Apicius 7.11.4 Pudding with Nuts

Time for a dessert. There is a decided lack of baking or pastry recipes in Apicius; the usual assumption is that baking was a specialized field, and so considered separate (or separate enough) that such recipes did not end up in Apicius. Which is quite a loss. But there are a few sweet recipes sprinkled in among the others; this one, with three varieties of nuts plus pepper sounded interesting.

[7.11.4] dulcia piperata: teres piper, mittis mel merum passum rutam. eo mittis nucleos nuces alicam elixatam. concisas nuces auellanas tostas adicies et inferes.

7.11.4. Peppered sweets: pound pepper; add honey, wine, passum, and rue. Add to the mixture pine nuts, nuts and boiled alica. Add chopped roasted hazelnuts and serve.

According to Grocock and Grainger alica is ground emmer wheat, available in several grades ranging from coarse to fine, the finest being about like semolina. In Apicius the middle grade was called for the most often to make porridges or to add bulk in meatballs and sausages. I used semolina (although it's a different variety of wheat), which can be made into a porridge more or less like Cream of Wheat (though that has all kinds of other stuff added to it).

'Nuts' in the general sense probably referred to the ubiquitous walnut (again, according to G&G); if not it probably meant whatever kind you have on hand. I had walnuts, so I used them. This is the recipe I came up with. It was quite good, but I think I'd like to tweak it still.

1/2 teaspoon peppercorns
4 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon sweet white wine
2 tablespoons passum
1/2 teaspoon chopped rue (a couple smallish sprigs)
2 tablespoons pine nuts
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
1 cup semolina
2 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons chopped hazelnuts

Grind the pepper in a mortar; add the rue and grind into a greenish paste. Add some of the honey, then the white wine and mix to thin the herb/pepper mixture. Pour this into a saucepan, then add the rest of the honey and the passum. Heat a bit to flash off some of the alcohol, then add the milk and the semolina. Stir with a whisk until smooth; heat on medium till it thickens and bubbles (this will only take a few minutes), stirring often so it doesn't stick to the bottom and burn. When it's thick, take off the heat and set aside.

Toast the pine nuts and walnuts in a dry pan until a little browned but not burnt; grind them up as fine as you can in the mortar, then stir in to the semolina mixture.

Toast the hazelnuts the same way in a dry pan; when they've browned crunch them up in the mortar, though not as finely as the other nuts. Sprinkle over the pudding and serve.

The order of the recipe does imply that the wine and passum are not cooked, only mixed in with the cooked alica at the end, which would give the whole thing an alcohol flavor like modern rum balls. I opted to cook the semolina in the wine/passum/milk mixture for a couple reasons: first, I'm a supertaster and can't stand the taste of alcohol (it's like gasoline to me, ick) and second, again, I'm using a modern smallish mortar and there wasn't really room in the thing to use it in that way.

This was quite good just as it was, as a mildly sweet nutty porridge with the hazelnuts sprinkled on top. The semolina pudding was quite filling; the hint of pepper gave it a little kick that offset the otherwise mild flavor, while the rue gave it a flowery note (the honey completely cancelled out any bitterness). So I think, as a pudding, it will go in the keeper pile as is.

However, the recipe calls it 'sweets', plural, which I'm assuming means some kind of little candy-like finger food. A couple recipes down, in 7.11.6, instructions are given to make a very thick porridge with alica which is then spread out on a plate to firm up, then cut into cubes which are then fried and drizzled in honey. (It also says the alica is better boiled with milk than water, which is why I used the milk.) So I could imagine making this recipe as dense and very sweet little candy squares with the hazelnuts pressed into the top.

I'd never made semolina before, and the instructions I could find online were surprisingly enough quite vague in the amount of liquid needed, so I guessed a bit. While it came out pretty thick it still wasn't something that could be cut into squares, even after a spell in the fridge. So I think next time I'd like to make it with less milk so it could be cut up.

