The Roman Cubboard
from Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius, 2006

Investment in your Roman store cupboard will yield the dividend of dishes much closer to an authentic taste of Apician food.

Herbs and spices

You will find that many of the most common herbs in use today are found in Apicius, such as oregano, green coriander, thyme, mint, dill weed and parsley. However, some that are less familiar are also employed.

Savory (Satureia hortensis/montana).

This comes in summer and winter varieties and is a small woody shrub with thin, oblong, dark leaves similar to thyme in appearance but with a distinctive flavour not unlike marjoram. It is readily available from herbalists in dry form but grows with little attention in any English garden so you can dry your own.

Rue (Ruta graviolens).

A bitter perennial herb with small grey-green leaves and a pungent aroma. It has a reputation for being dangerous and it should be avoided by pregnant women. In small quantities it is quite safe and adds necessary bitterness to sweet dishes in Roman food. It is not regularly available as a culinary herb and the only sure way to obtain a supply is to grow your own. It is pretty much indestructible and establishes itself well in a sunny site. Many garden-centres sell it and, as you will only require a small amount in any dish, it should not take long to be ready. It should be picked with great care as a chemical in the leaves can react with sunlight and, if touched, can burn the skin. Pick in the shade and, if you think you are susceptible, it would be best to avoid the task or get some one else to pick it for you. Out of the sun it is generally harmless unless you have particularly sensitive skin.

Lovage (Levisticum officinale syn. ligusticum).

This is a hardy umbelli-ferous perennial similar to angelica in appearance and with a strong celery taste. It is not absolutely clear whether Roman cooks used the green herb or just the seeds in their recipes – they never identify the spice beyond its name. I believe that the seed was the standard ingredient, largely because in the recipes the spice occurs after the pepper at the beginning of a list and never among the other obvious herbs. It is also worth noting that the list of kitchen ingredients at the beginning of the Vinidarius collection of recipes includes lovage seed. For these reasons I do not often use the green herb.

Lovage seed is a flat, ovoid seed similar in length to cumin, with ridges running from end to end. It is not in any way similar to celery seed in appearance or to the ajwain or ajowan (which does look like a large celery seed) which I have often found in packets in Indian supermarkets labelled as lovage. Care should be taken to identify the correct spice. It is available from herbalists and garden-centres. In the long term, growing and harvesting your own is the surest way to obtain the right spice. The flavour of ajwain is often likened to thyme; it can act as an emergency substitute.

Asafoetida (Ferula assa-foetida).

This spice is obtained from the resin leached from a umbelliferous plant native to Iran and Afghanistan. In Roman cookery the resin was called laser and the plant was called silphium, though this was originally a separate and distinct plant native to north Africa which became extinct around AD 50 after which the resin from Parthia (Iran) replaced it. It has a distinct and pungent aroma reminiscent of fermented garlic, and is very common in Indian food. It is in Indian supermarkets that you will find it today. It comes as a yellow powder, sometimes under the name ‘heng’, and needs to be used with care. Its effect is considerable. Sometimes the true resin can be bought from Indian suppliers and it is recommended that you try to find this if you can, though the powdered form is perfectly adequate and was in fact the most common form of the spice in the ancient world. If you are able to acquire a piece of resin do as the Apicius cookery book recommends at 1.13 and place it in a glass vessel or jar with 20 pine kernels. The flavour and aroma will transfer to the kernels which you use instead of the resin – replacing them with a new supply. You will have to experiment over time to gauge the strength of flavour of the kernels and adjust the recipes. The use of asafoetida is very much a personal one, like the heat of chilli; you need to know your limitations and that of your guests!

Bay berries (Laurus nobilis).

These are small round kernels about the size of a pea (often also split) which have a similar flavour to bay leaf, but can be eaten – while bay leaf itself is generally not consumed. Note well that this is the berry of the bay tree and should not be confused with the flowering laurel (Laurocerasus officinalis) which is very poisonous and produces berries similar in appearance. Until recently bay trees in the UK could not set berries in the autumn for lack of the correct temperature. Instead, they would attempt to flower again, producing small, pale green buds. Recent global warming has resulted in berries forming on many large bay trees, particularly in the south of England, and it is now possible to obtain them through careful harvesting. The berry will be a dark red to black in colour and should be left for as long as possible on the tree to ripen. Harvest just before the frosts and dry carefully. The skin will peel off to reveal the kernel which needs to be fully dried before storing in an air-tight container. The flavour is very interesting and I use them in a number of successful recipes in this book.

Myrtle berries (Myrtus communis).

