Category: Ancient

Up to 500 A.D.

“Your worthiness is the result of chance”: Kanasu Broth c. 1700 BC

Language is a funny thing. Most of us know what good writing looks like, but few of us can actually write good.

That’s partly because writing is so subjective; what’s funny, moving, interesting to one person is awkward, vapid, dull to another (apart from the work of Terry Pratchett which is universally fantastic.)

Sumerian is the oldest written language and was spoken in regions of ancient Mesopotamia. Clay tablets dating as far back as 3200 BCE have been found bearing Sumerian writing and, like the writing of the late great Sir Pratchett, much of the content found on the various tablets is pretty inspiring:

“A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred.” “Fate is a raging storm blowing over the land.” “A good word is a friend to numerous men.”

When the writing wasn’t being insightful it was being practical.

“Putting unwashed hands to one’s mouth is disgusting.” “Before the fire has gone out, write your exercise tablet!” (guess kids have always resisted doing their homework). “The owner of a house should reinforce the windows against burglars.”

But just to balance it out so that no-one became too self-confident or capable, the Mesopotamians also had language to remind you of your place in society.

“Your worthiness is the result of chance.” “Your role in life is unknown.” “The battle-club would not find your name – it would just find your flesh.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a civilisation so adept at putting ink to paper – or more accurately stylus to clay – would go hard when writing recipes.

Not quite.

Kanasu Broth

Leg of mutton is used. Prepare water add fat. Samidu; coriander; cumin; amd kanasu. Assemble all the ingredients in the cooking vessel and sprinkle with crushed garlic. Then blend into the pot suhutinnu and mint.

Recipe 23, tablet A. The Babylonian Collection at Yale University.

So why so brief? Let’s break it down.

Firstly, Ancient Mesopotamians were writing on clay tablets, not papyrus or paper. Because the letters were pushed and embedded into the clay, rather than scratched on, each tablet had to be fresh and pliable before writing. This meant that someone had to make the tablet and carve out the stylus before any writing could occur.

Secondly, the script used was cuneiform. This script (which was developed by the Sumerians), underwent a huge number of transitions during a 2000 year period (3000 BCE – 1000 BCE), developing from pictograms to glyphs to horizontal and vertical wedge shaped lines. Recipe 23 dates to about 1700 BCE, placing it in the middle of the Old Babylonian era, and uses cuneiform script but is written in the ancient language of Akkadian.

The Akkadians were another Mesopotamian civilisation who, according to linguist Guy Deutscher, developed a culturally symbiotic relationship with the Sumerians which included widespread bilingualism. By 1700 BCE, Akkadian had just about taken over Sumerian as the main spoken language of Mesopotamia, but Sumerian cuneiform script continued to be used. However, Sumerian was structurally inconsistent to Akkadian. To combat this, (and save time developing a brand new script), the Akkadians began to write out their texts phonetically using the Sumerian cuneiform symbols that most closely corresponded to the Akkadian sounds.

As if that wasn’t confusing enough, Akkadian cuneiform was also pretty wild to look at. As time went on the Akkadians altered cuneiform script into highly abstract versions of the original pictograms, some of which contained as many as 20 separate marks. Furthermore, some of the signs could be read either logographically or syllabically, making their true meaning more difficult to decipher.

This is confusing.

Basically it boils down to this: cuneiform script could be relatively time consuming to copy out and the meanings could be pretty unclear.

Also, recipe writing simply wasn’t that important to Mesopotamians, be they Sumerian or Akkadian. As Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson point out, most ancient texts dealt with numeracy and were quantitative in nature, focusing on administrative matters; wages, accounts and contract. How to make the perfect pavlova or a lasagne to wow the in-laws just wasn’t a major part of the Mesopotamian literature.

That’s not to say that Mesopotamian food was simple, far from it. In fact, you could argue that the annoyingly sparse succinct nature of the recipe suggests that Mesopotamian cooks were so adept that they knew, as standard, what phrases like “prepare water add fat” meant without needing extra hints and tips.

In addition to this the Mesopotamians enjoyed an abundance of fruit and vegetables, baked over 300 types of bread and made many types of cheese. They recorded their bounty on stelai and relief panels which show fruits like pomegranate, apricots and apples, vegetables such as radishes, lettuces and leeks, and meat including wild fowl, goat and cattle – hardly the range of inexperienced chefs.

Babylonian relief carving. Credit: Andrea Izzotti / Adobe Stock
“Do you serve chips though?”

The problem for modern historians trying to recreate these recipes, though, is that we don’t share their common knowledge. Knowing that the ancient Mesopotamians were experienced cooks who could understand the nuances of “prepare water add fat” was all well and good, but I still ended up in my kitchen boiling five kettles just in case and having a breakdown over whether to use lard, butter or olive oil.

And what the hell was samidu? Kanasu? Suhutinnu? Even Waitrose didn’t sell these ingredients (and they stock seven different types of salt and pepper!)

“Hey Google, translate ancient Akkadian”

Google translate was no help at all. It failed to detect any translation for samidu, told me that suhutinnu meant “mouthwash” and that kanasu was a “dream”. Reluctantly I accepted that I was going to have to do some proper research.

The authority on Mesopotamia was Jean Bottéro. He wrote the first book on cooking in Mesopotamia, The Oldest Cuisine in the World, and provided translations for some of the words found in the recipes.

Bottéro translated the samidu and suhutinnu as allium vegetables, like leeks or shallots. However, the food historian Laura Kelley believes that some of Bottéro’s translations are incorrect, and that rather than being a vegetable, samidu was more like semolina.

Her argument for this is based on similar words from nearby regions: The Syrians used the word semida to mean “fine meal”. The Greek word semidalis meant “the finest flour”. And “a fine flour [was] called semida in the Talmud (Pesachim 74b, Shabbat 110b, Moed Katan 28a.)” Similarly, Kelley argues that the word semida “is the Targum Yonatan translation for solet – also meaning “fine flour”.” The University of Chicago’s Assyrian Dictionary also defines semidu as semolina.

Kelley translates suhutinnu as some kind of root vegetable, but cannot be more specific. She suggests carrot, turnip or parsnip (but not an allium) based on the fact that tablets tell us nothing more than suhutinnu is “dug up”.

Bottéro gave no translation for the word kanasu (other than “a kind of edible plant”, which doesn’t really narrow it down), but Kelley believes it refers to emmer wheat flour. Emmer was one of the earliest crops domesticated in the Near East, growing naturally throughout the Fertile Crescent before domestication.

This amazing document is a field plan of a property in the Sumerian city Umma showing the acreage of each parcel of land. c. 2100 BC – 2001 BC

Making Kanasu Broth.

I gathered my ingredients: mutton was sourced at a local farm shop (I had to get diced rather than a full leg), emmer wheat was bought from a specialist mill, and semolina was found lurking on a back shelf in Waitrose, resentfully eyeing the more commercially successful rice pudding grains.

But how to cook it?

In his book A History of Food in 100 Recipes, William Sitwell points out that when the collected recipes are examined together, myriad cooking techniques are mentioned: “slicing, squeezing, pounding, steeping, shredding, marinating and even straining.” He suggested that despite the thousands of years separating us from the ancients, cooking techniques and food preparation hadn’t changed all that much.

So I followed my gut. Would I want to eat meat boiled in water without having been seared first? Not really; searing helps build flavour. I assumed, then, that the ancient Mesopotamians had a similar thought process.

With the meat seared and set aside I began work on the water and fat. Assuming I was making a stew rather than a broth after all, I added just 200ml of water to a pan .

The fat mentioned in the recipe was likely to have been sheep tail fat, which I couldn’t find anywhere at all at short notice, so I used olive oil. I figured that since olives had been cultivated in Mesopotamia from around 5000 years ago it wasn’t outside the realms of possibility that oil might have been used in place of animal fat when needed.

As the water and oil mixture heated, I crushed coriander and cumin seeds with a pestle and mortar and mixed the spices with semolina and emmer flour. Then the whole lot was tipped into the water and oil mixture and stirred to prevent lumps.

Once the sauce had thickened a little, I returned the browned meat to the pot. I added crushed garlic, sliced parsnips and a handful of mint and then let the whole thing cook on a low heat for just over an hour.

Final thoughts.

This meal was probably intended for the wealthy. The ingredients and tools needed (knives, caldrons, mills or grinders), to make it suggest it was probably cooked in palace or temple kitchens, rather than bog standard houses. Though literacy among Mesopotamians wasn’t just the domain of rich men, the idea that ordinary people would see the value in writing out recipes such as this just for personal use is also far fetched.

And the food itself? Delicious! Far more stew like than broth in my opinion, which I actually preferred. The mutton gave it a stronger flavour than lamb, but it wasn’t too dissimilar. The mint worked exceptionally well (who would have thought that the lamb/mint combo stretched back so far?!) and the spices were subtle enough to add depth, but not so overpowering that they drowned out the other flavours. In fact, I could probably have added half a teaspoon more than I did.

If you’d like to watch how I made this then please see the video below (and hang around til the end where I attempt a visual joke that made my husband declare he would “divorce me within 20 years” when he saw my preparations for it.)

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Kanasu broth

500g (1 pound) of mutton or lamb (I used diced but the original recipe refers to a leg. I give instructions below for both methods but if you are using a 1kg (2 pound) leg of lamb you will need to double the rest of the ingredients.)
200ml (6.7 fl. oz.) water
2 tablespoons of flour (any type will do)
1 tablespoon of semolina (or another tablespoon of flour if you can’t find semolina)
1 parsnip
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 tablespoons olive oil
Handful of mint

  1. Sear the meat in a pan if using diced meat. (If using a full 1kg leg, cut holes in it and rub with olive oil and salt before roasting in an oven at 220C / 200C / gas mark 7 / 425F for about 45 minutes and then skip ahead to step 3. Remember to double the quantities for the rest of the ingredients!)
  2. When the meat is browned, remove it from the pan.
  3. Add the water and oil to the pan and heat.
  4. Grind the coriander and cumin seeds in a pestle and mortar and then add the flour and semolina to them. Grind everything together and then add to the water and oil. Keep stirring! (If cooking a leg, skip to step 6.)
  5. As the sauce thickens, add the diced meat back to the pan to allow it to cook through.
  6. Chop the parsnip into chunks and add it, along with the garlic and some torn mint, to the pan.
  7. Cover the pan with a lid and cook on a low heat for about an hour if using diced lamb or until the leg of lamb is cooked if using a leg. Keep checking on it regularly to stir it and add more water if it gets too thick.
  8. Serve! (If using a leg of lamb allow the lamb to rest for 15 minutes or so after cooking before pouring the sauce over it.)

“What the hell is sparging?”: Sumerian beer c. 1800 BC

Today’s experiment is something that I’m sure homeschool-weary parents all over the country will be interested in, because it involves alcohol. Beer, actually.

Not just any beer either – 4000 year old beer.

Okay, fine: technically it’s not 4000 years old and technically it’s not what we would recognise as beer, but hey – it’s as good a hook as any.

After a previous semi-successful foray into ancient beer brewing, I decided to give it another shot. This time I wanted to tackle the oldest ‘recipe’ for beer that historians know of, which is found in the 1800 BC Sumerian poem Hymn to Ninkasi.

Given birth by the flowing water ……, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja! Ninkasi, given birth by the flowing water ……, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja!

Having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you. Ninkasi, having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you.

Your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu. Ninkasi, your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu.

It is you who handle the …… and dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics. Ninkasi, it is you who handle the …… and dough with a big shovel, mixing, in a pit, the beerbread with sweet aromatics.

It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. Ninkasi, it is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain.

It is you who water the earth-covered malt; the noble dogs guard it even from the potentates (?). Ninkasi, it is you who water the earth-covered malt; the noble dogs guard it even from the potentates (?).

It is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, it is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall.

It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes ……. Ninkasi, it is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes …….

It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine. Ninkasi, it is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine.

1 line damaged:
You …… the sweetwort to the vessel. Ninkasi, ……. You …… the sweetwort to the vessel.

You place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat. Ninkasi, you place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat.

It is you who pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ninkasi, it is you who pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Hymn to Ninkasi, trans The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Some recipe, right?

Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of beer and brewing. Since beer was an absolutely vital element to everyday life as well as the drink of the gods, it’s likely that she was pretty highly revered.

Hymn to Ninkasi, the song she’s best known for (or as well-known as an ancient Mesopotamian goddess can be) is a cross between a poem and an instructional manual. The formulaic nature of the poem has led scholars to argue it was intended to be said aloud, perhaps as an aid to teach brewers the correct steps needed to make a perfect batch of beer.

Although the poem dates to 1800 BC, the brewing process it documents may well be older. Paul Kriwaczek argued that the techniques within the poem were actually in use about 1000 years before 1800 BC which supports the argument that the poem was originally an oral song which was written down later.

