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A piece of fine parchment paper showing Genesis, the creation of the universe, from the magnificent Italian Renaissance Bible of Borso d’Este Vol 1.
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Fish baked in fig leaves (#ulink_acabd60d-7956-5fba-8b4f-627d9bb8f29d)
350 BC
AUTHOR: Archestratus, FROM: Hedypatheia (Life of Luxury)
You could not possibly spoil it even if you wanted to … Wrap it [the fish] in fig leaves with a little marjoram. No cheese, no nonsense! Just place it gently in fig leaves and tie them up with a string, then put it under hot ashes.
Archestratus’s mission in life was to visit as many lands as he could reach in search of good things to eat. A Sicilian, he ventured all over Greece, southern Italy, Asia Minor and areas around the Black Sea. He tasted his way to paradise and then recorded it in classical Greek hexameters. Not the way one might record recipes these days, but maybe he felt it added a lyrical nuance to his findings, as well as a playful parody of epic poetry.
The entire project was recorded in the form of a poem appropriately entitled Hedypatheia or ‘Life of Luxury’. And while only fragments of it remain, there are enough of them for us to get a good idea of the food he ate, what he thought of it and, vitally, how it was cooked. Archestratus’s writings on ingredients, dishes and his views on flavour combinations paint a picture of the well-to-do of ancient Greece in around 350 bc. Their tastes were cosmopolitan and they appear to fit the stereotypical image of them taught at school – lying languidly on couches, eating in a reclining position, grapes dangling from their fingers.
The poem shows Archestratus to be a man of strong likes and dislikes. He was not a great eater of meat, for instance, its link with religious sacrifice making it less appealing as a dish for feasting, but he loved sea and river food. Of the sixty-two fragments that remain of his poem, forty-eight concern fish. He divided these into two categories: tough fish that needed marinating and the finer type that could be cooked straight away. And his guiding principle in cooking it was simplicity. He believed that the better quality of the raw product, the fewer additional ingredients the cook needed to add. Cooking should be simple – preferably grilling with the lightest of seasoning and oil, such as in this recipe for cooking a variety of shark: ‘In the city of Torone you must buy belly steaks of the karkharias sprinkling them with cumin and not much salt. You will add nothing else, dear fellow, unless maybe green olive oil.’ The recipe for baked fish, at the top of this chapter, is prepared with a similar lack of fuss.
‘All other methods are mere sidelines to my mind,’ he wrote. ‘Thick sauces poured over, cheese melted over, too much oil over – as if they were preparing a tasty dish of dogfish.’ Perhaps this was a rebellion against the meals he had endured as a child, which could be very rich as well as over-abundant. As Plato wrote disparagingly: ‘[Sicily is] obsessed with food, a gluttonous place where men eat two banquets a day and never sleep alone at night.’
As well as his disdain for sauces, Archestratus was insistent on what he considered were worthy ingredients. ‘Eat what I recommend,’ he said. ‘All other delicacies are a sign of abject poverty – I mean boiled chickpeas, beans, apples and dried figs.’ And he was obsessed with where food came from and where the best ingredients were to be found. ‘Let it come from Byzantium if you want the best,’ he wrote, like the voiceover of an early product endorsement.
Of the few meats he liked – hare, deer, ‘sow’s womb’ and all sorts of birds, from geese to starlings and blackbirds (animals not used for sacrifice, that is) – he preferred the following method of serving: ‘[Bring] the roast meat in and serve to everyone while they are drinking, hot, simply sprinkled with salt, taking it from the spit while a little rare. Do not worry if you see ichor [blood – used normally with reference to the Greek gods] seeping from the meat, but eat greedily.’ As with cooking fish, the principles are of a dish simply prepared and served.
Highly opinionated Archestratus may have been, but he was also extremely knowledgeable. Indeed, he demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation of the various parts of a fish, writing of the subtle differences in texture between the flesh of the fin, belly, head or tail. Subsequent writers relied on his expertise. Athenaeus of Naucratis, author of the Learned Banquet in around AD 200 and a man without whom we would have little knowledge of the cultural pursuits of the ancient world, was much influenced by his predecessor. He wrote of Archestratus: ‘He diligently travelled all lands and sea in his desire … of tasting carefully the delights of the belly.’
