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 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.