Apicius 4.1.2: Sala Cattabia

This one looked fairly approachable to modern eyes; more or less a chicken salad with a ginger-raisin vinaigrette. A while back I tried the recipe immediately after it, also a sala cattabia, though it didn't make it into the keepers pile. (I still don't know what 'cattabia' refers to; for a while there I thought maybe it was a type of cooking pot, but no, I was thinking of a caccabus.) This one is said to be 'in the style of Apicius', so extra fancy, I suppose. It would work quite well as a lunch dish, though I had it for supper. It was very yummy, let me say.

The Latin, followed by the English:

[4.1.2] aliter sala cattabia Apiciana: adicies in mortario apii semen puleio aridum mentam aridam gengiber coriandro uiridem uuam passam enucleatam mel acetum oleum et uinum. conteres. adicies in caccabolo panis Picentini frustra, interpones pulpas pulli glandulas edinas caseum Vestinum nucleos pineos cucumeres cepas aridas minute concisas; ius supra perfundes; insuper niuem sub ora, [piper] asparges et inferes.

4.1.2. Another sala cattabia in the style of Apicius: put in a mortar celery seed, dry pennyroyal, dry mint, ginger, green coriander, de-seeded raisins, honey, vinegar, oil and wine. Pound together. Put in a small pot pieces of Picentine bread interlayered with chicken meat, goats' sweetbreads, Vestine cheese, pine nuts, cucumber, finely chopped dried onions. Pour the sauce over (the ingredients); stand (the pot) in snow for an hour, sprinkle with pepper and serve.

According to Grocock and Grainger, Picentine bread is made from alica, a fairly finely milled wheat groat similar in texture to semolina. The alica is left to soak for nine days, probably in must (fresh grape juice, which was usually made into wine). As the must started to ferment, the naturally occurring yeasts acted as a leavening agent. Nowadays we just buy yeast to make bread; of course the Romans had to get it another way. After the nine days more flour was mixed in to make a proper dough, then it was baked. The resulting bread was famous for being quite light and spongy, and I imagine it was a bit sweet too since it started with grape juice rather than just water. I don't know if nine days is long enough to get it to something like sourdough; at any rate it does seem a very interesting way to make bread. Maybe I'll try it someday, though I have to admit my bread-making skills are pretty substandard. I'm going to go ahead and blame my kitchen, which is basically in the cellar, and always a bit on the cool side. I'm sure that's it.

I was able to find a bread made with semolina, crazy enough, though it was this weird sort in Local Supermarket's bakery department that was only lightly baked (as the Gwragedd Annwn prefer, so I hear) that I put in the oven for another ten minutes. Not sure that did anything but warm it up, but it was certainly tasty. A French (or Italian) bread would work, too.

G&G don't give an explanation for 'Vestine cheese', but luckily the internet does, because there totally are people out there who did their PhD's on the History of Cheese. Vestine cheese was made by the Vestini of central Italy, and was a smoked goats' cheese which was quite popular for breakfast. Smoked goats' cheese does exist out there, again according to the internet, but Local Supermarket only had the plain kind, so that's what I used.

I skipped the pennyroyal, since it's on the questionable side; there's mint in it anyway, which is closely related, so I just used plenty of that.

And I left the sweetbreads out entirely, because no. Just no. I mean, you can if you want, but I'm not gonna and you can't make me.

For the dressing:

1/2 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon dried mint
2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced fresh cilantro (or parsley, if like me you hate cilantro)
1 tablespoon raisins
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon vinegar
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 tablespoon wine

Soak the raisins in the wine for a bit to soften; meanwhile grind the other dry(ish) ingredients to a fine paste in a mortar, then add the raisins when they've softened a bit. (I found cutting them up into several tiny pieces first made grinding them easier). Add the wine the raisins soaked in, the vinegar, honey, and oil and mix to a slurry. Set aside.

For the salad:

1 cup bread cubes
1 cup diced cooked chicken
2 oz smoked or plain goats' cheese, crumbled
1 generous tablespoon pine nuts
1/2 cucumber, peeled and diced
1 tablespoon minced onion
pepper

Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan until lightly browned and fragrant. Put all the bread cubes in the bowl, then layer half each of the chicken, goats' cheese, cucumber, onions, and pine nuts, followed by another layer of chicken, cheese, cucumber, and onions. Pour the dressing over, sprinkle with the remaining pine nuts and pepper to taste. Put in the fridge to chill for an hour, or eat right away (which is what I did).