I'd also add more honey, maybe close to triple the amount; I think this recipe could get to something almost fudge-like if it were sweet enough, given the richness of the semolina. At first I thought it could use a little more pepper, but over the course of eating a bowl of it I think it might be enough as is. Pepper is one of those tastes that's sort of cumulative.

So I'd like to try it again sometime, tweaking it a little to make little candies with it; still, just as a pudding, it was really very good.

Apicius 9.10.8 Tuna With Hazelnut Mustard Sauce

Okay, this one was goooood.

(I think my plating skills—and my photography—could use a bit of work.  But trust me, it sure tasted good.)

I thought it was time to try a seafood recipe, as there are an awful lot of them in Apicius; not surprising considering Italy is almost entirely seacoast.

[9.10.8] ius in siluro in pelamide et in tinno salsis: piper ligusticum cuminum cepam mentam rutam caluam careotam mel acetum sinape oleum.

9.10.8. Sauce for salted sheatfish, young tuna and tuna: pepper, lovage, cumin, onion, mint, rue, smooth nuts, date, honey, vinegar, mustard, oil.

Sheatfish (so Wikipedia tells me) is a type of freshwater catfish found in Europe; I went with the tuna variation of the recipe, since the supermarket had tuna steaks but not catfish. That it calls for salted sheatfish probably explains the lack of liquamen which is quite salty.

I cannot seem to be able to find lovage (either leaf, seed, or plant) anywhere these days; I've grown it myself in the past and loved the stuff (the leaf I think goes especially well in chicken dishes). Lovage being fairly reminiscent of celery I used celery seeds, though they really are a poor substitute.

'Smooth nuts' are, according to Grocock and Grainger per their wonderful appendix, most likely hazelnuts.

These are the proportions I came up with, which worked quite well (and on my first try!)

1/2 pound tuna steak
10 peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1/4 teaspoon cumin seed
1/2 medium onion, chopped
4-5 fresh mint leaves, chopped
4-5 sprigs rue, chopped (about 1/2 teaspoon)
2 tablespoons chopped hazelnuts (a bit more if whole)
3 largish dates
2 teaspoons honey
2 teaspoons vinegar
1 teaspoon dry powdered mustard
1 tablespoon olive oil

Grind the peppercorns, celery seed, and cumin seeds in a mortar; put them and all the other ingredients except the tuna in a food processor and whiz to a paste.

Put a bit of (additional) olive oil in a medium-sized frying pan; sear the tuna on both sides for a couple minutes, then add a decent amount of water to deglaze the pan. Add the sauce and stir; simmer it all until the fish is cooked through and the sauce has reduced back to being a thick sticky mess. Serve with the sauce glumped on top of the fish.

Since I figured tuna could hold its own I went for a fairly rich sauce; originally I'd thought to poach the fish in the sauce as it was, but it turned out to be a very sticky and thick affair, and there was not much I could do about that unless I wanted it to be mostly vinegar (which I didn't). So I went with adding some water, then the thick sauce, and sautéing it in that until the sauce reduced back to its original state. It worked perfectly well, though I think maybe such a thick sauce would work better as a coating/crust on baked fish. It did have to be cooked I thought given the onions in it.

I ended up using a food processor; going by the order of the instructions it seemed the onions were meant to be mashed along with everything else into a paste. My mortar though is the small modern kind for grinding spices; Roman mortars were dish-sized wide things and I think they used them sort of like we use food processors, though of course food processors cut food up rather than mashing it. Also I'm getting the impression the Romans like their sauces fairly smooth, so cooking the chopped onions separately with the fish didn't seem like the right way to do it. There wasn't a lot of the sauce, and so I didn't get it too smooth in the food processor (the hazelnuts didn't become a 'butter' or anything and were still in distinct, if small, pieces), but it seemed to work well even so.

I really liked this, and would definitely like to try it again as a coating for a baked tuna steak. I will say it was very rich; I got the smallest tuna steak they had, thinking it would be a little more than a serving, but really given the richness was more like two.