The common myrtle is a hardy ornamental shrub that produces berries which are dried and still used in Middle Eastern cooking. You may be able to purchase them from Turkish or Iranian delis or greengrocers. Alternatively, plant your own bush or raid a neighbour’s. Just as with bay berries they will need to be left on the bush until late autumn and taken when dark blue to purple, then dried carefully and thoroughly before storing. Note that if these berries are not fully dry they rapidly go mouldy in their container.

Fish sauce

Fish sauce – which they called garum or liquamen – is fundamental to Roman food; in fact it is the ingredient that brings all the others together in a harmonious balance. Without it, the many flavours of the spices and liquids would be loud and discordant in the mouth, and the reputation that Roman food has for overpowering seasoning would be all too true.

The taste of fish sauce has recently been identified as the ‘fifth flavour’ alongside sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Umami is the ‘all-round-the-mouth’ meaty taste one gets from mushrooms and monosodium glutamate. It is not just salt flavour, there are all kinds of complex cheesy elements to it too, though the Romans used their fish sauce instead of salt and rarely used salt alone in their savoury or their sweet cooking. The effect of the sauce is not fishy or rotten or rank but immensely satisfying and integral to the cuisine. ;e Romans cooked with a variety of fermented fish sauces whose distinguishing characteristics can be difficult to understand in the modern world. It is only recently that I have been able to identify and classify the various types with any degree of accuracy. It may be that other food historians will have different opinions as to the nature of these sauces. I would not claim to have solved all the problems of interpretation. If you wish to read more about Roman fish sauce see the excursuson garum and liquamen in the appendix to our edition and translation of the Latin text.

Garum was a sauce made from the fresh blood and viscera of selected fish, mainly mackerel, fermented with salt. As it fermented, the mixture cleared and a dark brine was drawn off that was used at table by the diner (and sometimes in the kitchen). We do not find garumon its own mentioned in Apicius. Experiments we have conducted have produced a sauce with a distinctive blood aroma which makes it quite different from the other fish sauces. It was a relatively high-status condiment and was used in some of the oenogarum sauces that were part of Roman cuisine. However, these sauces using blood garum do not appear in Apicius. I believe its use was predominantly by the diner at table rather than by the cook in the kitchen.

For the purposes of this little book we only really need to know about liquamen. This was made by dissolving whole small fish, as well as larger pieces of gutted fish (including the empty mackerel bodies used to make garum), into a liquor with salt. Te fish, often anchovy, were layered with salt in a barrel or pit and left for anything up to four months. ;e whole mixture cleared from the top and settled into layers. The paste at the bottom was called allec and was used as a pickle in its own right. The liquor was called liquamen.

We know that cleaned fish and slices of fish such as tuna were also salted to preserve them. Te salt leaches water out of the flesh in the early stages, and this effusion we can firmly identify as muria,a fish brine. It is quite pale and far less ‘fishy’ than the other fish sauces. We find this form of fish sauce in other food literature but not in Apicius. It appears to have been used predominantly by the lower classes, though this is not at all certain. In Italy, in the Bay of Naples, a modern company reproduces the ancient techniques and makes a liquor from the salting of fish. It resembles many of the Thai fish sauces familiar today and could not be distinguished from them in blind tastings.

We know about a fourth kind of fish sauce made from a mixture of whole small and medium-sized fish with extra blood and viscera. This composite sauce, made by combining the elements of garum and liquamen, was a late development to the culinary tradition dating from the 6th century AD and I do not believe it was used in the recipes of Apicius. If you have some knowledge of fish sauce and you are asking yourself ‘what about..? She has not considered...?’ then please read the article on garum and liquamen in our edition.

For the purposes of reconstructing Roman recipes today we only really have access to the various South East Asian fish sauces. ;ese are similar to liquamen in nature because anchovy and salt are allowed to dissolve together into a liquor. The differences, however, can be crucial. Some of the best Thai fish sauces are fermented for anything up to 18 months. They are also made with a much higher ratio of salt to fish than that indicated for Roman sauces. An ancient sauce was made with one part salt to seven parts fish, while a Thai sauce is made using a ratio of 1:3 and some times even 1:1. the length of time required for fermentation is not an issue we can deal with, but the salt can be adjusted to correspond to Roman liquamen. The following recipe produces a suitable blend for the recipes in this book. There are many varieties of fish sauce available and each one is slightly different. Some are very salty, others less so. Some are dark, almost black, while others are quite pale and golden. Still more are blended with sugar. You may only have access to one type and you need to assess its qualities. For our purposes, pale is better than dark and the less salty is also better. Ideally, you should buy a blended variety already slightly sweetened, as this is how the salt levels are adjusted.