Lapis lazuli cylinder seal
You thought a pint was a large serving size? The Sumerians drank from vases…

Sumerian beer: what do I need to know?

Making the beer was a pretty involved process. Don’t try this if you’ve only got a day or two spare – you’re going to need to check up on various elements of the beer every day for just under a week!

Because the poem was a little vague (to say the least…) I ended up having to make up guess a few of the steps. Luckily I had stumbled across the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, which had this brilliant article by Peter Damerow breaking down some of them.

According to him, the early Sumerians had at least 9 types of beer, which developed as the period went on. By the middle of the 3rd millennium BC cuneiform tablets mentioned characteristics of beer, such as “golden”, “dark” and “sweet”. Early wine critics, if you like.

However, there’s one ingredient that stands out in Sumerian records: bappir. The true meaning of this term has been lost and caused scholars a lot of debate. Some think it refers to a type of bread which was added to the beer before the fermentation process. Others think it was a byproduct of the beer, which was then reincorporated to future brews. Regardless of how it created, my understanding of it (based on a frantic internet search) was that it was some sort of barley dough/grain mixture which contributed to the mash.

The symbol for bappir was show in Cuneiform tablets as two signs inscribed on top of one another – one representing barley and one representing a beer jug (𒋋).

This led to bappir being known as ‘beerbread’, but Damerow suggests this term may be misleading. For one thing, the term bread implies it was edible or at least similar to other breads, which it wasn’t. Secondly, whenever bappir appeared on records it wasn’t listed like other breads (i.e. in quantities), but appeared as if it was grain (i.e. by capacity.)

Was bappir less of a bread and more of a grain? I had no idea and to be honest was quite out of my depth. As a no-win compromise, I decided to bake my bappir like a bread and then immediately break it up afterwards like a grain, before adding it to water to create a cold mash.

Mash? As in sausage and…?

As someone who has no experience of brewing, I found I’d been thrust into a world of new words and confusing terminology. Mash, wort, malt – what did they all mean?

My basic understanding of it is that mash is the liquid you get when you add grains to water. Usually this is heated to a specific temperature to let the sugars do some enzym-y mojo and break down, after which you can add yeast and begin the fermentation process.

The trouble was the poem wasn’t clear about the mashing process. The line “the waves rise, the waves fall” may allude to the mashing process and the addition of water to grain, but there was no mention of heat, although later lines reference a cooling the mixture. This raised the possibility that two types of mashe were used: a hot mash, as is standard today, and a cold mash – where grain is added to cold water and left to sit, unheated, for a few hours.

I began some research into cold mashes to see how I should begin. An online beer forum told me that after the cold mash had been completed it needed “sparging”.

Okay, not to panic, that’s what Google was for, I thought. I typed in “what the hell is sparging” and waited.

“Sparging is a part of the lautering process…”

I started again: “What is the lautering process?”

“The lautering process consists of three steps: mashout, recirculation and sparging.”

I took a quick break from research to scream into a pillow.

In the end I decided to refrain from getting too technical, arguing that the Sumerians were hardly likely to worry about exact temperatures and processes. I split my beer into two mashes – a cold one and a hot one – to cover all bases and after both mashes had competed their individual mashing (no idea if that’s the right term) I combined them.

Making the beer

Making the beer was a long, fun, messy process. If you fancy seeing how it was done (and what it tasted like) then give the video below a watch and please consider boosting my already over inflated ego by subscribing to my YouTube channel.

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Ancient Egyptian(ish) Beer: c. 1500 B.C.

It’s one of the oldest drinks in the world. People have brewed it for millennia for a variety of reasons ranging from religious and solemn (as in sacred offerings or rituals), to the less noble but much more fun (as in going to the pub with friends – remember that?!)

Beer, or more accurately craft beer, is something that certain types of people take very seriously. You know the type, don’t pretend. Friends of mine who know about this stuff talk passionately about ‘hoppiness’ and ‘fermenting yeast’ while I nod along, desperately and hopelessly lost, wondering when’s the best time to mention that I can’t stand any of it – be it ale or lager, craft or commercial.

I’m sorry, it just tastes like soapy water to me. Perhaps I’ve never tried a good one, I hear you cry. My husband is quite into his hipster craft stuff, though, and even these brews – with their funky label designs and heritage signposting – still taste disgusting to me.

The thing is, though, I’ve been writing this blog for almost a year now. Stews and soups and pies and cakes are all well and good, but as time’s gone on, especially as I’ve looked at more ancient stuff, I can’t help but feel I’ve neglected a huge part of food history by ignoring beer. It was such an essential part of everyday life for our ancestors that I felt obligated to give it a go. And so I embarked on what was possibly the most half hearted, begrudging beer brewing process the world has ever seen.

A note on guesswork and adaptation

She looks like she loves her job. Credit here.

I’m dealing with ancient Egyptian beer here, for which there are no surviving recipes. Or if there are, they’re in hieroglyphs which is all, er, Greek to me. Equally, as I found beer brewing to be a totally alien concept, I chose to copy the process that Tasha Marks, Michaela Charles and Susan Boyle (no, not that one) set out when they recreated a version of ancient beer for the British Museum, rather than interpret it for myself.

These women talk a lot more about the science and history behind beer making (and their results are better too), so please do go and check out their post. I mean it; they have a video and everything. Andrew Coletti at Pass the Flamingo has also looked at ancient beer in brilliant depth with some great results, and I used his excellent blog post to guide me on the more practical aspects of this experiment.

The ancient Egyptians loved beer. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. They had loads of names for it depending on how it was used, or who it was for, or who had made it. In fact, such was the Egyptian preoccupation with beer that they’re often praised as being among the first – if not the first – civilisation to really nail the brewing process. They can’t quite claim to be the inventors of beer, though – that accolade goes to the Sumerians.

Sumerian beer appears to have been a concoction so thick that it had to be drunk through a straw (another Sumerian invention), and was perhaps diplomatically described as an acquired taste “to certain palates” by the Greek writer Xenophon. The Egyptians refined the Sumerian method over time – still favouring the straw, but gradually moving away from a porridge like drink to a smoother, runnier liquid. That’s not to say it was thin or weak, though.

Beer: humanity’s salvation?

In fact, Egyptians relied on beer not being weak. According to one Egyptian myth, the sun god Ra became angry with the people of Egypt when they stopped following his laws. He calmly and logically weighed up his options and decided that in order to lovingly guide his people back to the ways of justice and order, a good old fashioned genocidal purging was needed. He sent his daughter Sekhmet to earth in the form of a lion. There, she ravaged the land and the people until Egypt ran crimson with blood.

At this point, Ra had a slightly-too-late change of heart, and took pity on the blood soaked earth. Perhaps he realised that he was in danger of ceasing to exist if all his followers were eaten? (Ooh, philosophy!) He called Sekhmet off, but she was so full of vengeance and bloodlust that she ignored his orders. Rather than send down another lion to devour the first lion he’d sent to devour the people (like some sort of divine, fly swallowing old lady), he decided to change tact. He poured a thousand jugs of pomegranate stained beer into the Nile, which turned the water red. Sekhmet, believing it to be blood, drank it all and became immediately so shitfaced that she passed out for several days straight. When she woke up, the hangover was presumably so intense that her desire for maiming and destroying had waned, and humanity was saved.

A thousand jugs, eh?

I was not about to make a thousand jugs of humanity-saving beer. Having heard horror stories of home brews gone wrong I was pretty sure that if anything my beer would end up threatening humanity’s existence. More specifically, one human’s existence. Mine.

The starting point for Marks, Charles and Boyle’s creation came from engravings on a clay tablet dating to c. 1800 B.C. This tablet was a hymn to Ninkasi – the Sumerian goddess of beer – who apparently brewed a fresh batch every day as part of her holy rituals. The tablet helpfully details the brewing process, and it was this process which acted as guidelines for the experiments. It’s worth noting here that though the inspiration is Sumerian, the technique (and most of the ingredients) are Egyptian, hence the title ‘ancient Egyptian beer’.

The hymn makes reference to ‘beer bread’ as a starting point in the brewing process. This was a common technique in Mesopotamia whereby leavened loaves were partially baked and then crumbled over pots. Water was poured over the crumbs and the whole mixture was left to ferment for a couple of days before being drunk as beer.

The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom followed this method too but by time of the New Kingdom a new method had emerged. Instead of making little loaves to start with, they made two mashes – a hot one and a cold one. Analysis on pots of ancient beer have shown that the cold mash was made with malted grains and the hot one with either malted or unmalted – the results were unclear. This is a good time to also point out that there were no hops used in the beer brewing process as hops weren’t used until around the 9th century.

The mashes were mixed together, strained, and left to ferment out in the open for a day or two. That was it – end of process. Despite the fact I tend to zone out after two minutes when anyone talks to me about beer, I’d managed to learn enough to know that the Egyptian way seemed suspiciously simple. Where was the carefully controlled heating? The sterilising and meticulous monitoring to prevent unwanted cross-contamination in the yeast? And, bloody hell, had anyone even thought about designing a quirky and original label for the bottle yet?!

The process begins…

First things first I had to get hold of some malted grains. My choice of grain was the only area I deviated from the British Museum’s version. I had a bag of einkorn grains in the cupboard (no, really, I did. My husband uses it as evidence every time he tries to show me that this blog has got out of control.) Einkorn was grown in Mesopotamia from as far back as 10,000 years ago and though there is some disagreement online about whether it was commonly used in Egypt, I decided to work with it because a) it was a fitting tribute to the origins of this experiment and b) when else was I going to use a bag of einkorn grain otherwise?

To start the malting process I placed the grains in a jug of water and left them to soak overnight. The next day I drained the water and spread the grains out in a tray. I sprinkled on a little more water so they were wet but not submerged, covered them with a cloth so that air could get to them but insects couldn’t, and left them on the windowsill for three days. After this time they had grown little tendrils, a bit like eyes on potatoes. After I baked them low and slow for a couple of hours they were ready to be ground.

A sample of sprouted vs. unsprouted grains.

Despite my husband’s belief that my hobby has taken over our lives, I am yet to own a quernstone – it’s on my Christmas list. Because of this, I had to grind the grains little by little in a mortar and pestle. Let me tell you, for those of you who have never done this, it was Not Fun. It took well over half an hour to pulverise even just 100g of grain and at the end of it my FitBit told me I’d done 13 minutes of active cardio – a personal best if ever I saw one.

Ground and unground malted einkorn. I have a new found respect for bakers and brewers of pre-blender times.

For the unmalted mash I decided to do something different and used barley; a common and popular grain of ancient Egypt. I ground another 100g of this, sweating and swearing like I imagine all Egyptian brewers must have done (or perhaps not if they had the right tools – hint hint, J.)

The malted einkorn was then added to room temperature water while the barley was added to water that had recently boiled but was warm rather than hot. The barley was then heated further until it thickened to a porridge like consistency and smelled, well, porridgy and delicious. I mixed both mashes together in a large pan and left the lot to cool completely.

Homebase: the place for all your DIY, garden and ancient cookery needs

The Egyptians brewed their beer in ceramic vessels that looked like tall flowerpots. I didn’t need much more of an excuse, so popped off to Homebase to purchase a terracotta pot. The trouble was that all the pots had holes in the bottom of them to allow water to drain out of. As I explained to the bemused shop assistant, this simply wouldn’t do. Were there any plugs I could buy to stop the hole up? He offered me some sort of plastic tray and backed away slowly, but it didn’t really do the trick.

I was then struck with inspiration, perhaps sent from Ninkasi herself. I could stop up the hole by using a barley flour dough, mixed to the consistency of putty. It wouldn’t be adding anything that wasn’t already in the mixture, and should fill the gap nicely. For the first time ever, an improvised idea of mine worked! The hole suitably plugged and tested with water, I lay a circle of baking paper over the base as an extra precaution, and poured my two now-cool mashes through a sieve into the pot.

Following the method of Marks, Charles and Boyle, I added a date to speed up fermentation, and an aromatic spice mix of crushed roasted pistachios, rose petals, cumin, coriander and sesame seeds. I covered the pot with a thin cheesecloth and left it to fester – sorry, ferment – for a couple of days.

  • Straight out of Tutankhamun's tomb.
    Straight out of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
  • Just in case you don't know what pistachios look like.
    Just in case you don’t know what pistachios look like.

Waste not want not

In the meantime I pondered what to do with my leftover grains sitting in the sieve and thought back to the beer bread. Despite having no proof I felt sure the ancient Egyptians – or any ancient civilisation used to facing droughts, famines or just slightly poor harvests – would have thought twice about throwing food away if it could be transformed into anything even vaguely edible.