It was nicely mustardy and had a little bit of a kick; the sweetness was just about right, and of a lovely rich earthy sort with the hazelnuts and the dates. I managed to get it nicely balanced on my first try, too, which is kind of a miracle. I'm kind of assuming the long lists of spices in Roman food are parallel to those in Indian cuisine; a little of each making up a sum greater than its parts. And I think doing just a little honey and a little vinegar, such that you can't really taste the vinegar on its own is the way to go. It gives it a balanced sweetness without being cloying. Also I think if the vinegar is overplayed it will dominate, and since most recipes include it everything will end up tasting the same, which cannot have been the intent.

As I said, I'd like to try this again in a baked version, but for now it's still going straight in the keeper pile. It really was very good!

Apicius 4.3.6 Pork and Apricot Minutal

Finally, a meat dish. This one is a minutal, which means (as per Grocock and Grainger) a stew made with small or chopped pieces of meat. This one with the apricots reminded me especially of the famous lamb and apricot tagine from Morocco, which is a slow-cooked sweet and savory stew. Given the meat was pre-cooked, the Roman recipe didn't need nearly as much time. The Latin and the English, as usual:

minutal ex praecoquiis: adicies in caccabo oleum liquamen uinum; concides cepam ascaloniam aridam; spatulam porcinam coctam tessellatim concides. his omnibus coctis teres piper cuminum mentam siccam anetum; suffundis mel liquamen passum acetum modice ius de suo sibi; temperabis; praecoqua enucleata mittis, facies ut ferueant donec percoquantur. tractam confringes, ex ea obligas, piper aspargis et inferes.

4.3.6 Minutal of apricots: put oil, liquamen and wine in a pan, chop in dried ascalonian onions and diced cooked shoulder of pork. When all this is cooked, pound pepper, cumin, dry mint, dill; pour on honey, liquamen, passum, a little vinegar, some of the cooking liquor; balance the flavours. Put in stoned apricots, bring them to a simmer until they are thoroughly cooked. Crumble a tracta and thicken with some of it. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.

This sounds like a recipe invented to use some of last night's roast, i.e. leftovers. I'd never made pork shoulder, but a couple nights before slow-roasted one (per instructions found on the internet) for like four and a half hours with a couple suitably Roman spices (pepper and cumin) and some honey rubbed on it. The honey caramelized almost to black but didn't burn given it wasn't too hot (I think 325° Fahrenheit). I don't think I've ever had roasted pork shoulder but it came out very tender, like meltingly so (I understand the cut is used for pulled pork and the like). However it is a rather fatty cut of meat and was almost a little too rich for me, though it was quite good.

This recipe makes use of tracta, which are dried disks of flour crumbled into sauces to thicken them. They can be made from scratch, though I understand they are a lot of work. Since I don't have any (I may make some someday, just to be authentic), I used cornstarch, although I suppose that's pretty New World.

Ascalonion onions are a bit of a mystery and cannot be identified with certainty according to Grocock and Grainger; though the ancient city of Ascalon (Ashkelon) in what is now Israel gave its name to both shallots and scallions they may not be either of them. I went with scallions because that's what I could find.

I managed to find fresh apricots in my local supermarket; dried ones would probably work as well, though you'll have to cook them a bit longer. I also went with fresh mint rather than dried because that is what I had.

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon liquamen (Thai fish sauce)
1 cup wine
3 green onions, roughly chopped
1 cup diced cooked pork shoulder
a few peppercorns
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon chopped fresh mint leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried dill
2 teaspoons honey
2 tablespoons passum
1 teaspoon vinegar
2 fresh apricots, stoned and sliced
cornstarch or other thickener

Put the olive oil, liquamen, and wine in a pan; throw in the onions and pork shoulder and let simmer till the onions are soft. Grind the peppercorns, cumin, mint and dill in a mortar; when they form a smooth paste add in the vinegar and honey and mix well. Pour into the pan, then add the passum. Add the apricot slices and simmer for a few more minutes until the apricot slices are cooked but still fairly firm. Thicken with a little cornstarch mixed with some of the cooking liquid. Serve with a little more ground pepper. Makes about two servings.

I left out the second liquamen as I felt there was plenty of it already; I found I wanted to fry the onions in just the oil first but no, the recipe called for simmering it all in the wine mixture.

