Apicius 5.6.3 Iterum: Fava Beans in Pine Nut Mustard Sauce

I was lucky enough to get my hands on some fresh fava beans yesterday at a local farmstand, so I tried this recipe again. I also researched how to properly cook them, so this time after de-podding them, I blanched them in boiling water for a minute or so, then slipped them out of their inner (surprisingly plastic-like) skins to reveal the pure bright green bean inside. I did not get a picture, alas, but that's because I ate them all right up, yum yum! And though I didn't have any rue (it does not seem to have survived in my herb garden), I did remember to pour a little vinegar in a little bowl to dip them in, which turned out to be a very nice addition to the balance of flavors. I highly recommend this recipe now. I think if I can't find fresh fava beans in the future I'll try it again with the frozen fresh kind, but this time I'll thaw them first and blanch them as if they were fresh to get the inner skins off.

This was really good!

Apicius 5.6.3 Redux: Fava Beans in Pine Nut Mustard Sauce

So I gave this one a try again, having found some frozen fresh fava beans (i.e. not canned or dried). It came out quite nicely this time, and I think the frozen beans made all the difference. The Latin and the English, from Grocock and Grainger, once again:

[5.6.3] aliter: fabaciae ex sinapi trito melle nucleis ruta cumino; ex aceto inferuntur.

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

1 cup fresh frozen fava beans
1 teaspoon ground mustard
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon pine nuts
1/2 teaspoon cumin
sprig or two of rue, minced, to make about 1/2 teaspoon
vinegar to serve

Cook beans according to directions on the package (it took about a half hour of boiling for me).

Grind the cumin seeds (if you're not using ground) with the rue (if you can get it) in a mortar. Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan until golden brown and fragrant; transfer to the mortar and grind, adding the mustard to make a smooth dryish paste. Add the honey and mix; it should form a thick sticky mess.

When the beans are finished cooking, drain well and then toss with the sauce; the heat from the beans will thin it a bit. Sprinkle a little vinegar over and serve.

This definitely worked better this time, and was quite simple, especially given I didn't have any cumin seed so went with pre-ground. I did not, however have any rue, since it's still winter out there, but as I used it the last time I tried this recipe I think that amount should be fine. It was quite rich, and well balanced, and definitely had a nice kick with the ground raw mustard. It could be described as a hot mustard honey sweet and sour sauce.

I found I rather liked the fava beans, unlike last time when the choices I had were dried or canned; the frozen ones really did taste much, much, better. They don't seem that far off from lima beans, actually, mild and a little sweet, so if you can't find frozen fava beans frozen lima beans would work just as well.

So now I finally get to put this one with the keepers, yay!

Apicius 8.6.1: Lamb With Black-eyed Peas

Another lamb recipe. This one sounded like a good hearty dish for a chilly night.

[8.6.1] copadia hedina siue agnina: pipere liquamine coques, cum faseolis faratariis liquamine pipere laser, cum inbracto bocellas panis et oleo modico.

8.6.1. Kid or lamb pieces: cook with pepper and liquamen, (or) with cow peas, liquamen, pepper, laser, (or) as a relish on pieces of bread with a little oil.

The translation has a bit of guesswork to it; in a footnote, G&G state "[t]he term faseoli faratariis seems to imply a 'starchy' pea, or perhaps pea flour is intended. Lit. 'with flour-filled beans'". So 'cow peas' (which Wikipedia tells me is the same as black-eyed peas) is a guess. They are an Old World plant, native (probably) to Africa, and it seems likely the Romans knew of them. I liked the idea of a lamb and bean dish with a thick sauce; again I was thinking of the Moroccan tagine, which is a slowly simmered meat dish that is a little thicker than a stew, so that's what I aimed for.

1 pound lamb, cut into cubes
1/2 cup dried black-eyed peas (cowpeas)
1 teaspoon liquamen (Thai fish sauce)
several peppercorns, ground (or more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon asafoetida

Put all the ingredients in a wide frying-pan with water to cover. Bring to the boil then reduce to a simmer, skimming off the foam. Simmer until the beans are soft and the lamb is tender, about an hour and a half, adding more water as necessary. At the end let the cooking liquid reduce down to a stew or gravy consistency, then serve.

This was just as hearty as I'd predicted—even with so few ingredients it had quite a full and rich flavor. Though originally I used a full tablespoon of fish sauce, thinking it needed a bit of broth to it, with the reduction at the end it came out a bit too salty for my tastes (though not inedible in the least); I reduced the liquamen to a teaspoon above to account for that.

It was pretty good, and very rich (I could only finish half the bowl), but I'm not entirely sure I like black-eyed peas. It was the first time I'd had them, and there was something about the taste I didn't really care for. Still, their earthy flavor was strong enough to hold its own with the lamb, and was a good match. I suppose one could substitute navy beans or the like, though those are technically New World ingredients; anyway the original recipe is a little vague on that ingredient so there's a bit of wiggle room.

I think it's probably just me; someone who liked black-eyed peas might just love this, so I'll put it with the keepers, as otherwise it did work quite well and made a rich hearty dish. I'd call it good simple plebeian/peasant food, if old gourmet Apicius wouldn't be insulted.

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.