I blitzed some dates to a pulp (in a blender, thanks. I wasn’t about to do anything by hand again), and combined the paste with the leftover grain dough. To this I sprinkled in a spoon of the spice mix and patted the mixture into four round discs, which were baked in a low oven for about an hour. They tasted decent enough – a bit molasses-y and nutty, with a powerful spicy punch from the coriander and cumin. I think they’d work well with a sharp cheese, although I ate one on its own without any fuss.

After two days I couldn’t put the terracotta pot sitting on my kitchen counter out of my thoughts any longer. The Egyptians drank their beer straight out of the pots with long straws but I hadn’t made enough to come up to a level that a straw could reach, so I ended up having to pour it into a glass and then wait for it to settle a bit. I somehow ended up with more sediment than drinkable liquid, but there was definitely something there.

The verdict

It smelled unpleasant. Kind of sour, kind of cheesy; not like something I’d normally want anywhere near my mouth. However, I was confident that I’d followed all the instructions and there was no visible mould at least, so I took a gulp.

This would cost you £5 in Shoreditch.

My first mouthful contained too much sediment – a gritty texture with a slight bread-dipped-in-vinegar flavour. I felt my salivary glands go into overtime to combat the sourness of it. Bugger, I thought, it’s gone bad. All that effort for no reward. I’d already eaten a chocolate bar to combat my 13 minutes of active cardio, so I really did have nothing to show for all my work at this point.

Once the sediment had died down a bit more I took a sip of the clearer liquid on top. This was a lot more palatable. It was lighter and thinner than the thick lumpy mixture at the bottom, for a start. It tasted sour, yes, but in a sharp way – a bit like a cheap white wine. The spices weren’t a prominent flavour, but I did pick up a hint of cumin. Whether that was my imagination playing tricks on me or the effects of overzealous seasoning is anyone’s guess, but it wasn’t unpleasant either way. Helen Strudwick explains “the quality of beer depended on both the skill of the brewer and the sugar content…” and while I wouldn’t say my skill was amazing, I didn’t use any added sugar (other than one measly date) and it turned out alright.

I have no idea what the alcohol content was, but research suggests the average Egyptian beer had a 3% – 4% alcohol content. Beer for workers was probably around 2% – the last thing a pharaoh wanted was wonky noses on all his sphinxes because his workers were too pissed to see straight. The content and quality was higher depending on who the beer was for (pharaohs got highest) and how the beer would be used (religious ceremonies got high quality beer, workers taking payment in beer got lower quality.)

As you can see, my enthusiasm for grinding barley was somewhat lacking.

At the end of all this my opinions on beer haven’t really changed. I’d still pick a sugary sweet cocktail over a pint, and I haven’t developed a passion for home brewing (much to my husband’s relief.) Yet it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. It smelled awful, true, but it was light and drinkable and definitely alcoholic – which is about the limits of my appreciation for beer anyway. All in all, not bad.

E x

Ancient Egyptian(ish) Beer

200g sprouted grain (wheat, barley, einkorn, emmer – any will do)
200g unsprouted grain
1l water
1 date
Handful of pistachios
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon sesame seeds
1 teaspoon rose petals

  1. Grind your sprouted grain to a coarse flour. Add about 500ml of room temperature water to the grain and stir well.
  2. Grind your unsprouted grain. Add 500ml of recently boiled water to the grain and stir. The water should be warm to touch, but not boiling.
  3. Heat the unsprouted grain and hot water mixture until it thickens to a porridge like consistency.
  4. Pour both mashes into a large pot and allow to cool completely.
  5. When the mashes have cooled together, place a sieve over a ceramic pot. Pour the mashes into the sieve and allow the liquid to drip into the ceramic pot.
  6. Toast and crush the spices and place them in a muslin bag or cloth. Place the spice bag in the pot with the liquid. Add the date to the pot.
  7. Cover the pot with a cheesecloth or similar and leave it at room temperature for no more than a couple of days.

Tiger Nut Cake: c. 1400 B.C.

Right, hello, I’m back again.

My seating plans are done, the classrooms are laid out in Victorian front facing style and there are lines of yellow tape marked around my desk to maintain a safe 1m distance between me and the students during lessons. Of course, this means that I can’t get to anyone at the back who may or may not be copying out their maths homework instead of analysing timelines of William’s conquest of England, but such is life now. On the plus side, I can legitimately throw things at kids and pretend it’s because I’m not allowed to hand things to them, rather than because they were annoying me (and if my headteacher happens to stumble on this blog, I’m joking. Ignore whatever Fred tells you.)

My first lesson back was to a class of fresh-faced year 7’s. With an alarmingly high level of energy I have no way of maintaining to next week, let alone Christmas, I started by asking them the age old question ‘what is history?’

“Stuff in the past.”

Okay, good start, I said. Any advances on “stuff”?

“The Tudors.” “The Victorians.” “My mum says we’re living through history right now.” Silently, I crossed off the last statement on my ‘first-day-back-post-lockdown’ bingo card. I would go on to hear the same sentence three times again that day. Truly, everyone’s mum is a history teacher now.

All great suggestions, I told them. I was clearly in a room with experts. But no one had quite answered the question yet: what is history?

Truth be told, I was stalling. The projector had packed in – shocked to death when I started it up after 5 months of inactivity – and I needed to reboot the system. While we waited, I overenthusiastically prompted them a bit more. Was history just the study of events and people? Was it just about reading accounts of things that happened a long time ago? And, that most golden of all nuggets: if history is about reading accounts of the past, who gets to decide what is and isn’t worth recording? Put ‘history’ on trial, kids, I said. Question it. Always look for the source of information and think: what is the real message here and why do they want me to know it?

And so, as their little eyes glazed over and they shared worried glances with each as if to say “trust us to get the mad one”, the projector sputtered back to life. A blurry photo of Tollund Man – our first lesson – appeared on the board, but upside down and in shocking fluorescent pink. I gave up and told them to turn to page 4 while I contacted IT support. A great start back.

Oh my God, what is the point of all this?

The point is I inspired myself that day, if no one else, to think about the aspects of history that are harder to define. This is where today’s experiment – a weird combination of historical sources – comes in: recipe, inventory, memorial, biography and art work all rolled into one. It is, of course, tiger nut cake from the iconography on the tomb of Rekhmire, an ancient Egyptian noble and official.

I don’t know loads about ancient Egypt. I signed up to a class in my first year of uni because I thought it would make me look clever and cool if I could decipher hieroglyphs and I dropped out of it when I realised that I was neither (at least, not enough to keep up with the others.) A low point was when we were handed a small section of text to decipher and the only thing I could do was draw moustaches and hats on all the figures whilst those around me made expressive noises of wonder and revelation. Apparently, once translated, it was meant to be a poem or something but all I’d managed to do was transport Hercule Poirot back to the age of the Sphinx.

Anyway, Rekhmire belonged to the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt, A.K.A. the 1st dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1550 – 1077 BC) – a relatively late period in ancient Egyptian history. The New Kingdom followed the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 – 2181 BC “the Age of the Pyramids”) and the Middle Kingdom (c. 2050 – 1710 BC) and is known for its pharaohs. Tutankhamun and Akhenaten and his wife queen Nefertiti all belonged to the 18th dynasty, with Ramesses I (A.K.A. Ramesses the Great) following in the 19th. The New Kingdom can also boast the most famous of all Egyptians: Imhotep of Universal’s The Mummy fame (sorry not sorry to any genuine Egyptologists.)

It took several hours to make this when I should have been marking.

Rekhmire

We know a lot about Rekhmire from his tomb; almost every inch of the walls inside are covered with carvings depicting scenes of his life and administration. As well as being an official, it appears he was also a high priest of Heliopolis, amassing great wealth and prestige during his lifetime which explains why he was able to afford his own tomb. Despite the name, however, there’s no burial chamber inside and therefore no body – Rekhmire’s final resting place remains so far undiscovered. (Any intrepid explorers who fancy themselves as the heroes of a real life The Mummy can just wait until 2020 is over before they go poking around ancient Egyptian burial sites, thank you very much.)

Unfortunately for Rekhmire it seems he was deposed towards the end of his life, though we aren’t fully certain why; the scenes on his tomb unsurprisingly don’t tell us too much about that part of his life. What some of the pictures do show us, however, are scenes of cooking and it’s these scenes I was most interested in.

Egyptian cooking

There are no recipes from ancient Egypt. Anything we know about cooking comes from archaeological evidence – pots, grains, wall paintings or hieroglyphs and fragments of documents. Some of those documents are official records (detailing the cost of bread, or the purchase of meat for example) but many are more narrative accounts of Egyptian life, which historians have carefully analysed. On Rekhmire’s tomb there’s one scene depicting people making some type of cake or bread.

Having already spent most of the day constructing a timeline I will never use again and working out how to put fancy borders round the pictures, I didn’t have the time (or the ability) to analyse the hieroglyphs and paintings myself. Most of them would have ended up getting the Poirot treatment after a few minutes anyway. Luckily, Rekhmire’s tomb had already attracted the attention of people far more qualified than me who had done the intellectual heavy lifting. The brilliant Ancient Recipes blog explained that the first scene on the walls of the tomb depicted workers piling tiger nuts and pounding them into flour which was then mixed with a liquid – most likely honey given the image of a honeycomb on the same wall. Fat was then added, such as olive oil.

Drawing by Norman de Garis Davies. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943. From Ancient Recipes.

Tiger nuts were not something I’d come across before. I had to order them online specially for the recipe. They aren’t actually nuts but tubers, and are one of the oldest cultivated plants in ancient Egypt. Tiger nuts are still used in cuisines around the world today, for example in the Spanish drink horchata de chufa.

I began by blitzing 150g of tiger nuts in a blender – ignoring the judgemental expressions of the workers in the picture of Rekhmire’s tomb who were having to pound the nuts by hand. It took a while as they were very hard, despite being pre-soaked in warm water. I ended up having to blitz them in batches until they were the consistency of ground hazelnuts. I sifted them to ensure as fine a flour as I could get and added 75g of honey and 35g of olive oil to them to create a thick and coarse paste.

Arty farty.

It’s worth pointing out here that I bought a special type of honey for this as well. Ancient Recipes advised using raw sidr honey, a monofloral honey made from the sidr tree. Sidr trees were common in ancient Egypt and there is evidence of these trees being planted near temples and palaces. As most bees in ancient Egypt were kept near temples and tended to by temple beekeepers, it’s likely much of the honey in ancient Egypt was sidr honey, made by these temple bees collecting pollen from the nearby sidr trees. It was a bit expensive so if anyone wants to make these cakes for themselves rest assured that they’ll also work well with whatever local honey you can get.

To bake or not to bake, that is the question…

The next image on the tomb shows the baking (or not) of the tiger nut cakes.

Drawing by Norman de Garis Davies. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943. From Ancient Recipes.

There seemed to be some disagreement online about how these were cooked and prepared. Some people suggested the cakes were baked, whilst others pointed to evidence of them being fried. Furthermore, some suggested the cakes were conical whilst others thought they were triangular. Both sets of people pointed to the images in the top and bottom centre of the drawing which showed four triangular shapes with bevelled edges as proof of the final cone/triangle shape.

I decided to try two methods in an effort to placate both camps. Firstly, I moulded half of the mixture into four triangles about 1.5cm in thickness and heated them in a frying pan over a low heat for about 20 minutes, turning each side over regularly until they were evenly browned. The kitchen smelled of honey and bread, which was nice if a little surprising given the lack of wheat in these.

The second cooking method was more involved, but arguably more fun. Ancient Egyptians had many ways of baking and these methods developed over time as new ideas and techniques were discovered. One of the most well known baking methods from throughout ancient Egypt involved baking bread in conical clay moulds. In the bottom of the second drawing of Rekhmire’s tomb, next to the finished triangular shapes, are images of what appears to be conical moulds stacked on top of each other. It was time to get creative…

Imagine how annoyed you’d be if you only got the tip and someone else got the end slice…
Credit here.

I didn’t have any ready made clay moulds or anything that could stand in for one, like a tagine lid. So, like a teacher trying to fill time as she waits for the broken projector to restart, I improvised. I fashioned a couple of cylinders out of folded tin foil which I greased with olive oil and packed the other half of the (uncooked) nut mixture into. Then I used the lid of an egg poaching pan balanced on a panettone tin as a frame to hold the cones upright. It wasn’t what you’d call authentic, as the picture below shows, but hey, if you wanted truly accurate Egyptian baking you should have gone to Seamus Blackley.

Not a method seen on Rekhmire’s tomb but just as effective.

After 20-30 minutes of baking the cones were done. I let them cool in the oven for another hour or so and then gently unpeeled them, pleased to see that they held their shape well.