Adapted fish sauce

l. carton white grape juice
1 bottle ‘Oyster brand’ fish sauce or a pale variety of fish sauce

Tip the grape juice into a large saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook at the lowest setting for however long it takes to reduce by half. This is never set in stone as grape juice can have a higher or lower sugar content. Cool and store. You can use this for other recipes in Apicius as well as for your fish sauce. The ratio that works for me is two-thirds fish sauce to one-third grape syrup. This produces a blend that is neither too salty, nor has it lost too much of the cheesy/meaty elements that you need. You might find that you need to adjust this ratio depending on the type of fish sauce that you have. The darker varieties tend to be saltier but unfortunately this is not always the case! You might try half and half to achieve the correct blend. Experiment! The initial cost is low and well worth the effort in the long run.

Grape must syrups

Defrutum

This is a syrup made from grape juice similar to that described for the fish sauce above but it has special flavouring and needs to be much thicker. It is defined as ‘fresh must boiled down to ⅓ of its volume’. This reduction is not necessarily fixed as the sugar content of grape must can vary. What matters is the flavouring. This could be from either figs or quinces, added to the syrup while cooking. It is possible to purchase this variety of syrup in Italy and the UK today. It is known as ‘Vincotto with figs’. The English translation on the label is ‘sweet vinegar condiment’ but this is not quite accurate. It is not a vinegar as it has not soured, although it has been aged 8 years. Many of you will already know that Italian saba, Latin sapa, meaning a grape syrup,is the origin of balsamic vinegar. Such syrups were left to age for longer than usual and they soured in the oak barrel producing the luscious vinegars we know today. There are a number of recipes that call for defrutum, and often the liquor is used to give colour to various sauces. The following recipe makes a relatively large quantity and is easily performed. You will find it is extremely useful as a condiment for all kinds of dishes where you would ordinarily use balsamic vinegar. Try it on salads, or in sauces and gravies, too."

2 L. red grape juice
5 dried figs

Bring the grape juice to a gentle simmer and cook on the lowest setting for at least 2-3 hours. Check constantly to ensure it does not reduce too much and take it off the heat when the volume has reduced by two-thirds. You might find it useful to mark the pan in some way to indicate the correct level. Cool and remove the figs. Store in a corked or close-fitting, lidded bottle. ;e figs are quite amazing and I recommend you plan the process so that they can be served as a dessert immediately with ice-cream or crème fraîche.

Caroenum

The identification of this particular liquor is difficult. It is likely to have been a grape must reduced by one-third and therefore similar to defrutum but thinner. Alternatively, it might also have been a sweet wine, some of which may or may not have been reduced to a similar degree before fermentation. A way out of this dilemma may be to find an inexpensive substitute, for example there are modern sweet wines which have cooked grape must added such as ‘Ambrato di Comiso’ from Sicily. However, I believe caroenum was a cooked syrup made at home. If a caroenum is made from a must taken from fresh grapes such as would normally be used to make a passum (i.e. a raisin wine, see below) then the must would be sweeter than usual. And when one-third of its volume has been boiled away with two-thirds remaining it would be a thin yet flavoursome syrup. This is in contrast to the excessive sweetness, thickness and colour normally associated with defrutum. Caroenum was used in the recipes as a bulk ingredient rather than to flavour or colour; that was often the role of passum and defrutum. There are numerous sauces called oenogarum(see below) that contain no other form of ‘wine’ but caroenum and it could not therefore have been too thick or too rich. Andrew Dalby has pointed out that the original Greek term karyinos refers to a nut-brown colour, and this suggests to me that a white grape rather than a black one would have been the norm. To make a basic caroenum that will suffice for reconstructing these recipes, simmer a carton of white grape juice in a pan until you have lost one-third of its volume. Cool, return to the bottle and store. Alternatively, you can use the grape juice which you boiled to half its volume in order to adjust your fish sauce (see page 29 above) as a substitute for caroenum if you have made plenty. All these diverse wines and syrups – heavy raisin wine, rich and thick to add colour, and sweet thin syrups – were added to fish sauce and formed the basis of the ready-made sauce oenogarum.

