The Taste of Rue

It's no secret that Kristin and I occasionally like to cook Ancient Roman food. Well, more accurately, Kristin likes to cook it, and I like to eat it (and support her habit).  We've also complained occasionally that it's hard to get certain ingredients. But Kristin has been growing both rue and pennyroyal this year (two of the hard to get, slightly poisonous Roman herbs), and she wanted to try at least one of them out.  So she took a recipe from Apicius and made it.

When I say Apicius, I'm talking about the ancient cookbook extant in the late Imperial period of Ancient Rome--not a modern cookbook which adapts the recipe, but a straight translation.  This is the first time we've done this--we've used adaptations of ancient recipes before, like Sally Grainger's or Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa's. Since the recipes are provided sans proportions, or much in the way of cooking instructions, it takes a skilled cook to translate the vague recipes into an actual meal prepared in a modern kitchen.  This time, Kristin was the one doing the cooking, using her best estimation of the amounts.  And since one of them was mildly poisonous, she was careful not to use too much (about a teaspoon).

Kristin will probably discuss the exact recipe on her blog. It was hardly a straight rue sauce: there was cumin, fennel seed, fish sauce, lovage, etc.  I liked it--it was certainly unique.  Rue is bitter, with hidden accents, but I'm not sure how to separate out the taste of rue from that of other herbs.  I think we should definitely try that sauce again, both with rue and with a substitue (we've used dandelion leaves before), and see how much of a difference it makes.

Update (8/31/2013): Kristin has written her own post on this subject, with the actual recipe she used.

Conditum paradoxum addendum

Kristin's finally put up her recipe for conditum paradoxum:

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donald and I share is a fascination with the culture of ancient Rome.  Since I also love to cook, this leads inexorably to our attempts to recreate ancient Roman food and beverages.  I say “our” even though it’s usually me doing the cooking.  Donald is there for encouragement.  Such as, “We haven’t had any Roman food in a while.”  Or, “When are you going to cook some more Roman food?”  He does help with the dishes.

One ancient Roman recipe I’ve made twice now is conditum paradoxum, from Apicius, the most famous ancient Roman cookbook.  Depending on the translation, conditum paradoxum means “marvelous seasoned wine”, “novelty spiced wine”, or “spiced wine surprise”.

I just wanted to point out that I'm also there for the math.

Roman Dinner

On Saturday, Kristin and I hosted a Ancient Roman dinner for our friends.  We've done Roman dinners before, as Kristin has discussed in detail on her blog.  Once again, Kristin did most of the cooking, and I did most of the dishes.  Which is not to say I did none of the cooking--I prepared the hydromel (honey water) and sorted lovage seeds, for example.

Ah, lovage seeds.  Roman meals use a number of ingredients which are not easy to get in the New World.  Among them are lovage seeds.  You can buy lovage seeds in the grocery store, but these aren't really lovage seeds--they're either celery seeds or ajwan seeds, which are different plants entirely.  You can't buy food-grade real lovage seeds, but you can buy them for planting.  And if you get organic seeds, they're untreated and edible.  So we ordered some lovage seeds.  However, while they're not treated, the seeds are only 99% pure--you also get a good bit of dirt and twigs in the package.  In addition, you can't be sure that they've been stored properly as a spice should.  So Kristin was kind of reluctant to use the seeds, but I went through them and painstakingly separated a teaspoon-full of seeds from the twigs and dirt, and convinced her to use them in one dish.

Lovage is not the only hard to get Roman spice.  Rue and pennyroyal are, unfortunately, slightly poisonous herbs.  Kristin's eager to try them--after all, if the Romans could eat them, can't we?  But I insisted that we not feed poison to our friends (besides, rue is supposed to be used fresh, not as seeds, and while Kristin has gotten some seeds, she still hasn't planted them), so we substituted dandelion leaves for the rue.  And don't get me started on myrtle berries--our myrtle bush didn't bloom this year.