Conclusion

The fried cakes were a more appetising colour – golden brown with clear markings where the heat had hit them, whereas the conical ones looked a little anemic in comparison. Despite this, there was little difference in terms of taste between the two – perhaps these popular cakes were prepared and cooked both ways in ancient Egypt?!

These were soft but very crumbly, and not as sticky as you might expect. The first flavour was a deeply intense honey that had a buttery almost molasses undertone to it, but still with a bit of a lighter – almost sharp – initial tang. This was down to the sidr honey, which was much darker and deeply flavoured than my usual supermarket bought stuff. The tiger nuts had a subtle flavour, which I could taste once the honey had washed away and reminded me and my husband of brazil nuts. Together the whole effect was like eating very soft, very honeyed nougat. It was surprisingly moreish and though two cones and four triangles was too much to eat in one go, I found myself nibbling at bits of it throughout the rest of the day.

There are only so many photography angles that suit a cone, really.

Would I make these again? Yes, actually. Maybe not into cones and triangles (small bite size pieces like sweets would be better), and maybe with easier to obtain ingredients. I’ve seen people suggest that almonds or hazelnuts would work well in place of tiger nuts. Others suggest that the Egyptians may have added extra ingredients such as dates to these and I think this would work well too.

In the end I don’t know how Rekhmire enjoyed his tiger nut cakes, but I found that they went best in small bites with a cup of tea and an episode of Poirot (I recommend ‘Death on the Nile’…) and were so pleasant that I relaxed enough to ignore the pile of marking already stacking up in the corner of the room. It would be future Ellie’s problem; for now, I was just enjoying being back in the world of food history.

E x

Tiger nut cake

150g tiger nuts
75g honey (any type will do)
35g olive oil

  1. Soak the tiger nuts in warm water for 10-20 minutes to soften them.
  2. Blitz them in a blender until they are the consistency of ground almonds. It may take some time and you may need to blend the nuts in batches.
  3. Sift the nuts through a sieve to ensure as fine a texture as possible. Blitz any nuts left in the sieve or pulverize them in a mortar and pestle until they are fine as ground almonds as well.
  4. Add the sifted nuts to a bowl and add the honey and oil. Combine until it forms a coarse paste.
  5. If frying: take a portion of the dough in your palm, about a large walnut size. Roll it into the shape you want, flatten it slightly to allow for even cooking, and fry in a pan over a low heat for 15-20 minutes. Turn the dough over regularly to stop it burning. You should not need to add oil to the pan if you are using a non stick pan.
    If baking: shape your dough into the shapes you want – cone or otherwise. Place on a non stick baking tray and bake at 160 degrees C for 20-25 minutes, until they smell toasted but not burnt.
  6. Drizzle with honey and serve.

A Fish Banquet: 3rd Century

Oh my God, it’s hot. It’s so hot that when my daughter went to the kitchen to look for an ice-cream she found that the heat had somehow penetrated through the freezer door and vaporised an entire box of her Fabs – wrappers and everything. Truly nature is a wonderous thing.

In weather like this, what else is there to do but have a barbeque?

My husband was delighted when I suggested BBQ for lunch but his joy quickly turned to apprehension as I announced gleefully “not just any barbeque! A history barbeque!”

All I had to do was find some inspiration.

Today’s experiment is from Athenaeus’ The Deipnosophists, specifically book seven: “The Phagesia”. Deipnosophists was an early 3rd century Greek work which somehow managed to fuse the two genres of philosophy and cookery together in a fairly entertaining way, despite being fifteen books long. Maybe it was just the translation I used, but I was able to read quite a few chapters without wanting to pull my brain out through my eye sockets in boredom and confusion, as can sometimes happen with ancient philosophical texts (looking at you, Plato’s The Republic.)

A 17th century version of Deipnosophists depicting the fusion of philosophy and food: the birth of “Plat-ato”…

Put simply, Deipnosophists is a fictional account of the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus’ time at various banquets where he spoke with educated and philosophically minded guests. In it, he recalls the conversation between the guests on all manner of things, but one thing in particular stood out for me: the food.

Book seven is long and entirely dedicated to discussion of fish. Every kind of fish is discussed with various epithets attributed to them: “gold brow’d fish”, “sacred fish”, high-backed fish”, even “girl-like fish” (I don’t know why either.) In fact, fish are so exulted in this book that early on Athenaeus reminds us of the words of the 4th century BC Athenian poet Amphis: “Whoever buys some relish for his supper and, when he might get real genuine fish, contents himself with radishes, is mad.”

Equally important to bear in mind is the information that if you found yourself on Rhodes and came across the chance to eat a “fox-shark” you should resort to any means possible – even stealing – in order to taste it; according to one guest, the experience of tasting fat fox-shark can compose even those about to be executed and allow them to “meet [their] fate with brow serene and mind well satisfied.”

Despite all this talk of fish, there wasn’t a huge amount in the way of practical instructions from preparing it. The guests in Deipnosophists seem more interested in showing us how well travelled, how knowledgeable, how learned they are. Guidelines for preparing food are vague at best and often left open for interpretation. What I’ve done for today’s experiment, then, is to pick a selection of foods mentioned in book seven and form a sort of guesswork meal based on ingredients and cooking methods.

The experiment

One such “recipe” that stood out for me early on was for “dainty” fish soaked in oil and covered in marjoram which was then wrapped in fig leaves and cooked under hot ash. Elsewhere, another recipe following similar guidelines used prawns. I rang my mum, who is the proud owner of a long-suffering fig tree. It has never borne any fruit and until earlier this year we really thought it might die. Only a few months ago, when she moved it to another part of the garden in an effort to save it did it seem to come back to life and grow large leaves. No fruit, still, but lots of leaves.

“You know that fig tree you only just saved?” I started by asking.

“Yes…”

“Can I come round and hack some branches off it?”

Once her screams had died down I was able to explain that actually I only needed 10 leaves. We bartered for a while and eventually I was granted two large leaves, three medium ones and one small one “just for any gaps.”

The next dish I wanted to try involved tuna. Athenaeus told of a very simple recipe, supposedly belonging to the 4th century BC poet Archestratus, for roasted tuna sprinkled with salt that I thought would cook well in the heat of the BBQ once the smoke had stopped. This could be served with a “brine sauce”, but also went very well on its own.

I returned from my jaunt to the shop (via mum’s garden) laden with prawns, tuna steak and a few green bits to make it into a full banquet.

I started by lighting the BBQ, which was very exciting for next door’s dog, who I think gets a sausage every time next door does one of their own. But at lunchtime on a Monday, when they were both trying to work, hearing the whines and door scratching of Lulu the Lab for a solid twenty minutes was probably a bit annoying. Oh well, I thought, that’ll teach them to let her dig a hole under our fence.

While the flames were flickering higher and higher and Lulu was getting more and more excited at the possibility of a tasty, juicy sausage I got to work on the first fish dish: prawns wrapped in fig leaves.

[Take] a noble and dainty fish…wrap in fig leaves and soak it through with oil and over all with swaddling clothes of marjoram…and hid[e] it like a torch beneath the ashes.

The  Deipnosophistae

“Do these look noble and dainty to you?” I asked my husband, holding up a prawn against a fig leaf.

He smirked. “They’re not the biggest leaves in the world are they? No wonder Eve was disappointed in Eden…”

Absolutely useless, but he was so pleased with his joke I promised I’d put it in. Anyway, the smirk was wiped off his face when I showed him the larger leaves and pointed out that this one was in fact a small one.

No foil in ancient Greece, apparently.

With the prawns wrapped in fig leaves I turned my attention to the next dish – tuna. Now, I’m not going to lie and say this was the cheapest thing I’ve ever bought, because it wasn’t. I had no idea fish could be so expensive, but by the time the lady on the fish counter told me the price she’d already wrapped it out and printed that little sticky label so, as a true Brit, I was bound by the conventions of awkward politeness to accept the fishy parcel with a smile and a quick calculation that if we only ate beans on toast for the rest of the week it would even itself out.

That mighty fish [tuna], whose home is Byzantium. Cut it in slices, and then roast it all with accurate care, strewing on nought but salt most thinly spread; then sprinkle a little oil, then eat it hot, first dipping it in brine or if you like to eat them dry they’re good like the immortal gods in character…but if you once forget and vinegar add to them, then you spoil them.

The  Deipnosophistae

Because of the price tag I was very, very unwilling to go too off piste with the recipe. Not that there was a lot to go off piste with, but the fear was there. I sprinkled salt onto the tuna steaks, made a mental note not to add any vinegar to them, and set them aside to focus on the accompaniments.

Obviously I had to make something with radishes, if only to check I hadn’t gone mad. Spring onions were described in ancient Greece as early as the 4th century BC and it was believed that they had certain medicinal properties such as “balancing the blood” which could help prevent things going wrong with the body – handy, then, for putting right any temporary radish-related madness. I sliced the radishes finely using a side of the cheese grater I’d never really understood before now (you know the bit I’m talking about, don’t pretend), and put them in a bowl with the chopped spring onions. To this I added two tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon of red wine vinegar and a dash of garum (nam pla).

Asparagus was also mentioned in Deipnosophistae along with its various medicinal properties. There were no cooking instructions but I knew it was renowned for being quick to cook thanks to the Augustan expression “as quick as cooking asparagus” to describe something as being fast. With this in mind I imagined that the ancient Greeks, especially Archestratus (of tuna recipe fame) who was renowned for promoting simplicity in food, would have cooked asparagus using the easiest method to hand. For this meal that meant dowsing them in olive oil and salt and placing them on a grate over the ashes of the BBQ to roast.

After fifteen minutes or so of the prawns cooking under the ash and the tuna and asparagus roasting on the grate above them I felt it was time to taste. Tentatively, I removed the coals and and pulled each fig parcel out of the pit. The tuna was placed on a plate with the asparagus and the radish mixture was brought to the table.

So satisfying to unwrap.

Firstly, let me say that unwrapping food from hot leaves, covered in ash and smelling vaguely of fruit and smoke was such a treat. I felt like a child opening a present it was that exciting. The prawns were a rich pink colour and surprisingly juicy considering they’d been right among the coals. There were little pools of moisture in the fig leaves from the meat juices which meant the prawns must have steamed and roasted at the same time. In terms of taste: delicious. The fig leaves did make a difference, albeit a subtle one. It was an unidentifiable sweetness, reminiscent of the sultana filling in peshwari naan, but much less noticeable.

The tuna was cooked to perfection, which I was doubly relieved about as it meant our money hadn’t been wasted and also that I’d managed to keep to Archestratus’ exceptionally vague instructions to “judg[e] by instinct of the time it takes to be completely done without being burnt.” Helpful, right? It was tender, juicy and so flavoursome that I double checked the recipe – surely these elegant and sophisticated tastes were modern creations, not ones that were thousands of years old?

I think this might be the best photo I’ve ever taken.

The asparagus was slightly crunchy – we ate the tips and left the very bottom of the stalks – but rich and oily and salty all the same. My husband squeezed some lemon over his asparagus but I abstained since there’s some debate as to whether lemons were used in ancient Greek cooking – the lemon was used in Roman cooking from the 1st century AD, but whether it made it into Greek recipes soon after is unclear.

I had to admit that by this point I was sure radish-hating Amphis had been right; who would ever choose a bowl of raw veg over meals such as this? And then I tried the radish and spring onion mixture. It was the perfect relish for the tuna – tangy and crunchy. I know that Archestratus had been very clear that adding vinegar to the tuna would ruin it, but maybe he hadn’t tasted good vinegar. Or maybe he had and it was my taste buds that were unsophisticated and uncultured (after all, Deipnosophistae was also known as the “The Learned Banqueters”, and I wasn’t sure I fit that description.) Whatever the case, the radish was so delicious that even after the fish had all been finished I was still eating it out of the bowl.

Okay, the skewers weren’t authentic, but I had a pepper and some spare prawns to use up.

Overall, this looked and tasted incredibly modern. Possibly that’s because I was allowed a little more creative freedom to interpret the recipes in this one, so I chose techniques and flavours that I’d be used to, but I’m not so sure. Rather, I think that ancient Greeks just knew really, really good food when they saw it. I will absolutely be making this again – just as soon as we’ve saved up enough for two more tuna steaks.