While his musings on food are appealingly vivacious, Archestratus’s recipe writing is deliciously free and passion-fuelled, such as when championing the finest-quality ingredients: ‘If you can’t get hold of that [sugar], demand some Attic [Greek] honey, as that will set your cake off really well. This is the life of a freeman! Otherwise one might as well … be buried measureless fathoms underground.’ Probably the world’s earliest cookbook, Life of Luxury has all the energy and colour of a modern bestseller.
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To salt ham (#ulink_c4945c9b-795a-580c-8e8c-ffc16692bc36)
160 BC
AUTHOR: Cato the Elder, FROM: De agri cultura (On Farming)
Salting of ham and ofellae [small chunks of pork] according to the Puteoli [a Roman colony in southern Italy] method. Hams should be salted as follows: in a vat, or in a big pot. After buying hams [legs of pork] cut off the hooves. Use half a modius [a dry measure equivalent to about 9 litres (2 gallons)] of ground Roman salt per each ham. Put some salt on the bottom of the vat or pot, and place the ham on it skin downwards and cover it with salt. Then, place the next ham on it skin downwards and cover it with salt in the same way. Take care that the meat does not touch … After all the hams are placed in this way, cover them with salt so that the meat cannot be seen; make the surface of the salt smooth. After the hams stay for five days in the salt, remove them all, each with its own salt. Those that were on top should be placed on the bottom and covered with salt as previously. After twelve days altogether take the hams out; remove the salt, hang them in a draught and cure them for two days. On the third day, take the hams down and clean them with a sponge, smear them with olive oil mixed with vinegar and hang them in the building where you keep the meat. No pest will attack them.
Roman politician Marcius Porcius Cato was brought up on a farm south-east of Rome near a city called Tusculum. He enlisted as a solder at seventeen and later rose to high office as a statesman, known as a skilful orator who made use of his public-speaking prowess by chastising those in the Senate whom he felt were too liberal. This accorded with his latter role as censor, an official position that included supervising public morality and which he took to with enthusiasm. With his clamp-down on immoral officials and support of a law against luxury, he was identified with the job – known to posterity as Cato the Censor. He was censorious about those he thought were extravagant – he wouldn’t have approved of the creamy sauces that came out of Apicius’s kitchen 150 years later – while the first-century historian Plutarch praised him not for any triumphs as military leader but that ‘by his discipline and temperance, [he] kept the Roman state from sinking into vice’.
Perhaps it was his childhood on the farm that had instilled in the young Cato a Spartan frugality. His father apparently died while Cato was quite young and he inherited considerable responsibilities, learning the business of farming in his early teens. As an older man, he ate with his servants, was a strict parent, a harsh husband, an inflexible official and, by all accounts, a downright bore.
He was also a prolific author, although only fragments tend to remain of his writings. He wrote a history of Italy in Latin, published a collection of his speeches – including the deadly retrospective On His Consulship (he’d been a consul before discovering his métier as censor) – and a tome entitled On Soldiery. Not even fragments of the latter remain but one can imagine the sort of thing it might have included: dawn rises, cold showers, spotless uniforms and suicidal charging at the enemy.
But one volume that has survived completely intact is his De agri cultura, or ‘On Farming’. A manual on good agricultural practice, it advises, for example, how many slaves to hire for the olive harvest and how – in one particularly charming note – a slave’s ration might be reduced should he be so audacious as to fall ill. It also gives details on how to preserve food, including the earliest recorded description of how to salt pork – the recipe that heads this chapter. In addition Cato offers recipes for pickling and smoking, and his writings show that he had considerable expertise, employing methods that would be just as workable today.