Still, we managed to produce a very nice three course meal.  For the appetizer, we had flatbread, olives, sheep and goat cheese (the Romans considered cows beasts of burden, not milk or meat animals), and an assortment of olives and salami (which Kristin considers to be pretty close to Roman sausages).

The real work went into this appetizing main course:

Kristin enjoying the main course.

From the bottom to the top, there's squash seasoned with real lovage (the only one we had enough real lovage seed for), pan-seared fish, Indian chapati (a reasonable approximation of Roman flatbread, we understand), highly-seasoned pork belly, and even-more-seasoned parsnips.  Kristin wasn't too happy with the parsnips, thinking they were too salty, but they turned out to be a favorite, and the only thing we ran out of.  There are also two bottles, one containing conditum paradoxum, and the other containing the hydromel which I made.

The dessert course consisted of honeyed fritters, grapes, and figs.

Most of the recipes came from Sally Grainger's Cooking Apicius (shown left), which is our favorite of the various Roman recipe books.  For one, it's the most modern, and has the best understanding of what ingredients are available to a modern kitchen.  For another, there's a lot of scholarship involved, a lot of it based on the work that went into her and her husband's new translation of Apicius (the most extensive of the Ancient Roman cookbooks).  It seems to us to be pretty accurate, and Kristin thinks it agrees very well with her research in the area.

We did use a somewhat different recipe for the conditum paradoxum, but I've discussed that in detail before.  The hydromel also came from a different source, namely Mark Grant's Roman Cookery (shown right).  The original recipe comes not from Apicius, but from Bassus's Country Matters.  It mixes one part apple juice, two parts honey, and three parts water.  In Grant's recipe, these are boiled rather than aged the way they were in Ancient Rome.  We used apple cider rather than apple juice, since the cider's closer to what the Romans would have had.  The cookbook recommends chilling and serving as an apertif, but I preferred something that could be drunk with a meal.  It was too sweet to drink straight in quantity, but we mixed the hydromel with three parts water, as we had done with the conditum paradoxum.  Unfortunately, this was still too sweet.  Kristin, who's a much better cook than I am, suggested adding some vinegar.  Adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving was just what was needed.  It tastes more of apples that way, and the acid of the vinegar prevents the sweetness from being overwhelming.  Since the Romans usually let the mixture age long enough to ferment, I figure that the result is probably pretty close to what the Romans drank.  According to my calculations, adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving results in a ratio of 1 part apple cider vinegar, 2 parts apple cider, 4 parts honey, and 6 parts water, but Kristin prefers 50% more vinegar, for a stronger acidity.  If I make it again, I'll use my proportions.  It's easier to add a little vinegar later than to take it out.

Conditum Paradoxum

As I mentioned last week, I have a book coming out soon, and I've been spending some time thinking about the release party. Of course I'll have a release party. We'll probably do something local, for friends whom I can guilt into buying my book. In addition, we'll probably do something at some of the local cons: Readercon and/or Boskone, if we can. One question we've been pondering is what we can do to make it distinctive and original. Well, my book has Romans in it, so what can be more distinctive than Ancient Roman food? To that end, Kristin and I have been taking a close look at some Ancient Roman recipes, and trying to see what we can make. First up, conditum paradoxum, or paradoxically spiced wine. The recipe is from Apicius, who describes it thus:

Conditum paradoxum: conditi paradoxi compositio: mellis pondo XV in aeneum vas mittuntur, praemissi[s] vini sextariis duobus, ut in cocturam mellis vinum decoquas. Quod igni lento et aridis lignis calefactum, commotum ferula dum coquitur, si effervere coeperit, vini rore compescitur, praeter quod subtracto igni in se redit. Cum perfrixerit, rursus accenditur. Hoc secundo ac tertio fiet, ac tum demum remotum a foco postridie despumatur. Tum [mittis] piperis uncias IV iam triti, masticis scripulos II, folii et croci dragmas singulas, dactylorum ossibus torridis quinque, isdemque dactylis vino mollitis, intercedente prius suffusione vini de suo modo ac numero, ut tritura lenis habeatur. His omnibus paratis supermittis vini lenis sextarios XVIII. Carbones perfecto aderunt duo milia.