E x

Prawns in fig leaves

Two fig leaves per person
Three to four raw, shell off king prawns per fig leaf
Olive oil
Marjoram

Tuna steak with salt

Tuna steak (1 per person)
Salt
Olive oil

Accompaniments

200g Asparagus spears
150g radishes
4 spring onions
Olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Nam Pla
Salt

  1. Light a barbeque to give the flames a chance to die down.
  2. Rub each prawn with olive oil and cover with marjoram
  3. Wash the fig leaves and then place three or four prawns on the leaf. Fold the edged of the leaf over the prawns until you have a small parcel. Flip over so the the weight of the prawns keeps the fig leaf from opening up.
  4. Rub the tuna steaks with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt.
  5. Grate the radish into slivers and chop the spring onions. Place both into a bowl.
  6. To the bowl add the oil, vinegar and nam pla. Stir well.
  7. Rub the asparagus with olive oil and salt. Place the asparagus on the BBQ.
  8. When the flames have stopped, carefully remove the grate with the asparagus on and move aside the charcoal and place the fig leave parcels on the bottom. Pile the ash and charcoal over the leaves.
  9. Replace the grate and turn over the asparagus to ensure all sides are cooked.
  10. Place the tuna steaks onto the grate with the asparagus. They will only need a few minutes on each side depending on how hot the BBQ is so keep an eye on them for when they start to flake.
  11. After ten to fifteen minutes of cooking (again, depending on the heat of your BBQ), the fish should be cooked. Remove the tuna, fig parcels and asparagus from the BBQ.
  12. Give the radish mixture one last stir and serve it all up.

Stuffed Goat: 1st Century

Time for a Roman one.

I’m working my way up to dormice but I’m not quite there yet. One day, I promise. Maybe.

The Romans were, like most ancient civilisations, extremely resourceful when it came to food. I suppose if famine was a very real threat, and you didn’t have supermarkets to just pop in to for bits and bobs, you’d learn pretty damn quickly how to use every part of an animal or which flowers were pretty and edible. To the modern cook, the Romans do seem to have taken that survival instinct to the extreme though; they didn’t just know how to survive on the weird and wonderful – they seemed, at times, to revel in it. In 2005, archaeologists excavating a food quarter in ancient Pompeii discovered the bones of a giraffe leg – complete with butcher marks – in the gutter of an ancient diner. Similarly unnervingly, the most famous Roman cookbook, Apicius, had not one, but two recipes for roasted flamingo and added, as a footnote, that if one fancied, “parrot [may be] prepared in the same manner.”

Of course, that’s not to say that every Roman ate this sort of nonsense everyday. Far from it. Flamingo tongue, for example, was considered a delicacy even for the wealthy – and the poor were lucky if they got within 10 feet of the grease of the plate (I’m assuming; I don’t actually know how greasy flamingo tongue is?)

Most Romans ate a diet of fish and meat or cheese, legumes, vegetables and bread; fairly normal stuff. Dormice didn’t appear on menus as frequently as popular history would have you think. Though Apicius appears to have been a manual used by experienced cooks (including slave-cooks), only the wealthier classes would have had access to some of the more frivolous recipes in it, and even then some of these recipes would have been enjoyed only at very special occasions; like eating caviar as a canape instead of in a sandwich (unless you’re like my husband’s grandfather, who was given some caviar as a gift but had no idea what to do with it and unknowingly created the most expensive butty in the world for his work packed lunch…)

Cute, tiny and delicious… Credit here.

I’ve talked a little bit about the background of Apicius here, but the headlines are basically that it was an instructional work to guide the accomplished cook in the preparation and cooking of everyday meals – as well as meals for banquets – for their wealthy masters. The name Apicius has been attributed to the 1st century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, though historians now doubt he wrote the manual himself. More likely is that thanks to his reputation as an unrelenting glutton of the most expensive food (Pliny wrote that Apicius was “equipped for every ingenuity of luxury”), his name became a byword for “gourmand” and seemed a fitting title for the work, which was probably composed by a series of educated cooks.

Goat isn’t anywhere near the same “unusual food” league as flamingo tongue or giraffe. In fact, it’s relatively common in parts of the UK with high African and Caribbean populations, and in other countries it’s as easy to get hold of as chicken is here. My dad, who lived for a few years in Nigeria as a boy, enjoyed it regularly in curries. Unfortunately for me, the nearest butcher that sold goat meat (I couldn’t find it on Sainsbury’s shelves) was in Leicester, which is still in a strict lockdown. Much as I love historical cooking, I wasn’t about to take a jolly into a city still very much in the grip of a pandemic, so looked elsewhere and found that I could get goat meat delivered from the Dorset Meat Company, an ethical grass-fed, outdoor-reared butcher in my second favourite county. Win!

And…I could end the post there. You’d all be thinking that this was a lovely, educational experiment using ingredients I was unfamiliar with to create a semi-authentic Roman meal. But you’d be wrong. So, so, dead wrong. I almost didn’t write this post up, believing that the end result was so disastrous that there was nothing anyone would gain from reading it. Alas, my ego and need for attention spurred me on.

The recipe I attempted was one of 10 possible recipes in Apicius for goat. It was essentially a roasted dish, with an accompanying sauce. Some of the other recipes were pretty simple, such as kid stew which was cooked in chunks with onion, wine and various herbs and if I’d only stuck to these ones, there may have been a very different outcome to this experiment. The recipe I chose to follow, however, lured me in because of its precise measurements and quantities. That’s right, it was that most rare of historical recipes: one with exact instructions. I should have known it was too good to be true.

Aliter haedus sive agnus syringiatus: lactis sextarium unum, mellis unc. IV, piperis unc. I, salis modicum, laseris modicum. Oleum acetabulum, liquaminis acetabulum, mellis acetabulum, dactilos tritos octo, vini boni heminam, amulum modice.

“Another kid or lamb syringiatus: one pint of milk, 4 ounces honey, 1 ounce pepper, a little salt, a little laser. Oil, liquamen, a spoon of honey, 8 [ounces] crushed dates, a good glass of wine, a little starch.

Apicius, Book VIII

(Huge apologies for dodgy translation, I used a combination of Google translate and already translated versions to try and get as accurate picture of the original recipe as I could.)

Anyway, Sally Grainger’s version seemed to have converted most of the original quantities to modern day equivalents, so I used her translation as guidance. The first thing to do was to roast the goat. Underneath the original recipe was another recipe which appears to have become disjoined from the first, but clearly belongs to it as it gives instructions for preparing the raw goat. I was to rub the meat with oil and pepper and sprinkle on liberal pinches of salt and coriander seeds before roasting. So far, so simple and even delicious; the smell of meat as it roasted with coriander was mouthwatering.

You know what a roast looks like.

Having never cooked goat before I’d done a little research and knew that there was a danger, thanks to the low fat content, of it becoming too dry and tough. In order to combat this, modern cooks (as well as Apicius!) advised regular basting throughout the cooking process. Some cooks even suggested cooking the meat in a tin foil tent to trap any escaping moisture. I rolled my not-technically-authentic foil out and dutifully shaped it so it would fit over the meat before setting regular timers on my phone to remind me to baste it.

The Romans took a lot of their understanding of insanity from the Ancient Greeks, and certain schools of thought taught that madness was a divine punishment; a common trope in Greek mythology or epics. The 1st century Roman physician Celsus subscribed to the belief that insanity could be visited upon a person by “phantoms” which could cause a person to descend in to one of two types of madness: the “depressed” or the “hilarious”.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why I decided, halfway through roasting the goat, to remove the cot sides from my toddler’s bed – a task that in itself took over half an hour – and then expected her to go to sleep without any issues. Whatever phantom it was that inspired me to do this was clearly a fan of schadenfreude.

I sat on the floor of the landing as the smell of roast goat grew stronger and shepherded my daughter back into her new bed when she appeared at her doorway, wildeyed and wailing, every 45 seconds. To add to the madness, the alarm on my phone went off every ten minutes to remind me to baste the meat. I ignored it nine times; the foil tent would have to do on its own.

After just over an hour and a half of battling the world’s most resistant toddler there was silence. I checked in on her: she had pulled her pillow and blanket onto the floor and had fallen asleep under the bed…we clearly had much work to do. The work would have to be done another night, though, because by this point it was almost 9pm and I hadn’t even started on the sauce to go with what I presumed was now incredibly burned goat.

As I headed back into the kitchen, I saw that the foil covering I’d been relying so heavily on to stop the meat from drying out had been left in a neat tent on the side – in my mad rush to take the cot-sides off my toddler’s bed I had forgotten to actually cover the goat with it. Any “hilarious” aspects of the phantom madness that had gripped me earlier began to fizzle away and were quickly replaced by “depressed” ones.

Truth be told, by this point I was ready to jack it all in and order a takeaway – I’d try a goat curry in the spirit of it all if necessary. But the masochist historian in me forced me to see this thing through to the bitter end, so I began work on the sauce.

I added the milk, pepper, honey and salt to a pan along with a little asafoetida. The ingredient “laser” was an ancient herb that has since become extinct, but was believed to be closely related to asafoetida, which made a reasonable substitute. While it was heating enough to dissolve the honey, I blitzed the dates with more honey, oil and liquamen – I used nam pla as a modern alternative. Nam pla has a very distinctive smell and despite being used in countless Thai recipes, it’s a smell I just can’t get used to. I fully understand that it transforms dishes with its umami flavour but once I smelt this I just couldn’t get the scent out of my unsophisticated nose and I knew I was going to struggle to eat dinner. Unfortunately for me, Grainger’s reading of the recipe called for a full 70ml of it – not an inconsiderable amount.

Once the dates and liquids had been transformed to a runny paste, I transferred it to a pan, added a small glass of wine and heated the mixture slightly. I strained the warmed milk and combined the two and stirred like a madwoman to try and stop it from curdling too much. Once I was sure I could stop stirring, I added a tablespoon of cornstarch to thicken it slightly over heat. I may have added too much because after a while the sauce became as thick as wallpaper paste, which did nothing to add to my anticipation of the meal.

The goat had been roasting on a low heat for about two hours now. I took it out, drained the pitiful amount of meat juice into the date sauce and rested the goat under foil to reach the warm but not hot temperature that it would have been served at.

Roman diners often ate roasted meat in slices and dipped each slice into small bowls of sauce, rather than cover the meat entirely. I decided to copy this method of serving: partly for authenticity reasons but also on the off chance that, if the goat wasn’t too tough, I didn’t ruin it by drenching it in cheesy smelling sauce. Despite being called stuffed goat, it actually wasn’t clear where the stuffing occured, and I wasn’t about to risk it by filling the meat with the dubious sauce.

At least the bowl was pretty.

We sat, apprehensive, in front of our plates until my husband went first and took a bite. He chewed thoughtfully. He chewed some more. After what felt like a solid minute of chewing, he stood up and wordlessly made his way to the kitchen to put some chips in the oven.

“Oh God, is it that bad?” I asked.

“No,” he lied (still chewing). “I just thought it would go with chips.”

I took a bite. The quality of the meat had been very good, so this tasted very similar to lamb with only a subtle “goaty” hint to it. However, my fears of it being too tough were right – it was so chewy that I felt like the stereotypical image of Henry VIII, tearing meat off in chunks with his teeth and eating with his mouth open, as I ate.

The sauce, though not as bad as I’d thought, failed to save the meal. It was too thick, for one, and clung to the meat rather than soaked it which therefore did nothing to alleviate the dryness. It was faintly sweet and creamy, but with an alcoholic tang. Though you couldn’t taste the fish sauce on its own, there was a lingering scent of it (I couldn’t work out if it was from the sauce or from remnants in my nose), and so with each bite there was a slightly cheesy retronasal smell that I found pretty off-putting.

In the end we continued determinedly through about 1/3 of the meal before giving up and sharing the bowl of chips. Late into the evening I made brownies, too; it seemed like that kind of night. I was determined not to waste the leftover goat, though, so I have plans to mince what was left and add it to a ragu.

Overall, the night did not end as I thought it would. My toddler was asleep on the floor, all the windows were open to drive the smell of fish sauce out and our dinner lay mostly uneaten on the side. I’m not saying an experiment with flamingo tongue would have been better, but it couldn’t have been much worse.

E x

Stuffed Goat

1kg goat (or lamb) leg
Small handful of coriander seeds
12g black peppercorns
300ml whole milk
110g honey
Pinch of asafoetida powder
4 dates
70ml fish sauce
70ml olive oil
150ml white wine
Tablespoon cornflour

  1. Rub the goat with olive oil and cover in salt, pepper and coriander seeds. Roast, under a foil tent, for 2 hours at 160 degrees C. Baste regularly.
  2. When the goat is roasted, take out and keep covered in foil. Begin the sauce.
  3. Crush 6 peppercorns and add them and the rest of the peppercorns to a pan with the milk. Add 40g of honey, the asafoetida and some salt. Heat gently.
  4. Grind the dates in a food processor with the rest of the honey, the fish sauce and oil. Transfer to a pan and add the wine. Heat.
  5. Strain the milk and add it to the date sauce, stirring whilst adding.
  6. Take the meat out of the oven and allow to rest a little. Pour the meat juices into the date sauce and stir.
  7. Transfer the sauce to small dishes, carve the meat and serve at just above room temperature.