Okay. This was really good, but then I really like meat + fruit dishes. It was quite well balanced, and not too vinegary, with just the right amount of sweetness to make the apricots work. With the pork shoulder already cooked and very tender the whole thing felt like it had been simmered forever. You could, I suppose, make it with some pork cutlets if you didn't want to roast an entire pork shoulder beforehand, but it probably won't be as tender.

Passum

One of the ingredients the Romans used as a sweetener was something called passum, or raisin wine. This was wine made from dried grapes that were then mixed with must and pressed, i.e. made from raisins before being fermented and so extra sweet (and again, I am totally cribbing this from Grocock and Grainger). There are plenty of raisin wines (also called straw wines) still made in the Mediterranean area but they can be hard to come by, as well as expensive stuff to use just as a flavoring. So I cheated, and made a pseudo-passum by steeping raisins in already-made wine.

It's said to be sweet, and I assume red, so I used a port (again, I am not a drinker and know next to nothing about wines. Seriously I had to look this stuff up on Wikipedia). The bottle was 750 ml, so I used most of a medium sized (twelve ounce) box of raisins; I put them in some Tupperware, poured the wine over it and let it all soak in the fridge for a few days.

When that was done I strained it back into the bottle, then took a spoonful at a time of the soaked raisins and squashed them up in the mortar, then strained them. But that got pretty tedious pretty quick, so I ended up going all 21st century and throwing them in a food processor with a bit of the wine to make a slurry, then straining that back into the bottle.

When I tasted it it was definitely sweeter, with a strong raisin flavor to it. Hopefully that will be an acceptable substitute.

Apicius 5.2.2 Lentils With Chestnuts

This one sounded interesting:

lenticulam de castaneis: accipies caccabum nouum, et castaneas purgatas diligenter mittis. adicies aquam et nitrum modice, facies ut coquatur. cum coquitur, mittis in mortario piper cuminum semen coriandri mentam rutam laseris radicem puleium, fricabis. suffundis acetum mel liquamen, aceto temperabis, et super castaneas coctas refundis. adicies oleum, facies ut ferueat. cum bene ferbuerit, tutunclabis ut in mortario teres. gustas, si quid deest, addes. cum in boletar miseris, addes oleum uiridem.

5.2.2 Lentils with chestnuts: take a new pan and put in carefully peeled chestnuts. Add water and a little soda, put it to cook. When it is cooking, put in a mortar pepper, cumin, coriander seed, mint, rue, laser root, pennyroyal, and pound them. Pour on vinegar, honey, liquamen, flavour with vinegar and pour it over the cooked chestnuts. Add oil, bring to heat. When it is simmering well, pound it with a stick as you pound in a mortar. Taste it; if there is anything lacking, add it. When you have put it in the serving dish, add green oil.

Since this one called for laser root, which is another name for the famed silphium, I broke out the asafoetida. To my surprise it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. Now, it was a few years old (and pre-ground at that), so maybe it had lost some pungency, I don't know. The person I bought it from had originally triple bagged it in ziplocs though, so it had been pretty well sealed up.

It is not chestnut season in these parts right now, so I used some pre-roasted ones in a pouch. They probably taste a little different than boiled chestnuts (a little sweeter), but that's what I could find.

Making this recipe taught me that even though there are very few measurements there is a method to recipes in Apicius, because once I started with it the order made a lot of sense. After I set the lentils to cook, and put the chestnuts in a pan with some water just to heat through, I started grinding the herbs in my mortar. (I left out the pennyroyal again and just used mint.) With the green herbs as well as the dry spices, it formed a thick paste pretty quickly; putting a little vinegar in it and mixing that up (especially to thin the honey, which is quite thick and sticky) made it far more workable, and something that could be poured in to the vegetables without leaving half of it behind. Which is also I think why vinegar is in there a second time, because that's when you're adding it properly for the taste. In the next recipe down, also a lentil recipe, the authors' note says they replaced the second vinegar with wine, as it seemed redundant. But I think it makes sense given the method.