Knowing how to preserve meat, fish or indeed fruit was vital in the centuries preceding the advent of the supermarket and the fridge. Indeed Polish professor Maria Dembinska, writing in the late twentieth century, has described it as ‘the greatest worry of primitive man’. In the days when finding food for everyday consumption was a trial, if not life-endangering, its preservation was all the more important. That ever-present fear of hunger challenged man’s ingenuity to find methods to both preserve food and then store it effectively.
How much less meat we might waste today if we had to hunt it ourselves – if we had speared it while it was charging at us. Preserving food was necessary not just so that it would last beyond the weekend but because food might be sourced at quite a distance from where it would be consumed. So people buried food in situ. Excavations on the Irish and Norwegian coasts have uncovered bones, for example, from fish buried between 5000 and 2000 bc. That they were excavated shows a skill in burying fish, if not in retrieving it. Without a map to mark the spot, that fish remained buried for rather longer than was perhaps intended.
Herodotus, meanwhile, wrote 2400 years ago of the Babylonians and Egyptians drying fish in the wind and the sun. And meat was often hung in the roofs of houses. Perhaps that is how it came to be smoked – by mistake over a home fire, but resulting in another method of preserving food as well as enhancing the flavour. The Vikings may have developed this concept, although no records exist to confirm this. Once it was discovered that salt was a proficient preserver, that idea quickly spread too. By 1800 BC there were salt mines all over the place. Although many still preferred to bury their fish, particularly in the lands of the north.
A Swedish census from 1348 records the existence of a man called Olafuer Gravlax. He lived in Jamtland in central Sweden and as his surname means ‘buried fish’ we can assume that that’s what he did. Whoever first produced gravlax – cured salmon – in Scandinavia probably did it by mistake, his aim simply being to store fish for the winter season when freezing temperatures and ice-covered rivers and lakes would have made fishing almost impossible. Burying it also would have kept it away from thieves – from ‘those on two, as well as those on four legs’, as the Norwegian author Astri Riddervold puts it.
So he buried his fish. Then when he dug it up months later, it would have stunk, horribly, having lain underground and then fermented. But, ignoring the smell, whoever dug it up then bravely tasted it and found it not just to be edible but to have a remarkable flavour, albeit very different from that of the fresh fish he had buried all those months before. It was a miracle. The following season, maybe he added salt to one fish, a little sugar to another and sugar and salt to another. Perhaps he then experimented to see what happened if he stored it for less time – a few months, weeks, then days.
Who knows quite how it happened and when it became an established practice. But people liked the tart taste and it became a culinary tradition, not to mention a commercial enterprise. Indeed, while Olafuer Gravlax buried fish he may not have run the entire business. This we can surmise from another record – this time in the 1509 annals of Stockholm – which lists one Martin Surlax, whose surname translates as ‘sour fish’. So as sour fish is the result of burying fish, perhaps Mr Gravlax buried it while Mr Surlax dug it up.
Gravlax brings echoes of the 1980s, when it was all the rage in Britain, served at dinner parties with dill sauce. These days you don’t of course need to bury it to make it as a trip to the supermarket makes its procurement rather easier. And with the addition of salt, sugar, dill and some spices (peppercorns and coriander seeds), you can even do your own burying – in the fridge for just two days. Back in the fourteenth century it wouldn’t have been quite so straightforward, but those early fish buriers were clearly on to something. They may have been using their instincts when they added salt and sugar, but they were unknowingly engaging in a very complicated scientific process. The salt drew out the water but also refreshed the proteins and preserved the fish.
Be they medieval fish buriers who cured salmon for a living or a Roman disciplinarian who salted pork in his spare time, these early innovators used their ingenuity to keep hunger at bay. Meanwhile, the techniques that once staved off real hunger in former times now sate the greed of the modern snacker today. For where would we be without all those salty, sugary goodies to make us obese and thirsty?
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Roast goat (#ulink_2b81c5a7-5cba-5892-8514-5989f750a28e)
30 BC
AUTHOR: Virgil, FROM: Georgics II: 545
Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing,
Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cakes
And dishes bear him; and the doomed goat
Led by the horn shall at the altar stand,
Whose entrails rich on hazel-spits we’ll roast.