Globi: c. 160 B.C.

How do you pronounce ‘globi’? Is it glob-ee? Glow-bee? Glob-eye? Does it really matter when they all sound just as unappetizing as each other? When I saw the title of today’s experiment I assumed it would be for some sort of hideous fish, oozing mucous and slime and served on piles of raw seaweed – that sort of thing. I don’t know why I bothered to read the rest of the recipe, to be honest.

Luckily for me, it turned out that globi weren’t anything to do with mucous-y fish at all. In fact, once you got over the unfortunate name they actually sounded quite delicious: balls of fried cheese covered in honey and poppy seeds. ‘Globi’, meaning spherical in Latin, was therefore a description of the dish’s appearance rather than a gooey sea creature.

The recipe was from Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, the oldest surviving work of Latin prose, which I found in The Classical Cookbook. It’s written in Cato’s usual uptight and stoic way and was intended to be a useful manual of the rules of farming and agricultural management for those rich enough to own large farms (or be looking to expand smaller farms), or those who wanted to create profitable agricultural businesses. The average large Roman farm would usually be staffed by slaves, as many profitable businesses in Ancient Rome were, and so parts of De Agri Cultura are also concerned with how to manage the slave-labourers. It’s here we can see the more jarring elements of Cato’s writing; he talks about the slaves on the farm as if they were any old farm tool rather than people, and advises masters to work slaves constantly before selling them alongside “worn-out” animals and objects when they become too weak, old or sick:

“Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle…old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave and whatever else is superfluous.”

De Agri Cultura, 2.7

Really nice guy, right? Though Cato’s thoughts on slavery should be viewed within the context of the Roman Republic – a society built on the belief that slavery was a necessary element to a successful civilization – his opinions were still considered extreme by some. As Rebecca Gove notes, the poet Seneca, for example, viewed slaves as conquered people who needed to be supervised in order to ensure efficiency, but deserved more dignity and compassion than was given to animals, warning overly harsh masters that “[Slaves] are not enemies when we acquire them; we make them enemies.” That doesn’t mean Seneca was sympathetic to slaves, just that he thought they worked better when they were well treated.

When he wasn’t advocating the sale of exhausted humans in the name of good farm management, Cato could be found loudly supporting laws designed to restrict women’s wealth. I know, I was shocked too. The Lex Oppia was the first in a number of sumptuary laws established in 215 BC which specifically banned women from owning more than half an ounce of gold, wearing purple clothes or ride in a carriage in the city of Rome (or any town within a mile of Rome). This might seem shocking now, but sumptuary laws were a very common way of controlling the status quo and maintaining social order and continued for centuries after the Roman Republic – and not just in Rome, either.

There’s a bit of debate surrounding the Lex Oppia and whether it was a “true” sumptuary law or whether, because it was introduced during the peak of Second Punic War between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian empire, it’s better to view it as an emergency wartime measure to protect the wealth of Rome. Either way, by 195 BC the people of Rome, having beaten the Carthaginians, felt it was time to repeal the law.

But who argued that women simply couldn’t be allowed to grow their wealth and wear fancy clothes again? Why, our man of the people – Cato. His reasons for upholding the law were varied but centered mainly around the argument that women would instantly resort to competitive dressing which would shame those who couldn’t afford the best clothes. Alternatively, he argued that all women were afflicted with an insatiable desire to spend money – an urge he likened to an incurable disease – and therefore the Lex Oppia was a kindly restrictive measure to prevent the poor unrestrained dears bankrupting themselves.

Not a fan of Cato, we get it.

I know, I know: it’s anachronistic to apply modern sensibilities to the past… sorry. Still, when he wasn’t working his slaves to the point of death or stopping women from wearing silk underpants or whatever it was he had a problem with, Cato came up with some pretty decent recipes.

I’d covered his libum (also from De Agri Cultura) with success so I had high hopes for globi in spite of their dubious name.

To begin with I needed ricotta cheese. Now that I’m a bit more experienced at cooking I thought I’d try and make my own. I felt pretty cocky about this; cheese-making always seemed so difficult and something that “real” cooks did. I swanned off to alert my husband to my newly acquired status as master chef.

“Oh yeah? Ricotta’s pretty easy isn’t it? Do you want any help?”

Not the reaction I’d hoped for.

I heated 1 litre of full fat milk until it was just under boiling and added 30ml of white wine vinegar. The Roman author Varro wrote about cheese making, stating that fig sap and vinegar could be used to coagulate milk into soft cheese. I didn’t have any fig sap and when I asked my mum if I could cut a twig off the ailing and temperamental fig sapling she’s been attempting to grow for years she hung up on me. So I just had to hope that the vinegar alone would do the trick.

Every instinct in my body told me not to eat this.

True, it looked like a yoghurt I once left in my locker over the summer holiday but I was confident it would all work out for the best. After ten minutes of it coagulating I poured it into an old muslin cloth and left it to drain overnight.

The next morning I had been rewarded with 150g grams of creamy, cheesy ricotta. Success! I added 80g of semolina to the cheese and mixed it together to form a thick paste, which I shaped into large olive sized balls.

Each ball fried in a pan of olive oil until it was golden brown before being transferred to a kitchen roll covered plate to mop up the excess oil. The globi were then drizzled with honey and rolled in poppy seeds before being “artfully” arranged on a plate.

Looks fancy, right? I had to lie on the cold kitchen floor and get my husband to squat above them, squeezing honey onto the plate to get just the right kind of drip. Less fancy now, I bet.

As you can see, they look pretty great. Elegant and easy – they only had to be tasty and I’d have pulled off a cooking hat trick. And they were!

The globi themselves were quite creamy and mild in a savoury kind of way, which made them very different to modern sweets. All of the sweetness came from the honey and the beauty of that meant they could be sweetened to personal taste by having only enough of it drizzled on to get the poppy seeds to stick, or by being served with a side bowl of it to dunk them in. It’s probably not a surprise to anyone that I opted for the sweeter option.

Texture wise they were slightly gritty, thanks to the semolina, but it was a grittiness that was enveloped in smooth ricotta, so it wasn’t very noticeable and certainly not unpleasant.

In the end I was actually a little put out by how easy it was to make these. What with the cheese-making and the frying, I’d sort of assumed these would safely earn me my place in the hallowed halls of advanced cookery but I felt a bit of a fraud by the end. Still, as I handed my husband the honey and told him to help with the photos I pretended to wipe sweat off my brow and sighed with the imaginary effort of it all.

I think he bought it because afterwards he offered to do the washing up and I got to sit on the sofa with my feet up, dipping globi into warm honey with reckless glee. Win!

E x

Globi

150g ricotta (or you can make your own by heating 1l of full fat milk until just below boiling and adding 30ml of white wine vinegar. Stir for a few minutes then leave to coagulate. After 15 minutes, pour the mixture into a cheesecloth with a bowl under it to collect the whey. Leave it for at least 30 minutes, or overnight for a firmer cheese.)
80g semolina
Olive oil for fying
Honey to taste
75g poppy seeds

  1. Mix ricotta and semolina together to form a paste.
  2. Heat olive oil in a frying pan until it is glassy and sizzles when globi are placed in it.
  3. Fry each globi, two at a time, in the oil until golden brown.
  4. Drain the globi on kitchen roll, then drizzle over as much honey as you like.
  5. Roll the globi in poppy seeds and enjoy.

Lenticulam De Castaneis: 1st century

That’s lentils and chestnuts to you and me.

Today’s experiment is from a work entitled De Re Coquinaria (now often just referred to as Apicius), a 1st century Roman text full of recipes and instructions for the Roman cook. Though often attributed to the gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius, there’s actually not a lot of evidence that this was the case. Apicius lived a life of luxury, sampling the finest food and drink the ancient world had to offer and generally sashaying around the Mediterranean like a 1st century Rich Kid of Instagram. According to Pliny, Apicius considered himself an expert in top quality food: he advised that red mullet tasted best when it was drowned in a bath of fish sauce made out of red mullet blood and that pork liver was sweetest if the pigs were gently fed dried figs (aww) and then killed by overdosing on honeyed wine (argh), in a similar manner to foie gras. His devotion to excessive animal cruelty gourmet dining was extreme. Seneca wrote that having spent 100 million sestertii on his kitchen, Apicius realised he was soon to be bankrupt and could no longer afford top-dollar food… so he chose to poison himself to death rather than, I don’t know, get a job? When I say bankrupt, by the way, I mean bankruptcy according to the standards of the uber wealthy: by Seneca’s own admission Apicuis still had 10 million sestercii left in his account.

Sally Grainger, author of Cooking Apicius, notes that the intended audience (and therefore writer/s) of the recipes in Apicius may well have been experienced cooks, including slave-cooks, rather than elite gourmands. It’s easy to think of slavery in Ancient Rome as being a one-size-fits-all type of situation; that there was no differentiation in status, ability or lifestyle between the slave population, but this was wrong. Slave-cooks had a higher status than slaves working as labourers and, as highly trained members of rich households, were expensive and valuable to their master. Their skills not only covered food preparation (including inventory and budgeting for ingredients), but also included reading and writing – which it’s often wrongly assumed all slaves weren’t taught in ancient Rome. It’s no secret that wealthy ambitious Romans used wining and dining as ways of networking, so it was imperative that the food served at banquets for the political elite be of excellent quality. In order to achieve that quality a rich Roman master would have to invest in the education and wellbeing of his cooks.

That’s not to say that slave-cooks were routinely educated to a very high level. The language of Apicius is ‘Vulgar Latin’: the Latin of everyday workers. There is none of the refinement or polished poetry – ‘Classical Latin’ – in the recipes that one would expect to see if they had been written by a man as educated and elite as Apicius. The recipes in Apicius are particularly no-frills in terms of writing style. In addition to this there are also almost no quantities at all, no timings, no measurements. In some cases there are entire steps in the cooking process that are missed out – all of this suggests that the author expected his readers to be competent enough that they could fill in the culinary blanks without needing poetic devices to elevate any appreciation of the food. In short, it was a functional manual for the labouring masses rather than a literary work for the elite.

Going to talk about lentils or chestnuts any time soon?

Lenticulam de castaneis – which Google translate tells me actually means, in a weirdly jaunty way, “a spot of chestnuts” – is a deceptively delicious dish to make. Essentially it’s meant to be a meal of boiled lentils with a sort of mashed chestnut pureé addition, as Cathy K. Kaufman advises in Cooking in Ancient Civilizations.

The trouble with this recipe – which despite Google’s overly nonchalent reading translates as lentils and chestnuts – is that it doesn’t mention lentils. Not once. Not under a euphemism or assumed name. Not even in passing. It’s just a recipe for chestnut mush, which does admittedly sound quite nice in a foraging/back to nature kind of way, but doesn’t constitute a whole meal in my book.

The recipe that comes after this one is called ‘Lentils another way’. Putting aside that we’re yet to receive the first way, this second recipe appears to follow on from the first and provides clear instructions on how to prepare lentils, but nothing about chestnuts. It may be that both recipes were originally part of one whole recipe that somehow become fragmented over time, or that they were indeed two separate recipes and the author assumed cooks would be competent enough to prepare lentils without needing instructions, but either way I used both for this experiment.

I began with the chestnut pureé. The chestnuts I had bought had already been cooked, so I just put them in a pan and added a splash of water to heat them through in.

To the chestnuts I added crushed black pepper, cumin, coriander seeds, mint and dried rue. The recipe also called for ‘laser root’ and ‘fleabane’ to be added. ‘Laser root’ was also known as silphium – a highly prized plant used in ancient cookery that we don’t have in today’s world. It was considered so useful and precious that it became literally worth its weight in gold. Its sap was dried and grated over food and its petals were crushed for their perfume. Its stalks were eaten as a vegetable and, like all disgusting yet inexplicably expensive things, its juice was considered a powerful aphrodisiac. Pliny the Elder wrote that in his lifetime only a single stalk was discovered, such was its rarity. The stalk was picked and sent to the emperor Nero, but history is quiet on whether it was used for edible or bedible (ha) reasons.

I, like everyone else in the world, didn’t have any ‘laser root’. I also didn’t have any ‘fleabane’ – a furry kind of daisy – mostly because its names made me suspicious that it was a fictional herb from the Harry Potter universe rather than an actual ingredient, but also because it wasn’t stocked in Sainsbury’s herbs and spices aisle. I guess Apicius was more of a Waitrose kind of guy.

A needlessly large close up of some herbs and spices I probably won’t use again for months. You know how it is.

To this chestnut and herb mixture I added a little white wine vinegar and honey. For my version of liquamen – Roman fish sauce – I used nam pla, which is made in exactly the same way by fermenting the whole fish – including its guts and bones rather than just its blood – and is an excellent substitution if you lack the nasal capacity to ferment your own fish guts at home. I added olive oil and heated the lot until it had just started to bubble. The recipe then said to “taste to see if something is missing, and if so, put it in…” Something like, oh I don’t know, lentils? It was time to start on recipe two.