In English, with modern measurements:

Conditum Paradoxum: The composition of this excellent spiced wine is as follows. Into a copper bowl, put 15 librae (10.8 lbs) of honey and 2 sextarii (1.08 L) of wine; heat on a slow fire, constantly stirring the mixture with a stick. At the boiling point add a dash of cold wine, retire from stove, and skim. Repeat this twice or three times, let it rest till the next day, and skim again. Then add 4 unciae (4 oz) of ground pepper, three scruples (3/24, or 1/8, oz) of mastic, a drachma (1/6 oz) each of aromatic leaves  and saffron, 5 roasted date pits, the dates themselves soaked in wine, having been steeped beforehand in wine of sufficient quality and quantity so that a sweet mash is produced. When you have prepared all this, pour over it 18 (9.72 L) sextarii of smooth wine. The resulting mixture is treated with charcoal.

The English, but not the calculated amounts, is a combination of a couple of different translations, but mostly Giacosa's A Taste of Rome.  The mixture would, of course, be strained.

We decided to try this wine after finding a modern interpretation on this German website. It uses 4 L of Retsina wine, 500 g of honey, 60 g black peppercorns, 8 pitted dates, 1 teaspoon of anise, a pinch of saffron and as many bay leaves as would be covered by the liquid. Looking over it, we realized two things. First, they substitute anise for mastic, and second, they use proportionately a lot less honey, and a lot more of most everything else (with the exception of saffron). We figured we'd try something closer to the original, with gum mastic ordered from Amazon. However we did have to scale everything down, since we didn't want 11 liters of spiced wine.  We decided that the recipe would work best for 1.5 liters of wine (2 bottles).  So the proportions we used were:

• 1.5 liters (3.2 pints) wine
• 1.5 lbs (682 grams) honey
• .55 oz (15 g) pepper
• 1 roasted date pit
• 1 pitted date soaked in wine
• 1/43 oz (0.63 g) aromatic leaf
• 1/43 oz (0.63 g) saffron
• 1/58 oz (0.48 g) gum mastic

Some of these are very small quantities.  Well, except for saffron, which comes in jars of 0.5 g (technically, a jar containing a plastic bag with the saffron--but even so, it is really a lot of saffron, since it's a strong spice).  We just used one whole jar of saffron.  For the leaves, we used a couple of leaves of tejpat (though bay leaf works too).  The gum mastic, which is a tree resin, comes in beads of varying size, and after some math, we came up with 9-10 mastic beads (assuming a normal size distribution) as the proper amount.  We did use Retsina for the wine.

So, more accurately, our recipe contained:

• 1.5 liters (3.2 pints) Retsina
• 1.5 lbs (682 grams) honey
• .55 oz (15 g) black pepper
• 1 roasted date pit
• 1 pitted date soaked in wine, along with the wine
• 1-2 tejpat leaves
• 0.5 g saffron
• 9-10 gum mastic beads

I'll leave it to Kristin to give the full recipe she used, since she did the cooking (I just did the calculations).  If you do decide to make conditum paradoxum based on this information, the most important warning I should give is that like all Roman wines, it should not be drunk straight.  The Romans diluted their wines with anywhere from one to seven times as much water.  We found three parts water (or soda water, if you don't mind being anachronistic) to one part conditum paradoxum to be about right to give a sweet and spicy drink, tasting strongly of honey, pepper, and saffron. So you may think you're only making 2 liters of conditum paradoxum, but it's really 8 liters worth.  Share it with some friends.

Update (9/29/2012): Kristin's finally put the recipe up on her blog.  And I have another post on Ancient Roman food here.

Update (10/6/2012): Kristin pointed out that I left the black pepper out of the ingredient list.  I put it in.