This was really very good, though it has no salt (and no liquamen, either), so I was worried it would be bland. It wasn't, because the goats' cheese was a little salty, but you could add salt if you like with the pepper at the end. The flavors all worked quite well together, and surprisingly the bread was a very important part of it and gave it a good solid base. It was over all quite nicely balanced, though it was a little light on the dressing. Ideally I wanted enough to soak down through the layers and into the bread at the bottom, but it didn't get that far, being fairly thick. It tasted good, though, so I think the proportions of the dressing are about right. Maybe half again as much would work for the amount of salad? That's very much to personal taste, though, of course.

The dressing wasn't all that gingery, oddly enough; I wonder if it's the ginger I've been getting lately. The last time I got some I made ginger tea out of it, using rather a lot of ginger, but it had barely any kick. So maybe you'll want to use less, ha. Still though, the dressing was rich, complex, and densely flavored, and very Roman.

You can play with the proportions of the salad a bit too, of course. I don't really care too much for raw onion, so only used a little. It did work well and gave it just the right amount of bite, I thought. You could also use rather more pine nuts; the measurement I gave above was just what I had left in the container!

Overall, though, definitely a keeper, and I'll be making it again!

Apicius 7.11.7 Variation

Oh my GOD.

Try this, for the cheese patina recipe a couple posts down:

1 cup total whole milk + cream in whatever proportion you like (I used rather more cream than milk)
3 eggs
1/3 cup honey
8 oz package (1 cup) mascarpone cheese
ground pepper (optional)

Follow the directions linked above. Eat it, and revel in the decadence that was the Roman Empire.

Happy Lupercalia!

Apicius 7.11.7: Sweet Cheese Patina

It's been a few months since I've done any Roman cooking; I think I got to a point where I just needed a damned tomato in my life (and peppers, and zucchini, and chocolate, and butter). Also, this is a hobby blog and I tend to do things in waves, so I at least am not surprised. But it seemed time to get back into this.

This recipe for a cheese patina sounded rather like a honey cheesecake without the crust. Strictly speaking a patina is a wide flat cooking dish or pan with sloping sides; the name was also applied to the kind of dish cooked within it. These generally used eggs as a binder, though not always, and seem to have ranged from something like a quiche or frittata to custards. They could be sweet or savory and contain pretty much any ingredient you could imagine. (Incidentally patella, 'little patina', the word for kneecap, comes from the same root, as does the Spanish paella, which also gave its name to a specific type of dish cooked in it.) This particular patina recipe is found under the Homemade Sweets and Curds section of Apicius.

I'll give the Latin followed by the English, as usual; and as usual, the translations and information about Roman cooking techniques are straight from Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger's Apicius: A Critical Edition With an Introduction and English Translation, so, you know, don't go thinking I'm an actual expert on this stuff or anything.

[7.11.7] tiropatinam: accipies lac, aduersus quod patinam estimabis, temperabis lac cum melle quasi ad lactantia, oua quinque ad sextarium mittis, si ad eminam, oua tria. in lacte dissoluis ita ut unum corpus facias, in cumana colas et igni lento coques. cum duxerit ad se, piper adspargis et inferes.

7.11.7. Cheese patina: take some milk and choose a dish of sufficient size to hold it; flavour the milk with honey as though for milk pudding. Put in 5 eggs to a pint or 3 to a 1/2 pint. Dissolve them in the milk so that you have a smooth emulsion. Strain it into a Cumaean clay dish and cook over a slow fire; when it has set, sprinkle with pepper and serve.

Apparently this is one of the (all too common, alas) recipes in Apicius where a key ingredient is found only in the title; at first I thought well maybe 'cheese' referred to the consistency of the finished custard, but that didn't seem very likely really, especially given that part of the instructions are 'as though for milk pudding', implying that it is specifically not a milk pudding. But then I had to guess at the amount of cheese to put in. Not that that's anything new with Apicius.

