Tips for Using Spices and Herbs
from Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius, 2006

Roman food, and particularly Apician Roman food, has a terrible reputation. Many of the recipes in Apicius have so many spices, herbs and liquids that the food they represent seems, to the untrained eye and palate, to be simply over-done. ;e consensus among scholars and archaeologists over past decades has been that the spices were there to reflect wealth, not taste, and were chosen by the decadent Roman gourmet for the status they projected rather than their suitability or flavour. But crucially, these modern commentators have not had the requisite training to interpret recipes written by cooks for other cooks to read. For this, in fact, is the true nature of Apicius: a practical handbook of recipes, many written in a kind of shorthand that only another cook could understand. It is therefore a tricky business to turn the recipes in Apicius into successful dishes without acquiring some prior knowledge of the techniques and ingredients. The numerous spices were used with considerable restraint and in fact the very subtlety of their use is easy to misinterpret, and the results of such misinterpretation would support modern criticisms, but with care, the flavours of the various ingredients can be balanced (temperas, ‘balance’, is a recurring instruction), and the results are stunning. We would not criticize the food of the Indian subcontinent for its spicing, nor that of South East Asia or Africa, though the cuisines of these areas can be just as intoxicating in their use of spices. In Rome, literary tastes developed an appreciation for surprise and complexity of expression and just such an appreciation came to dominate their cuisine. This does not mean that all their food was intensely flavoured; there are numerous recipes for simple and plainly seasoned food in Apicius,something often overlooked. We have defined the collection as a whole not so much as simply ‘high status’ but more as a cosmopolitan and urban collection of recipes covering a wide section of the population of Rome and her empire.

Thanks are due to the team of tasters who helped us to consume weekly Roman feasts; and to Andrew Dalby for his advice on modern wines and syrups. Christopher Grocock, my husband, deserves especial thanks for his enthusiastic appreciation of all the Roman food he was compelled to eat. Sometimes, in the text which follows, the authorial ‘I’ slips into ‘we’. This is intentional, for many of the conclusions have been arrived at jointly with my husband in the course of working on our edition of Apicius.

----------

I have found that the use of spices in Apicius needs particular care. The spices are deployed with subtle restraint to create complex sauces that are not overpowering. When a recipe contains many different spices, none should be used to excess or be allowed to dominate in the finished sauce, but rather a balance of all of them is necessary. Some spices are stronger than others, some are bitter, some sweet, so a balance of equal amounts rarely works. This is particularly so with spices like lovage, which is very bitter and can overpower and spoil a dish very easily. Cumin is ubiquitous and a wonderful spice in its place, but it does need to be kept at bay by the other ingredients if possible. Fish sauce is the magic ingredient that brings everything else into balance and should be used just as we would use salt. Read the section on special ingredients and follow the instruction on how to adjust the salt levels in your Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce to ensure you have the right balance before you start. I also try to add the fish sauce to a sauce at the end of the cooking process, unless I state otherwise, so that it doesn’t concentrate the saltiness too much. You never find that the fish sauce dominates. Taste often to see how the flavours work together. If you have overdone the fish sauce there will be a strong cheesy/fishy quality that will overpower everything else, and it will also be too salty. Honey can often bring it back.

I do not claim to have achieved the definitive interpretation of these recipes. Rather they are Sally Grainger’s Roman recipes, and the next Roman cook will do it very differently, I am sure. Bearing this in mind, I have been precise in the amounts of spices I recommend and I suggest that you select and use the measuring spoon, etc., carefully at first. After you have got the measure of Roman food you can take some risks with the spices and the ratios.