You may not consider Virgil to be a recipe writer, yet here is what amounts to a recipe for goat, roasted on an early version of a spit. And I’m not the only one who has cited this extract as a recipe. It was quoted back in the 1800s, to illustrate the simplicity of roasting as a cooking method. In a section entitled ‘The Ladies Department’ in an 1825 edition of the US publication the American Farmer, the poem is referred to with the comment that ‘Roasting is the most simple and direct application of heat in the preparation of food.’ While four years earlier, in 1821, Frederick Accum in his Culinary Chemistry also cites Virgil, going on to say: ‘Roasting on a spit appears to be the most ancient process of rendering animal food eatable by means of the action of heat.’
Before metal spits were devised, meat would be skewered onto branches pulled from trees – often hazel wood, as in Virgil’s poem. The sap in the wood, when heated, would make the branch turn (so long as the animal being cooked was light enough, such as a small bird like a lark; it wouldn’t happen if you skewered a pig on it) and people who witnessed it thought it supernatural. Hazel was also used as a divining rod.
But quite how roasting came about can only be guessed at. For thousands of years the human race ate its food raw, and then between the discovery of how to make fire and the appearance of the Neanderthals, man began to cook his food. So at some point, while using fire for warmth or to ward off wild animals, a discovery was made. Did the spark from a fire catch light and burn down the lair of some wild pigs? Did man smell the roasting fat and try out the first pork scratchings? Or did a grazing mammoth fall into a fire pit, the smell of its cooked flesh wafting on the wind in an appetising new aroma?
However it happened, man’s use of fire to cook was revolutionary. It wasn’t just the new flavour that it introduced to food, but the inedible then became edible. Items that could only be eaten when cooked – wheat, barley, rice, potatoes – were then worth cultivating. As man consumed more nutrients, his health must have benefited too. Furthermore, his use of fire for cooking is one of the decisive factors that separates him from other animals. When man cooks, he becomes fully human. Animals may store food – dogs bury bones, racoons douse their food in water – but only humans cook it.
Having learnt to roast food, man then got all sophisticated and started boiling it. So where roasting – or burning – food distinguished us from animals, boiling was proof of civilisation. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss muses on this point. In his essay ‘The Culinary Triangle’, he thrashes out his theory on cooked food. ‘The roasted is on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture,’ he writes. This is literally true because boiling requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object: ‘Boiling requires a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting.’
Thus, as we became cultured so roasting was seen as primitive and basic, while boiling was regarded as sophisticated and classy. Until more recently, that is, as we became increasingly sophisticated and decided that roasting was in fact rather more upwardly mobile. After all, the urbane gentleman doesn’t take pride in his ability to do a nice ‘Sunday boil’.
But he probably wouldn’t roast a goat either. Back in 30 bc, however, Publius Vergilius Maro – Virgil, to his friends – was more than happy to, and his reference to goat, spit-roast on hazel wood, comes in his epic work The Georgics. The Roman poet’s most famous work after The Aeneid, this chiefly detailed methods of running a farm – instruction manuals for those entering the agricultural sector making for perkier reading when in verse. In it he writes of raising crops and planting trees, of keeping livestock and horses and beekeeping.
His reference to roasting goat comes after a section on pruning trees and then a note celebrating vineyards, whose vines teem with ‘mellowing fruit’. With his mention of Bacchus, the goat roasting feels like a celebration of successful farming. The ensuing lines instruct on how to look after the soil with a few notes on hoeing.
As Virgil gracefully instructs one on correct farming practice, so he whets our appetites for a good roast, the flavours of which echo down the centuries as resonant as his poetry.