I have to confess I'm not that handy with a custard; in fact I pulled out my Mastering the Art of French Cooking by the one and only Julia Child (and Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) just for some tips. Those recipes turned out to be rather more complicated than I'd hoped, so instead I cribbed from an old Better Homes and Garden cookbook (yes, the one with the gingham/Italian restaurant tablecloth cover). The added texture of the cheese confused me too, as it was a bit grainy and hard to tell if the egg was separating, though I think I did all right in the end. So this is the recipe:

1 cup whole milk
3 eggs
5 tablespoons honey (=1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon, if that's easier)
1 cup ricotta cheese
ground pepper

Put the milk in a saucepan and mix in the honey with a whisk (you may wish to start warming the milk first to allow the honey to more easily dissolve). Add the cup of cheese and whisk till smooth. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl until quite smooth, then add to the milk and cheese mixture. Heat slowly over low to medium heat (you can use a double boiler if you've got one), stirring all the while. Keep stirring until the mix is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. It may look like it's not going to get there, especially with the cheese making it kind of grainy, but it will. I gave it a couple more minutes after that stage because I was following directions for creme brulée and I wanted it to be a little thicker, but you don't have to.

Take it off the heat and allow it to cool down; you can eat it then, sprinkled with some pepper, or put it in the fridge to firm up for later.

I don't know why the Romans were so taken with pepper, especially given that from what I could find the variety they used had both larger peppercorns and was rather spicier than the common round black peppercorns that are ubiquitous today; but they put the damned stuff on everything, including sweets. I guess that was one of the few sources of kick or heat they had for spices and a little bit of pain with their otherwise perfectly good food made them feel alive or something, like it does in Mexico or India. Me, I'm a wussy New Englander; our (sacred) recipe for clam chowder specifically says to use white pepper, if you must, because black pepper would just be too much. I put some on there for the photo (and I did eat it) but given my druthers I'd leave it off.

In spite of the pepper, this was quite good; I was a little confused though when I pulled it out of the fridge later to see a bit of water in with it. I thought that maybe I'd gotten it too hot after all and the egg had scrambled a bit; but actually I think it was just condensation, as I threw it in a bowl with some foil over it and stuck it in the fridge while it was still pretty hot, since it was getting late. I drained it off today and it certainly tasted fine, quite rich and custardy, with a bit of sweetness from the cheese.

I used ricotta because I was assuming a soft farmer's type cheese would be what they'd have. Mascarpone would certainly work, and now that I've thought of that I may just have to try this again because god damn, mascarpone cheese is amazing, especially with honey. And I suppose you could also add a little cream to the milk if you wanted, as I don't know that they separated that out. Though for that matter I don't know that they used cow's milk, either; goat's or ewe's milk would I'd guess be more common, but who knows.

It was as I said, quite rich and custardy; the only thing I might tweak is to add a little more honey, as it was a bit on the mildly sweet side for my tastes. But then I definitely have a very sweet tooth. Overall, though, this is definitely going into the keeper pile.

ETA: I did indeed try it with mascarpone cheese and some cream and it was absolutely heavenly. Here are the proportions for that version of this recipe.

Apicius 1.33 & 4.1.3: Cheese Spreads

In the back: the sweet Apicius 1.33; the front, savory 4.1.3

There are a few cheese mixtures in Apicius, to be eaten, I assume, with bread; two of them caught my eye because of the contrast in flavors. Also they looked pretty simple to put together, always a plus. The first one was a sweet mix, with raisins and dates in it; the second a savory one including garlic, surprisingly rare in Apicius as it was considered a food of the lower classes. The first recipe:

XXXIII YPOTRIMA: piper ligusticum mentam aridam nucleos pineos uuam passam cariotam caseum dulcem mel acetum liquamen oleum uinum defritum aut caroenum.

1.33. Hypotrimma: pepper, lovage, dried mint, pine nuts, raisins, dates, sweet cheese, honey, vinegar, liquamen, oil, wine, defrutum or caroenum.

According to Grocock and Grainger hypotrimma means 'something ground up', i.e. a paste made in a mortar; it looks to be the Greek equivalent of the Latin mortarium. (There is in fact a recipe titled Mortaria just down the page.)