Wines

Passum

This was a dessert or raisin wine made with grapes that were either allowed to shrivel on the vine or dried on rush mats. More sweet must, from other grapes that had not been dried, was used to aid the pressing of the fruit. The result was then fermented and aged. It is not a process we can duplicate but there are modern varieties of sweet wine that correspond to this. The one that I currently use and that most closely resembles dark passum is called ‘Malaga Dulce’. ‘Malaga Virgen’ and ‘Malaga Moscatel’ are broadly similar. It is relatively cheap to purchase in the Malaga region of Spain, although, unfortunately, it is quite expensive in Britain, as are many of the other varieties of sweet wine that might suit. Candidates, all made from white grapes, might be ‘Rivesaltes’ from southern France, ‘Amavrodaphne’ from Cyprus, ‘Muscat of Samos’ and ‘Muscat of Lemnos’, these last two from Greece. Any very sweet dessert wines such as a heavy muscat or a heavier Sauternes will also do. Passum could be either dark or pale as long as it has that raisin flavour. In the recipes here, I sometimes suggest a lighter raisin wine, particularly if the sauce in question is described as white.

Date syrup

Roman sauce recipes regularly include dates but it is unclear whether they used the whole fruit, fresh or dried, or made a paste in advance to make life easier. Most recipes list the dates among the other liquids rather than with the nuts etc. and I feel that a pre-ground thick syrup would have been used. You can find thick date syrup in health-food shops in Britain.

Ready-made sauces

Oenogarum/hydrogarum

Oenogarum was a common component of a Roman meal and in many respects it would resemble a simple salad dressing such as vinaigrette. Pepper, and occasionally other spices, are mixed with fish sauce and oil and then sweetened with wine and sometimes one or more of the syrups described above. Again like vinaigrette, a sauce like this is unstable and needs to be beaten frequently to maintain an emulsion which can be poured over food or used for dipping. It will separate if left to stand for any time. We find surprising evidence from wear-marks in the small Samian-ware bowls that were used at table that diners often did whisk their sauces themselves. Other oenogarums can be thickened with starch to form a stable emulsion for pouring over a finished dish. A number of recipes in the original text have precise quantities, yet the ratio of fish sauce to wine and oil is often quite varied. There is no definitive set of proportions that will make a Roman sauce to suit all conditions. However, a basic all-purpose sweet sauce might be as follows:

1 part fish sauce
1 part medium white wine
1 part passum
1 part oil
generous freshly ground pepper

Combine all the ingredients at the last minute to pour over the salad, vegetable, etc., or use as a dipping sauce. Beat before use.

You will also find a sauce called hydrogarum in this book. This is a cooking sauce that resembles the French cooking liquor ‘court bouillon’. Fish sauce, water and a few herbs and pepper are combined, and various meats poached in the boiling sauce. Some times the sauce is then used as a digestive.

Wheat products

The Romans served a starch component to their meals just as we do: this was predominantly bread, the staple food and main ingredient of the meal for many people, though they would often eat it with some form of relish such as meat, cheese, or vegetables. Even at the elaborate dinners of the wealthy bread was served, though it would have been white and aerated as opposed to the dense, brown loaves of the lower classes. ‘White’ was the most desirable form of bread; sometimes chalk was added in order to bleach the flour and give it a whiter appearance. In everyday meals, flat bread was common and may have been the means by which certain foods were picked up with the fingers. Small pieces of bread are certainly a very efficient way of picking up food and keeping the fingers clean. These flatbreads were called lagana and a simple whole-wheat Indian bread recipe such as chapatti or roti is ideal (see below). Lagana were used to make the dish Apician Patina which is a tower of flat bread layered with meat and fish in a sauce (page 64).

Bread was leavened with either a sourdough or an ale-barm. The first is a process whereby day after day a percentage of the dough is saved and used to leaven the next day’s baking. It contains a living culture of wild yeast cells which can leaven a large batch of dough. Sourdough bread can be bought in many bakeries today, or you might like to make your own. Learn more about it at http//www.sourdo.com (see also World Sourdoughs from Antiquity: Authentic Recipes for Modern Bakers, Ed Wood, Berkeley, 1996). The alternative form of leaven in the ancient world involved using the froth from the top of the barrel in which you made beer. This was a process common only in countries where beer was the staple drink, namely most of northern Europe. You will find some artisanal bakeries offer ale-barm breads.

Other starches served with Roman food included rice. We find rice used to thicken sauces and so we might conclude that it was also available on its own. Boiled cracked wheat and even plain porridge made with fine semolina or wheat starch that probably resembled a thick white sauce were served as separate items in feast menus.

