Peas Supreme Style

186 Pisa farsilis¹

Cook the peas with oil and a piece of sow's belly. Put in a sauce pan a broth, leek heads (the lower white part), green coriander and put on the fire to be cooked. Of tid-bits³ cut little dice. Similarly cook thrushes or other small game birds, or take sliced chicken and diced brain, properly cooked. Further cook, in the available liquor or broth, Lucanian sausage and bacon; cook leeks in water; crush a pint of toasted pignolia nuts; also crush pepper, lovage, origany, and ginger, dilute with the broth of pork, tie. Take a square baking dish suitable for turning over, which oil well and line with caul. Sprinkle on the bottom a layer of crushed nuts upon which put some peas, fully covering the bottom of the squashº dish; on top of this arrange slices of the bacon,6 leeks and sliced Lucanian sausage; again cover with a layer of peas and alternate all the rest of the available edibles in the manner described until the dish is filled, concluding at last with a layer of peas, utilizing everything. Bake this dish in the oven, or put it into a slow fire covering it with live coal so that it may be baked thoroughly. Next make a sauce of the following: put yolks of hard boiled eggs in the mortar with white pepper, nuts, honey, white wine and a little broth; mix and put it into a sauce pan to be cooked; when the sauce is done, turn out the peas into a large silver dish and mask them with this sauce which is called white sauce.

¹ List. Pisa farsilis; Tor. p. farsilia; Tac., G.‑V. pisam farsilem — same as fartilis, from farcio — fattened, stuffed, or crammed, or as full as it can hold, metaphorically perhaps "supreme style," "most sumptuous," etc.

³ isicia, formerly called Greek hysitia — any fine forcemeats, cut into or cooked in tiny dumplings.

-- from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/