ancient Romans. Which means that 'green beans' (and even I can see that's the literal translation) have to be some kind of green-colored seed bean (unless green simply means 'fresh' as in not dried); I'm guessing fava beans, which the Romans certainly had, 'cause those things go back like 8000 years in that area. They're usually eaten as the mature seeds without the pod, though apparently they can be eaten in an immature state like string beans (or snow peas).

Since I wasn't sure I got some fresh string beans and a couple kinds of fava beans, dried and canned, figuring I'd try them all. Fresh fava beans would have been my first option, and frozen second, but my local supermarket didn't have either. I'm quite sure the Romans knew how to dry beans (that's gotta be a skill picked up in the Neolithic); canned is probably the closest I can get to fresh for now. Also, apparently 'fava bean' means 'bean bean', because languages are goofy like that sometimes.

Mind you, I've never actually had fava beans. Who knows, I might hate 'em.

Here's the recipe again:

5.6.3 Alternatively: serve the beans (cooked) in some pounded mustard, honey, pine nuts, rue, cumin; serve with vinegar.

That sounds pretty simple, some kind of dressing or sauce with five ingredients, served with vinegar sprinkled over it (like some people like with fish and chips). But is it raw or cooked? It doesn't look like it needs to be cooked (though the beans obviously do), so I'll try it raw, mixed with the cooked beans while they're still hot. Sound good?

I wanted the mustard to be the predominant flavor, so after a bit of adding a little, testing a little, then adding a little more the final amounts are:

1 tablespoon ground mustard seeds
4 tablespoons pine nuts, mashed into a paste
1 tablespoon of honey
1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons of minced fresh rue
(2 teaspoons water)

The mustard I had in seed-form; I ground up an even tablespoon in my mortar but after it was ground it was considerably more than a tablespoon; I'm not sure how that works but I'm guessing it's some kind of parallel universe thing. The cumin I used pre-ground, as I'd run out of seeds. I kept adding more mustard to it because I wanted the kick of the spice. It was really very thick and not at all like a sauce, so in the end I added two teaspoons of water to it, on the theory that something as obvious as water might not make it in the ingredient list (oil or wine on the other hand being spelled out in plenty of other recipes). The rue was fresh, and came from my own garden. Just as a note, rue has a reputation for causing miscarriages in large doses, so if you're pregnant you probably shouldn't go eating it by the fistful (though from what I could find it looks like a little is fine).

I cooked the three kinds of bean separately (the dried beans I started soaking last night), then mixed the hot beans with a third of the sauce each, which did make it a bit thinner, so maybe I didn't need the water after all. This is what it looked like:

At the top are the smaller canned fava beans, on the bottom the larger dried ones (which certainly were not anything like 'green'; maybe they're the variety used for ful medames?) with the string beans on the right.

So then. What do I think?

Well, I think I am, first of all, an idiot for totally spacing out the vinegar part, which I knew I would, dammit. The sauce was however pretty good on the whole. Unfortunately though I think my mustard seeds are on the old side; while the sauce certainly had plenty of spicy kick to it it didn't taste very mustardy, which was what I was really looking for. Otherwise though it got credit for being fairly complex, flavor-wise: the pine nuts gave it an earthy resiny taste, which was balanced by the flowery overtones of the rue; the bitter aspect of the rue brought the honey down a couple notches, while the small amount of cumin gave it a good grounded base.

As for the fava beans themselves, well, not so much. The canned ones were definitely canned, and were approaching the taste of canned peas (blech); that got me wondering though if this recipe might work with fresh or frozen peas. I did like it on the green beans just fine, but I quite like green beans.

But no, turns out I'm not a fan of fava beans, at least in those two forms, such that I immediately reached for the palate cleansing powers of a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

So would I try it again? Yes, I think I would, with fresher mustard seed, and not with fava beans (unless I can find some fresh ones). Maybe frozen lima beans (which I like) or butter beans would work. Is that too far from the original recipe? I don't know, but this is about experimentation. With some hopefully edible results.