A further item for the store cupboard you will find useful to make in advance is the dried pastry sheets known as tracta. These are not pasta – there is no evidence that they were cooked in water or that they held their shape when they were used in stews. Rather they are sheets of dried pastry similar in appearance to a coarse filo. The only Roman recipe for tracta is found in Cato’s farming manual De agricultura (76), dating from the second century BC. Here the sheets of pastry are layered with goat’s cheese and honey to make a baked cake called placenta. We don’t find these cakes or tracta used this way in Apicius. Here we find them dried, crumbled and used to thicken meat stews. The dough is made with alica; a fine semolina soaked with water and kneaded with flour into a dough which is rolled out into discs and dried. The discs are friable and easily crumbled into very small pieces. In this state they act as a very efficient thickener.

Lagana (chapatti/roti)

300 g whole wheat flour
100 g strong plain flour
250 ml water

Sieve the two flours together and discard the largest flakes of chaff. Add the water and begin to knead the dough with your hands until it forms a single ball. Flour has different absorbency rates and so more or less water may be necessary. Continue to knead for 5-10 minutes until smooth and pliable. Put in a bowl and cover the dough with cling-film or a damp towel. Leave to rest for one hour. Bring it out on to a floured surface and divide in half. Return one half to the covered bowl and roll the other into a sausage. Divide this into ten parts. Put all the pieces back in the bowl, dust with flour, cover in cling-film. (At all times the raw dough needs to be kept under cover so that it doesn’t dry out.)

Prepare the area for rolling in advance. Dust the surface with flour and have a pile of flour to one side. Use a small cake-decorating rolling pin about 16 cm long and 2.5 cm thick. Take a griddle or heavy frying-pan and heat over a medium flame or setting. Take one ball and pat it into the flour all over and roll it out to a disc roughly 20 cm in diameter. Do not push from the centre but use a brisk back-and-forth motion at the edges, and use plenty of flour to stop it sticking. After each motion, ensure the dough has not stuck by moving it around and then roll again. You might want to trim the edges or use a flan ring or cutter to make a neat circle (do this particularly if you are using them to make the patina Apiciana on page 64). When you have a few discs ready you can begin cooking. Place each one on the hot, dry frying-pan and leave for roughly 20-30 seconds, at which point the base should have brown patches. Ensure the pan is not too hot, as it will burn before it cooks, or too cool, when the bread will dry out. Turn it over and cook for a further 10-12 seconds and remove with tongs. If you are serving them as bread, pile them up in a basket lined with a napkin. Leave them covered until ready for service. Alternatively, re-heat in an oven wrapped in tin foil.

This recipe is based on the one in Classic Indian Cookery by Julie Sahni (Grub Street, 1997), p. 331.

Tracta (dried pastry)

100 g fine semolina
200 ml water
150 g plain flour

Make these tracta when you are cooking other things such as bread or when the oven is in constant use, so that you can keep the kitchen warm while they are drying.

Pour the water over the semolina and allow to stand for 30 minutes.

Tip the mixture into a fine sieve and allow the water to drain away. Stir it a little to ensure most has passed through, but do not push the softened semolina through the sieve. Tip into the bowl and add 100 g of the flour and mix until a soft dough is formed. Turn on to a table and continue to knead while adding finger-fulls of flour each time the dough becomes sticky again. You may use more or less than the stated amount. Knead until the dough is firm and smooth.

Cover with cling-film or a damp cloth and leave to stand for 1 hour.

Divide the dough into two and return one half to the bowl. Roll the other into a sausage and cut into 8 pieces. Return all the pieces to the bowl and sprinkle with flour so they don’t stick together. At all times the raw dough needs to be kept under cover so that it doesn’t dry out. Take one ball and pat it into the flour all over and roll it out to a disc. Roll a few times and then turn it over, roll a few times more and turn again and repeat constantly so that it never sticks to the table. Do not push from the centre but use a brisk back-and-forth motion at the edges and use plenty of flour to stop it sticking. When a large rolling pin ceases to work, switch to a small one (used for cake decorating) and continue to roll and then stretch the dough into a fine sheet. ;e shape doesn’t matter, all that does is that the disc is as thin as possible. Eventually you will not be able to get it any thinner without it beginning to pull apart and sticking so completely to the table that you won’t be able to release it. That is the time to stop.

As long as the edges are all equally thin, place the sheet to one side on a floured tray and begin the next one. You will make 16 in total and it will be difficult to keep them all separate while they dry. It may take some time to dry the sheets fully, but once a skin or crust has formed they can be stacked a little closer together. It may take overnight or even longer, depending on the temperature and the weather. You may wish to put them in a warm but cooling oven after it has been used for another purpose. Do not use direct heat. The texture should be very friable and easily crumbled.

When you are sure they are fully dry, store in an air-tight tin until you need them. If you have failed to dry them fully, they will go mouldy in the tin so be careful. It is a lot of labour to repeat.