So here is what I came up with:

1/2 cup dry lentils (will make about a cup cooked)
1 cup peeled chestnuts
a few peppercorns (or more to taste)
1/8 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon coriander seed
1/4 teaspoon asafoetida
1/2 teaspoon fresh mint leaves, chopped
1 teaspoon fresh rue leaves, chopped
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon liquamen (Thai fish sauce)
1 teaspoon honey
olive oil

Heat the lentils in a decent amount of water; bring to a boil then reduce to simmering, and cook for about a half an hour or until soft but not mushy. If using raw chestnuts, boil them in a separate pan with a pinch of baking soda until cooked (I'm afraid I don't know how long that will take, but probably not as long as the lentils). Mine were already cooked so I put them in some water just to heat. Grind the seeds and herbs in a mortar to make a thick paste; dilute with a little of the vinegar, then add the honey, fish sauce and the rest of the vinegar to the mortar and mix/mash it well.

When the lentils are done, strain them and add them to the strained chestnuts, then mash with a fork or potato masher. Add the spices/vinegar/honey mix, and a bit of olive oil so it's not too dry. Turn out into a serving dish with a little more oil drizzled over the top. Makes about two cups.

I was very wary of getting too much cumin in there so went quite light on it, and over all I think the balance of spices worked really well. No one flavor dominated, but it had a nice sweetness to it. I think the secret is to go pretty light on the vinegar/honey so that it's not too obviously sweet and sour, but just has a bit of background sweetness with enough bite to be interesting. As it was it was really well balanced, I thought. Mind you, it wasn't a particularly appetizing color, but that's what you get with lentils (I have a cousin who used to call lentil soup 'mud soup', and that's about right).

I was really very pleased with this (I do like lentils anyway); the earthiness of the lentils paired very well with the sweetness and texture of the chestnuts, and the herb/spice mixture added quite a bit to it without being overpowering, so this one is going straight into the keeper pile. I'd like to try it with some fresh chestnuts come fall, too.

Apicius 3.7 Melon Salad

And another simple summery dish, this time watermelon with a sweet and sour dressing. Following are the Latin and English versions, once again from my copy of Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation by Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, which I have to say is a damned fine edition of Apicius, with an awful lot of helpful appendices on ingredients &c.

VII. PEPONES ET MELONES. piper puleium mel uel passum liquamen acetum. interdum et silfi accedit.

3.7. LONG AND ROUND SWEET MELONS: pepper, pennyroyal, honey or passum, liquamen, vinegar. Sometimes silphium is added.

I had just sort of assumed that melons like watermelon were New World things, since they look (to this non-botanist's eye anyway) related to the squashes like zucchini and butternut; but no. Poking around on the internet I fell down the rabbit hole of JSTOR to find Melons and Watermelons in the Classical Era by Alfred C. Andrews published in Osiris, Vol 12 (1956), which article says that there are even representations of melons in paintings from Herculaneum and Pompeii (although poking through some books and google images I couldn't find them, alas). According to Andrews watermelons are native to southern Africa, while cantaloupes and muskmelons are native to Asia and Africa; the ancient Egyptians had them, which must have been very welcome in that climate, and from there they spread to Greece and then Rome. I think that's pretty cool (but then I am a dork; witness this blog.)

As usual the "recipe" is just a list of ingredients with no proportions; it looked like it could reasonably be a vinaigrette dressing to pour over the melon pieces, so that's what I did.

This recipe uses some ingredients that are very typical of Roman food while very unusual to modern tastes, so I'll explain (and I really shouldn't take any credit for these explanations as they are all cribbed from Grocock and Grainger).

First, passum is a very sweet raisin wine; I don't drink so don't know much about wines, but I hear it is a little tricky to come by. But since the recipe gives honey as an alternative, I used that.

Liquamen is the famous fermented fish sauce. Grocock and Grainger devote an entire section of the appendix to liquamen and garum, concluding that garum (the more familiar name to modern readers) is a higher quality table condiment, often made with fish blood, while liquamen was the more common version made from whole fish and used in cooking (and hopefully I have got that straight). Luckily Thai fish sauce is really quite close to liquamen and readily available, though it's probably rather saltier than liquamen.