The second recipe was strictly speaking a salad, with I think bread crumbs mixed into it; it's a little vague, though, and so I opted to try just the cheese mixture on its own.

[4.1.3] aliter sala cattabia: panem Alexandrinum excauabis; in posca macerabis. adicies in mortarium piper mel mentam alium coriandrum uiridem caseum bubulum sale conditum aquam oleum; insuper niuem et inferes.

4.1.3. Another sala cattabia: hollow out an Alexandrian loaf. Soak (the crumb) in posca. Put in a mortar pepper, honey, mint, garlic, green coriander, cows' cheese, salt, spiced wine, water and oil. Stand (the pot) in snow and serve.

There are three recipes labelled sala cattabia; I assume sala is 'salad' but I don't know what the cattabia part means, and G&G (they are officially G&G now) don't explain it. They do all use bread, or bread crumbs in the recipe, so maybe that's just what that type of salad was called. Posca is a kind of drink made from wine that's gone sour and turned to vinegar; that doesn't sound all that appetizing to modern western tastes, but there are known drinks made with vinegar, such as the old Persian sekanjabin. At any rate though since I left the bread part out I didn't use it.

I have to admit that 'cows' cheese' did confuse me at first; but then I realized that cheese was probably more commonly made with goats' or ewe's milk than cows' at the time, so the distinction was necessary. I used ricotta for both, assuming it was something like simple homemade farmer's cheese. The Romans did have a variety of cheeses available, both hard and soft, but I have no idea how any of that corresponds to modern cheeses, so I went with what seemed simple. And again, I don't have any lovage, so substituted celery seed.

Oh, and I'm one of those people who cannot stand cilantro (which is what is meant by 'green coriander'). Since it's a genetic thing, I'm going to assume there were plenty of ancient Romans who hated the stuff too, and so would have had to find something else to use. I substituted parsley; alas, the local supermarket had had a run on the fresh stuff (there was a bin for it which was empty save for a few stray leaves), so I used dry, which is kind of a crime, I know. I also didn't have spiced wine, so just used regular wine.

The recipes:

Sweet Cheese Spread (Apicius 1.33)

1 cup ricotta cheese
a few peppercorns (or more, to taste)
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
4 or 5 fresh mint leaves
1 tablespoon pine nuts
2 teaspoons raisins
3 dates
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/4 teaspoon liquamen (Thai fish sauce)
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 teaspoon sweet wine
1 tablespoon caroenum

Grind the peppercorns in a mortar with the celery seed; add the mint and mash to a paste, then the pine nuts. Add the raisins and dates (you may need to empty the mortar first if there isn't room) and do your best to get them to a sticky paste too (or use a food processor). Add the honey, then the rest of the ingredients to thin it out, then mix it into the ricotta in a bowl. Serve as a spread on bread.

Savory Cheese Spread (Apicius 4.1.3)

1 cup ricotta cheese
a few peppercorns (or more, to taste)
1 teaspoon honey
8-10 fresh mint leaves
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 teaspoon chopped cilantro or parsley
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon wine
1 teaspoon olive oil

Grind the peppercorns first; add the mint, garlic, parsley and salt and make as fine a paste as you can (you probably don't want chunks of raw garlic in there). Add the honey and mix, then the wine and olive oil to thin. Mix into the ricotta, and serve on bread.

These were both quite nice, though I didn't get the dates nearly as mushed up as I thought I had, so the sweet version still had a few chunks in it. I think I'd prefer it smoother, personally, and would use a food processor next time. It was quite well balanced though and had a lovely richness to it, so I'm calling that a keeper.

I was really leery of getting the second one too garlicky (and in fact made sure to mix it second, because I figured the garlic would linger in the mortar no matter how well I scrubbed it out), but I think I under spiced it. It was pretty good, and the mint and garlic were balanced against each other, but a bit too mild; I'd redo it with twice the amount of each, as well as a good deal of fresh parsley to complement the mint. It was a good start though. I left it in the fridge overnight (rather than standing the pot in snow!) thinking it might get a little stronger as the flavors came together, but no. So that one will need a little tweaking before I call it final. Still though, it was definitely on the right track.

So one keeper, and one that needs tweaking. Not bad!