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Another sauce for fowl (#ulink_4daf7334-47ce-53d7-866c-f536671cd291)
AD 10
AUTHOR: Marcus Gavius Apicius,
FROM: De re coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters)
Pepper, lovage, parsley, dry mint, fennel, blossoms moistened with wine; add roasted nuts from Pontus or almonds, a little honey, wine, vinegar, and broth to taste. Put oil in a pot, and heat and stir the sauce, adding green celery seed, cat mint; carve the fowl and cover with the sauce.
His predecessor Archestratus may have had a downer on sauce. Poncey and over-elaborate, it engulfed good and simple ingredients. But Apicius was having none of it. He lived during the good times of ancient Rome, long before even the seeds of decline were sewn.
If anyone ever asks you, ‘At which point did Rome reach its zenith and what precisely symbolised that moment?’, remember the answer has nothing to do with beating back barbarians at the furthest reaches of the empire or with the building of public latrines. Rome was at its peak when its sauces were at their best, when they were plenty and at their richest. And we can pinpoint when this happened because Marcus Gavius Apicius wrote it all down. He lived between 80 BC and AD 40 – during the reigns of both Augustus and Tiberius –and his cookbook is still in print, although unless you speak fluent Latin, I suggest you find an English translation. It’s called De re coquinaria – ‘Of Culinary Matters’ – and is a bumper read of some 500 recipes. And did I mention sauce? Well, 400 of those recipes are instructions for making a sauce.
Sauce was the trademark of the ancient Roman chef and if Apicius was not the best of them, then he is at least an astonishingly impeccable example. Some scholars argue that Apicius could have been one of several people, or a collection of recipes by several individuals garnered under the name of Apicius, but the good money is on him being the aforementioned M. G. Apicius. He was a chef, a collator of recipes and he endowed a school of cookery. If he were alive today he’d probably be running some Italian equivalent of Ballymaloe (the Irish cookery school near Cork).
He lived and breathed his craft. He inspired those he met with his culinary ideals and he was an exhausting mentor to anyone who could withstand his rigorous teaching methods. He was an obsessive: exacting, precise, detailed and, naturally, opinionated. He also had the good fortune to be well born and wealthy. When we talk about good food during the period of ancient Rome, this was not a democratic idea. Most people would have lived very, very simple lives, with few possessions. The prospect of a decent meal, let alone decadent feasting, was denied to many. For the vast majority meals were a frugal affair at best; the richness of Apicius’s recipes therefore reflects only the dining habits of the elite. Of which he was a fully paid-up member.
Apicius had a vast fortune and he spent it on food. His kitchens would have been kitted out with all the latest mod cons. His cooking utensils were far more precious than ours as they would have been handmade, beautiful – works of art, even. By contrast, his apparatus for cooking food would have been basic (pots and a spit for roasting) and he seemed to make a virtue of his lack of chiller cabinets. At least that’s the only reason I can think for his creation of a recipe ‘for birds of all kinds that have a goatish smell’.
What he lacked in white goods, however, he made up for in kitchen staff. While good ingredients would have been hard to come by – this was a time when agriculture was haphazard, transportation limited and storage basic – once they were assembled there were plenty of people on hand to prepare and cook them. Perhaps this is one of the great differences between our age and his. Today ingredients are relatively cheap: we have access, within minutes, to ingredients from every corner of the earth. But while food is cheap, labour isn’t. Apicius didn’t just have cheap staff, he had free staff. What is unimaginable now was normal then – for the very rich, that is.
So we can picture Apicius beavering away with his dozens of kitchen underlings, chopping and prepping from dawn to dusk. Those lucky enough to work in his kitchen would have been dazzled by his ingredients. His larder would have been hung with hare, pork, lamb and endless fowl – from crane and duck to doves and peacocks, ostriches and flamingoes. He cooked with truffles, all kinds of mushrooms, sea-urchins, mussels, every type of fish. The herbs he used were of such variety that they take the breath away – from lovage and coriander to cumin and fennel seeds. He made wine reductions, pickled off-cuts of pork and served up great gravy, and he wrote this all down in his recipes.
Alamy: Mary Evans Picture Library
Marcus Gavius Apicius.