Silphium is the famous extinct herb/resin which was greatly loved by the Romans; as it went extinct in classical times they had already figured out substitutes such as its relative asafoetida, which I have some of, but have never opened because frankly I'm a little scared of the stuff. It's also called 'devil's dung', after all. But that was optional anyway, and given that I'm still a modern American and not acclimated to Roman cuisine just yet, I took the coward's route and left it out.

Now, pennyroyal is perfectly well-known in modern times; there is, however, some controversy about its toxicity (it has been implicated in some deaths), so I went with its common relative mint. Which, and I feel very silly for this, I bought fresh. I have plenty of mint in my garden (if you have any mint in your garden you have plenty of mint) but it's chocolate mint, and I didn't think that was going to work. So I bought freakin' mint.

My original guess at proportions:

2 cups sliced watermelon
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
1/2 teaspoon liquamen (Thai fish sauce)
10 peppercorns, ground
10 mint leaves, shredded (about 1 tablespoon)

Put the watermelon in a bowl; whisk the remaining ingredients in another bowl and pour over the watermelon.

I'm definitely on the fence on this one. On the one hand it had plenty of interesting contrast—the heat of the pepper vs. the coolness of the melon, the sour vinegar vs. the sweet honey, and the salt of the liquamen also balancing out the sweetness. But it's hard to tell. I don't know if I just don't have the hang of Roman food, or if the proportions need tweaking, or if maybe I just don't like it. I even went pretty light (I thought) on the liquamen because after all that stuff kind of smells like wet dog to me. It was also really really peppery (and a bit heavy on the salt from the liquamen come to think of it). I think maybe I should try it again, halving the liquamen and pepper while leaving the rest as it is. Also I think the dressing would have benefited from sitting overnight in the fridge to come together a bit.

I guess this one gets a :|

Apicius 1.22 Berries in Syrup

This recipe is actually for preserving blackberries, but it sounded like something that could work as a dessert or sweet dish on its own. The Latin:

XXII. MORA VT DIV DVRENT: ex moribus sucum facito et cum sapa misce et in uitrio uaso cum moram mitte; custodies multo tempore.

And the English:

1.22. How to preserve blackberries:* make a purée from some blackberries and mix it with syrup and put it in a glass vessel with (some more) blackberries. You will keep them for a long time.

*Or possibly mulberries. [Authors' note.]

I didn't have any blackberries, but I have a back yard full of these things called wineberries. They're originally from eastern Asia (Korea I think), not Rome (and not my back yard either), but they are obviously in the blackberry/raspberry family. They're ripe when a deep burgundy color (hence the name) and have these weird sticky sepal things that open up to reveal the berry. The berries are a bit sticky too, but they are quite good. They're probably closer in taste to raspberries than blackberries, but I figured they'd still work with this recipe.

So I went out there and picked a bunch, a little less than a cup. I could have picked more, but I was in a skirt and sandals which is not exactly the right outfit for tromping through brambles, so I just got what I could reach.

I washed them off then took half of them and squished them with a fork to make the purée, then strained it through a sieve into a bowl, because who needs more raspberry seeds in their life? Not me. I then added the syrup (the caroenum I made last week) and poured it over the berries. Here's the entire (very simple) recipe:

1 cup raspberries/blackberries
1/4 cup caroenum

Take half the berries and mash with a fork; strain through a sieve into a bowl, then mix with the caroenum and pour over the berries.

It was actually a lot sweeter than I was counting on and I think in the future I would use proportionally less caroenum. It probably was a bit much for the small amount of berries I had; also wineberries are probably sweeter than blackberries anyway. If you were doing it to preserve them (as per the original recipe) then you'd probably want them floating in there a bit, true. As a (totally non-period) note though: the caroenum + wineberry juice mixture would go real nice in some seltzer water as a summertime drink.

I think this is probably a keeper with a bit of adjusting; I'd like to try it with some proper blackberries next time.