Lentils were enjoyed all across the ancient world and not just in Italy. I used red lentils for this because they were what we had in, though I think the Romans probably would have used the more commonly available brown lentil. Having said that, red lentils may have been used too and were actually perfect for this dish, which talked of reducing them to a purée, as one of their properties is forming into a thick paste when cooked.

Having boiled about 180g of lentils until they were almost cooked, I added chopped leek, coriander and various herbs with honey, vinegar and liquamen to them and stirred over a low heat until all combined and cooked. The recipe then said to “bind with roux”, which seemed odd given that it was all pretty much bound anyway but perhaps furthers my theory that brown lentils, which don’t form a paste when cooked, were the Roman lentils of choice. In any case, I added a tablespoon of roux in an effort to keep as closely to the instructions as possible.

To quote Beyoncé: “To the left, to the left. Lentil/leek purée in the pan to the left.” (Chestnuts to the right.)

I had a choice in terms of serving suggestions: serve it as two dishes – as written out in the recipes – or as one combined dish. Kaufman suggested the chestnut and lentils should be combined in one dish and because she is “a scholar-chef and Adjunct Chef-Instructor, Institute of Culinary Education, in New York City” and I am just a greedy armchair historian with too much time, I took her word for it.

Now would be an honest time to admit that I’d been a bit worried about this meal. My last foray into Roman cooking using liquamen had not ended well – in fact, I still feel a bit queasy when I think of it. However, this time was different. Oh boy, was it different. This was good – really, really good.

Thanks to the roux, which I’d incorrectly assumed wouldn’t do much, the lentils were very creamy and rich. The leeks, which were just cooked through but still had a bit of a crunch, had an alium tang that cut through the creaminess and worked really well with the sharpness of the vinegar and herbs. In comparison, the chestnut puree was sweeter than I’d expected – maybe I’d added a touch too much honey? – and there was a slightly fiery aftertaste in the back of the throat because of the pepper and coriander seeds, which was delicious swirled through the lentils in a marbled effect.

Yes, I ate it with a spoon. It seemed like that kind of a meal.

The recipe may not have been written by Apicius but it would definitely have been one he would have enjoyed, I’m sure. It was also kind of nice that it had the added bonus of not requiring any animal to be drowned in the blood of its kin. In the end the quantities made enough for two very large lunches or three modest ones, so obviously I chucked a cheese sandwich at my toddler, and my husband and I enjoyed a huge portion each. Delicious!

E x

Lenticulam de castaneis

160g cooked chestnuts
180g lentils (any is fine, really)
1 medium leek
Black pepper
Coriander seeds
Cumin seeds
Rue (or sorrel, chicory or any other bitter herb. Certain people – including pregnant women – may want to avoid using rue.)
Mint
White wine vinegar
Nam Pla
Honey
Plain flour
Olive oil

  1. Heat the chestnuts in a pan with a little water – a couple of tablespoons. In another pan, add boiling water to the lentils and cook.
  2. In a mortar, grind a few good twists of black pepper with a good pinch of coriander seeds, cumin seeds, rue (or other herbs) and a couple of leaves of mint.
  3. To the herbs and spices add a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of honey and half a teaspoon of nam pla. Set aside.
  4. When the chestnuts are heated through, mash them to a pulp with a masher and add the herb and spice mixture. Stir and then remove from the heat.
  5. By now the lentils should be almost cooked through (after about 10-15 minutes), add the leek, finely chopped, to the water with the lentils and continue cooking for another 10 minutes or so.
  6. While the lentils and leek continues cooking, start on the roux. Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and add 2 tablespoons of plain flour. Over a low heat, whisk this together and add about 125ml of milk. Whisk constantly until the roux thickens to the consistency of buttercream, then take off the heat. You may need to add more milk or flour to achieve this thickness.
  7. In a mortar crush coriander seeds, cumin seeds, rue (or other herbs) and a couple of leaves of mint, as you did in step 2 (without the pepper). Add a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of honey and half a teaspoon of nam pla.
  8. Once the lentils have cooked, drain them and add the herb and spice mixture to the pan. Stir to combine.
  9. Take a couple of tablespoons of the roux and stir it through the lentils, making sure it’s combined. You can add more, if you like, to create a creamier texture.
  10. Pour the chestnut purée into the lentils and stir through, making sure not to combine it too thoroughly. You could leave a dollop of it on top.
  11. Chop some mint finely and sprinkle on top.

Moretum: 1st century CE

Salve, suckers!

Actually, I apologise. That was really inappropriate and I shouldn’t have said it; I meant salvete, suckers.

I’m going to go ahead and slap a big warning on this one for anyone who might come within 6 feet of me in the next few days: don’t. Seriously, this isn’t a joke. Especially if you’re a ‘sleeps all day, turns into a bat and drinks people’s blood by night’ kind of a person.

In fact, if there was ever a recipe made for enforced self-isolation, it’s this one. Containing a whopping four bulbs of garlic, this is one dish that’s not for the faint of heart or faint of nose.

Luckily, we love garlic in this house and (obviously) have no parties to go to where – had we eaten this beforehand – we might have been written out of the social calendar for the next decade. True, in recent times the closest I’ve come to having a ‘social calendar’ is booking my daughter’s parents’ evening slot at her nursery but you get the picture.

Today’s dish is Moretum. No, it’s not just something I see in the mirror after a heavy cake binging session, but is actually a Roman cheese paste mixed with herbs that was eaten through the Roman Republic (c. 509 – 27 BC) and into the Imperial periods (27 BC – 476 CE.) The word moretum translates to ‘salad’ (if we believe the notoriously hit-and-miss abilities of Google translate) and was enjoyed with bread. Since the main kitchen tool used in the preparation of Moretum was a mortar and pestle, there may also be a linguistic link between the recipe and the method of mixing the ingredients together. I don’t know though, and Google translate also tells me that the Latin word for mortar was mortarium, which translates as ‘trough’ – not very well linked to ‘salad’ after all.

As with previous Roman recipes, I’ve found that Farrell Monaco’s website (where she covers not one but three Moretum recipes – including the one I’m trying today) has been invaluable for advice and information. As always, if you prefer your historical cooking to be done by someone who a) knows what they’re talking about and b) has the tools and ability to carry out the cooking with as much historical accuracy as possible, then you should definitely head on over to her brilliant site. If, however, you just like the schadenfreude of reading about a woman bashing four bulbs of garlic to smithereens with a rolling pin (we’d lost our pestle) while her husband and daughter flee the kitchen, gasping for fresh air and vowing never to be in the same room as her again, read on.

The recipe I’m using isn’t really from a recipe book at all. It’s from a collection of poems from the 1st century CE called the Appendix Vergiliana – specifically one poem simply entitled ‘Moretum’. Yep, it’s my idea of great poetry: an ode to cheese.

Virgil: Author of the Appendix Vergiliana?

Except it’s not really. The author (whoever he may be – despite the name, there is debate around whether Virgil or other unknown author(s) wrote the poems in Appendix Vergiliana) isn’t really writing a love song to the Roman equivalent of Boursin (however much Boursin deserves such exaltation.) No, what we have here is a pastoral poem – a mode of literature which Terry Gifford summed up as having a focus on countryside lifestyles whist highlighting the contrast between urban and rural. Virgil himself popularized pastorals in his Eclogues, which maybe explains why, if the poem Moretum was written by a copycat, they chose the pastoral mode rather than any other. Traditionally, a pastoral poem would paint an idyllic image of rural living and simple country folk. Reading it though, I was struck by how unappealing it all sounded. The main character is portrayed as sweaty, sweary and smelly. He lives a life he doesn’t seem too happy with – unable to even afford meat and going round and round in a cycle of hard toil and sleep; hardly the blissful existence most pastorals painted. If anything, I ended up reading the poem as a satire of a pastoral – but that might be my poor literary judgement.

In fact, to say I lack a sophisticated appreciation for literary art is putting it mildly; I find cracker jokes funny and am naturally wary of people who say not all poetry has be written in rhyming couplet. The problem is, if it’s more advanced than a limerick out of a children’s book I lack the required nuance to ‘get’ it and
I’m not good with free verse poetry that
Does this sort of thing
in an
Arty kind of way –
It makes me panic, I mean:
Which words should I
Emphasise?
(And why do none of them rhyme?)

So here’s my no-frills, no-nuance breakdown of Moretum: a peasant farmer called Symilus wakes up and begins his day’s chores. These include lighting the fire, milling grain, making bread, picking the ingredients for Moretum, making the Moretum and ploughing. He’s not alone, old Symilus, though. He lives with a slave woman from Africa called Scybale who is described in uncomfortable and intrusive detail – notes on her hair, facial features, skin colour, breasts, stomach and legs made for jarring reading in the 21st century. For eight lines the author daydreams through a voyeuristic fantasy and though I’m sure someone will come along to tell me that this was/is a valid literary trope and we shouldn’t push our modern sensibilities onto past cultures (fair) it doesn’t stop my initial reaction to it.

All that aside, the poem does give a very detailed breakdown of how Moretum was made, which I tried to follow as closely as possible. First, I peeled four bulbs of garlic and placed them in the mortar with salt and and entire block (170g) of grated pecorino cheese (the poem doesn’t specify how much or which cheese Symilus used but it does refer to a cheese “hard from taking up the salt” and “hanging” by a rope which suggests a salty, hard cheese. Not only does pecorino fit these criteria, it was also a stalwart of the Roman army and is still (mostly) made following original methods, making it an ideal choice for my experiment today.

Now I understood why Symilus hated his life and “cursed his early meal” when making it; this was bloody hard work. It took well over 20 minutes to pulverize the garlic cloves in a mortar (even after I’d finally located the pestle but but not before I ruined our rolling pin) and I ended up with a blister in the middle of my palm. I’ve never looked at a kitchen appliance with as much longing as I have when I gazed at our mixer, with its shiny blades and never-before-used grater attachment. But I stayed strong; if I was going to do this at all I was going to do it no less than 75% properly and I’d already lost most of my leeway because I’d grated my cheese to make it easier, instead of bashing it up in chunks too.

To the finally mashed garlic and cheese I added parsley, rue and ground coriander seeds. The rue was dried, not fresh, so wouldn’t have been exactly the same, but I’m pretty sure the general bitter flavour was still there. It’s safe to use rue in food quantities (i.e. a couple of pinches) but some people, particularly pregnant women or breastfeeding mothers, should not eat it. More info here.

The smell. Good God, the smell.

Once the ingredients were in the pot (I had to transfer them out of the mortar because it was too small), Symilus began to mix all the ingredients together with his right fist while his left hand “‘neath his hairy groin” stopped his tunic from flapping into it all. What a delightful image. What a lucky woman Scybale was to live with such an appealing sounding man.

The mixture turned quite green, matching the description in the poem where Symilus notices the white from the garlic and cheese mingling with the green from the herbs, and smelled pungent. Very pungent. Even with the window and doors open I knew we wouldn’t be rid of the smell for days. I hoped to God it was worth it.

Eventually the mixture formed a stiff coarse paste. I added enough olive oil to loosen it up to the consistency of, well, Boursin (I promise I don’t get royalties from them or have shares in the company) and some white wine vinegar, as per the poem’s instructions and shaped it a little of it into a pleasing ball to serve along with some Roman flat bread (also mentioned in the poem – recipe is also below). Then there was no putting it off any more – it was time to try it.

My unsuspecting husband said these looked like veggie meatballs so I dared him to eat one whole. He’s not allowed to open his mouth for a month now.

What did it taste of? Garlic. There was just no getting away from that. But until you try it I don’t think you can know just how garlicky garlic can be. We’re used to eating it in a cooked form, which somewhat mellows it. This was raw mashed quadruple garlic and boy did I know it – it brought tears to my eyes. The first mouthful was so overwhelming I actually didn’t take anything in apart from Oh my God this is very garlicky quickly followed by why is it so spicy?! and Bloody hell I can see my own breath.

But once the heat from the first mouthful had died down, I was able to think about it more. It was fairly creamy, because of the cheese, but in the tangy way parmesan or other aged hard cheeses are (rather than the creaminess of soft cheese) and though I couldn’t really taste the herbs they did make it look more appetising. I think this could have taken even more cheese, so in the recipe below I’ve recommended two blocks of pecorino (yes, I know) and you can scale it down if you need to. The recipe is from the original poem and makes far too much for the average family to enjoy in one go, so I’d half it if you didn’t want any left over and you were feeding a (hungry) family of 4.

Garlic may have been the overriding flavour but once you got used to it, it was very moreish. I actually ended up standing in the kitchen absentmindedly dipping slice after slice of flatbread into the bowl as I watched my husband and daughter playing in the garden among the flowerbeds together (see, I can do pastoral scenes too.)

The best way I could describe it was like a very, very, very strong thick garlic butter (the olive oil obviously acting as the butter element). It was not, however, a meal. No wonder Symilus couldn’t find a partner if he was scoffing a plate of this for his lunch each day. But it was too good to just throw out once we’d tried a bit. So I froze what was left in an ice cube tray for individual portions – I reckon that one large cube or two small ones stirred into pasta would make a strong but delicious garlicky sauce for a family of 4.

I would absolutely make this again. Perhaps in smaller quantities, though, and only if I knew I didn’t have to speak to anyone the day after eating it. I recommend making Symilus’ flatbread too to go with it – it was the perfect subtle companion, offering a nutty but otherwise quite plain base for the Moretum to do its thing. I’ve yet to try the frozen Moretum but I have high hopes it’ll do well – let me know if you can think of any other cooking ideas for it other than pasta sauce.

And to the manufacturers of Boursin – if you’re reading this and now you’re thinking of making a Moretum inspired version; I would like 20% of the profits (and there will be profits) which I’ll accept in the form of money and/or wheels of your original Garlic and Herb.

E x

Moretum (half this recipe if you only want enough for 4)

For the Moretum:
4 bulbs of garlic
340g of pecorino cheese
A large handful of finely chopped parsley
One or two pinches of dried rue (or a few leaves of chopped fresh rue – but no more than a few leaves of fresh because rue can be toxic in large quantities and DO NOT use any at all if you are pregnant or breastfeeding)
1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground coriander seeds
Olive oil
White wine vinegar
Couple of pinches of salt

For the flatbreads:
320g spelt flour (or wholewheat flour)
Approx. 100ml warm water
Salt

  1. Make the flatbreads first. Heat the oven to 165 degrees C.
  2. Mix flour, salt and water until it forms a stiff dough. You may need more water – add as much as you need to get a stiff dough.
  3. Knead the dough and then turn out onto a floured surface. Roll it out to no more than 1/2 centimetre thickness.
  4. Cut the dough into equal rectangles or squares and place on a baking tray. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. They should be crisp when you remove them. If they aren’t, bake a bit longer.
  5. Peel the garlic and place the peeled cloves into a mortar. Pulverize them until they are a coarse paste. It will take much longer than you think. Alternatively, whizz them in a blender for a few seconds.
  6. Grate the cheese into the mashed garlic and add the herbs and salt.
  7. Mix everything together, making sure the herbs and salt are well incorporated.
  8. Add olive oil to loosen the mixture to a consistency you like, and a couple of teaspoons of white wine vinegar. Mix well.
  9. Transfer to a bowl and enjoy with the flatbreads.




Libum: 160 B.C.

Who likes cheesecake?

Because I don’t want to live in a world the alternative is true, I’m going to assume that most of you said you did – good. Well, you’re in luck: today’s recipe from Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura could be seen as a type of blueprint cheesecake – one of the very earliest forms.

Before you get excited I should quickly read you the small print because there are a couple of caveats to this cheesecake recipe. For one: does it look like cheesecake? No. Does it smell or taste like a cheesecake? Also no. Essentially what we’re dealing with is a cheesecake in the sense that it has cheese in it and is shaped like a cake but really that’s where the similarities end. Libum may translate as ‘cake’ but rather than matching our modern day idea of cake as something sweet, the notion of ‘cake’ here just relates to the round shape. Some people (my husband is one of them) still use the term cake in this way today – a cake of soap, for example, which is why my toddler spent most of the night hiccuping up bubbles.

That’s not to say that ancient cakes couldn’t be sweet – far from it. Liba may not have contained any sweeteners in the dough, but that didn’t stop people serving them drowned in honey or pomegranate syrup. The Greek writer Athenaeus, writing some 350 years after Cato wrote the recipe for Libum also tells of basynias – boiled dough filled with a honey and date stuffing – and elaphos – dough shaped like deers cooked with honey and sesame – for the festival of elaphebolia.

Back in Cato’s De Agri Cultura we find a large number of different cakes listed, included the alarming entitled ‘placenta’ cake – but his concern with listing these cakes isn’t frivolous. In fact, as Nicola Humble points out in a book that encapsulates my two greatest loves with frightening precision – ‘Cake: A Global History‘ – Cato’s preoccupation with cake in a work that is otherwise serious and instructive shows how culturally significant it was to the ancients.

Libum fits in perfectly with this assessment of the seriousness of cake. Rather than be baked to be eaten (although of course they were also used for this), Libum‘s primary function was as a sacrificial offering to the household gods of ancient Rome. Each household would have had an altar upon which one or two of these cakes would be offered to give thanks to the gods. Is there a link with the word ‘libations’, which seems to be only associated with liquid offerings to the gods? I don’t know – opinions and guesses are welcome! Someone who specialises in Roman food and who made much better Liba than I, Farrell Monaco, sheds some light onto the religious function of these cakes. Go and read her post on Libum for much more accurate history and baking than I can provide!

Copy of De Agri Cultura at the Laurentian Library. Credit here.

Cake for the gods? Must be pretty fancy.

Er…

The thing about sacrificing food to the gods in the ancient world is that people often, um, cheated. They didn’t see it as cheating, obviously, but the foods that were offered were usually not what we’d call the cream of the crop.

Take the ancient Greeks. If you know your Odyssey or your Illiad (*scoff* and who doesn’t?!) you’ll know that men of ancient epics quite frequently cook and offer up food as sacrifices to the gods. It happens fairly often – in fact, Odysseus could probably have been home a lot sooner if he hadn’t dilly-dallied around with “burnt offerings” as much as he did. And what were the offerings of choice? Why, thigh bones wrapped in fat and roasted to a crisp, just like mum used to make. Yummy!

The ancient Egyptians were little better – oh sure, they might make a show of offering their gods fruits, breads, wine, fatty meats and rich cheeses up to three times a day, but once the prayers had been said the altar was cleared before the gods could tuck in and the food was taken home to be eaten by the priests (who later died of blocked arteries – true story.)

And finally, the Persians. Herodotus tells us they had no temples to their gods as they believed altars to be “a folly” but when they felt the need to do some praying they stuck with good old fashioned human sacrifice. Even with this unconventional offering the gods might not get long to enjoy the meal; the butchered victim later had his flesh carried away by a holy man (Magi) to make “whatever use of it he may please.” Hmm. Whether or not we trust Herodotus’ account of human sacrifice – notorious anti-Persian sensationalist that he was – is of course another matter.

Engraving dating from 500-475 BC possibly of Persian king Xerxes killing Spartan king Leonidas to make a tasty kebab with later (also possibly not.)

All of which is meant to say: humans are greedy and don’t like sharing. Why offer Zeus an actual saddle of lamb when you can just burn some bones and say that the gods appreciate the smell of burning fat more than the taste of meat? Why allow cheese and meat to fester away on an altar to Osiris when you, a priest, can just eat it and claim that your actions were divinely inspired? Why sacrifice something as useful as a cow to Ahura Mazda when you can kill a potential criminal and ask for a successful harvest in one go?

Liba were no different. No one was going to stuff them with expensive spices or insist they be filled with precious honey just to be left at the altar to some god of lost car keys or getting red wine out of the carpet. Of course, if one were to make enough Liba for the gods to take their share and for everyone else to enjoy then that was another matter. Then all sorts of toppings and additions could be added.

So what’s in them?

Ricotta, spelt flour and egg. They could not be simpler!

The recipe is as follows:

Make libum by this method. Break up two pounds of cheese well in a mortar. When they will have been well broken up, put in a pound of wheat flour or, if you wish it to be more delicate, half a pound of fine flour and mix it well together with the cheese. Add one egg and mix together well. Then make into bread, places leaves beneath, and cook slowly on a hot hearth under an earthen pot.

Cato, De Agri Cultura

I used wholemeal spelt flour because 1) spelt was a very common grain in ancient Rome, 2) we already had it in, and 3) like any good victimarius before me I wasn’t about to waste my best quality plain flour in a time of flour shortages.

I mixed all the ingredients together until a sticky and quite wet dough formed. Although I kneaded it for a few minutes I found that there was only so much it would actually stiffen up, so turned quite quickly to the baking of it.

I greased a cake tin with olive oil and made a bed of bay leaves which I placed my wet dough, rounded to perfection by my own fair hands, onto, and placed the pan into the oven. Cato stated that the dough should be cooked “under an earthen pot”, which panicked me slightly because I imagined the steam would only make my already damp dough damper, which could hamper the dough de-dampening – d’oh! Nevertheless, I complied and in lieu of an authentic earthen Roman pot, I placed a stoneware lasagne dish over the pan and left it to cook for an hour.

After an hour the Libum was firmer but still felt a bit undercooked. It lacked any sort of brownness, so I put it back under the lasagne dish for another thirty minutes and crossed my fingers that I wasn’t about to give our household gods indigestion from under baked dough. After half an hour it looked much better and was ready to offer up to the goddess of house and hearthside, Vesta.

Before we placed it on our household altar, though, we thought we should probably try it. Cato’s original recipe was somewhat plain but would probably have been embellished with all sorts of additions. For authenticity I chose not to add any of these additions to the actual dough, but instead heated honey and toasted pine nuts, both very common features of Roman kitchens, to have as accompaniments.

Back off, Vesta; we’re grateful for all you do for keeping our home safe but these aren’t for you.

Eaten alone, Libum was perfectly pleasant. Both my husband and I struggled to equate it to a modern day food – it didn’t taste cheesy but there was a creaminess to it that was thanks to the ricotta. The base of the cake where it had been sat on the bay leaves was particularly delicious and fragrant. I’d never really tasted bay before, not having a palate sophisticated enough to pick up on bay in stews or casseroles, but here it was unmistakable. The spelt was also a great choice of flour as it provided additional texture that fine white flour wouldn’t, as well as a contrasting nuttiness that worked very nicely. The Libum was dense – very dense – but not exactly heavy or stodgy, and it cut beautifully. It wasn’t, however, like a cheesecake. There was no light moussiness or whipped quality to it.

So far, so good. Of all the things I’ve tried to cook, this felt like something that was as close to the original as I could make it – it tasted ‘old’ and looked authentically simple. One Libum fit comfortably in the palm of a hand and I could imagine a young girl laying a couple of these at the household altar and munching absentmindedly on one for herself as she made her way back to the kitchen.

With honey was where Libum really shone, however. I drizzled a little, then a lot, over a slice and sprinkled it with pine nuts. It was glorious. I would now consider honey and multiple little Liba an essential on any cheeseboard, if I were the sort of person who was fancy enough to serve cheeseboards after dinner, or pick them instead of cheesecake for pudding at a restaurant. In fact, if I’d ordered a cheesecake for dessert and a slice of Libum with honey arrived instead, I don’t think I’d send it back.

Cheesecake it isn’t, however. Libum is much closer to bread than cheesecake and there can be no doubt that like most bread, Libum performs best when warm and fresh from the oven.

Unfortunately, this morning I realised we’d run out of bread (fresh or otherwise) for our morning toast and wondered whether leftover Libum would work instead. Cato may have argued that the best Liba were the ones that were offered to the gods, but what he might have been pleased to know is that a day old Libum, slathered with lemon curd and eaten on a rainy morning in front of the TV also holds up well, with or without the gods’ blessings.

E x

Libum (makes 1 cake)

250g ricotta
125g spelt flour or wholemeal plain flour
1 egg
Bay leaves

  1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees c.
  2. Break up the ricotta in a large bowl to a rough paste.
  3. Add the flour and egg to the ricotta and combine thoroughly.
  4. Grease a round cake pan with olive oil and make a bed of bay leaves in the bottom. You want enough bay leaves to completely cover the base of the dough.
  5. Shape the dough into a round disk, about the size of a hand.
  6. Place the dough on the bay leaves in the cake pan and place in the oven. If you have an ovenproof dish to cover the pan and help create steam you can place it over the dough. If not, don’t worry and just bake as you would a normal cake but check on it after 1 hour.
  7. After 1.5 hours if baking under a pot (and after 1 hour if baking as normal) check on the cake. It should be golden brown on top and the edges and firm to touch, like bread. If not, bake for another 5-10 minutes and check again.
  8. Take the cake out of the oven and while it is cooling, place some pine nuts in a dry frying pan and toast for a couple of minutes. Keep an eye on them as they turn quickly and you don’t want them to burn.
  9. Heat some honey in a microwave or add it to the frying pan with the pine nuts if you want to combine the two and heat until runny.
  10. Serve the Libum on a dish and honey and pine nuts in a jug or plate to dip slices into.