Apicius’s book is Europe’s oldest and ancient Rome’s only surviving recipe book. As Joseph Vehling, who translated it into English in 1926, wrote: ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; so here’s hoping that we may find a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life through the study of this cookery book.’ Yet it was never plain sailing. Apicius’s recipes may paint a picture of luxurious dinners, of exquisite flavours and textures, but he had to deal with a bureaucracy that must have infuriated him.
Today, chefs and restaurateurs have to be much more than providers of good food. Aside from creating a restaurant worth eating at, they have to deal with council officials, inspectors and regulators, not to mention listening to the advice of their PRs and tolerating the critics. Apicius had his problems too. History books may carry the legends of Roman decadence but at the time many looked down upon those who enjoyed extravagant lifestyles. Writers such as Pliny and Plutarch disapproved of high living in the form of fine dining, let alone feasting. And they weren’t alone – severe laws existed that fixed the amount a household could spend on specific types of food.
Senior politicians and officials felt a need to protect public morals. Not that it stretched to stopping people watching Christians being eaten by lions in the Coliseum. So imperial food inspectors were sent out to perform spot checks on kitchens, not dissimilar to how hygiene officials operate today. Fortunately there was another aspect of life that was rife back then: corruption. So one can imagine Apicius, on being told a posse of ingredient inspectors were on their way, dispatching one of his chefs to entertain the inspectors when they arrived. No doubt the food wardens would have been quickly seduced with promises of some tasty morsels for them to take home, a meal in the kitchen or very likely money, gold even. Because they clearly failed to stop the purchasing of expensive ingredients and the dinners for which they were intended.
Wealthy food-loving Romans thus easily brushed aside the food police and circumvented the law. Which meant they were able to indulge in Apicius’s delectable food and, of course, his sauces. And there are sauces to accompany every meat you can think of, from hare and duck to lobster and sardines. But not the oft-mentioned ‘dormouse’ – not so much a mouse as a large rodent that lived in trees (not unlike a squirrel). Apicius stuffed it with pork, nuts and herbs and then roasted or boiled it, but he can’t have been that keen on it as he doesn’t do a sauce to match. This aberration aside, there are so many sauces it’s almost a frenzy. When he can’t think what to call it, he just says, ‘Here’s another one’ – as you can see from the recipe heading this chapter.
His writing style is chatty when there’s detail, of which there is often little. The language is of a busy, harassed man. He can be obscure and unhelpful, assuming a level of knowledge that would frustrate the novice. These days his publisher would have forced a ghost-writer on him. But instead we get the writings of a man focused on his work – after all he was a cook.
But reading between the lines he was also a humane chef. In those days many felt that the worse an animal suffered the better it tasted. Torturing some poor beast, it was thought, would bring out the flavour of the meat. Yet there are very few examples of this in Apicius’s writings. The two exceptions being a starter that calls for a dis-jointed chicken (this being done before the bird was killed) and a fig-fed pig, in which the poor animal would be starved before being force-fed with dried figs and then given mead to drink. The figs then simply expanded or start to ferment, the liver enlarged and the pig died. (For the modern equivalent – foie gras (or ‘fat liver’))
Apicius seemed less enamoured of this sort of animal cruelty and keener on promoting the cooking of vegetables. If you’re ever stuck for a recipe for cabbage, he’s your man. He was also a master of the art of disguising food. This was less for economic and practical reasons – think mock turtle soup in later times – than for show. Although the jury is out as to whether his ‘anchovy paste without anchovy’ might have been devised as an exquisite piece of trickery to fool and delight guests or simply concocted on the day he found he was all out of anchovies. With his extraordinary wealth, it was probably the former.
Apicius was a stickler for perfection, determined that his recipes should enlighten his readers and enhance their lives – although he wasn’t big on puddings. Despite the Romans love of confectionery, you won’t find any sweet dishes in this book. Perhaps this was one thing he sent out for.
But so great was his love of food that it did for him in the end. As he worked his way through his fortune – purchasing the likes of sea scorpions and Damascus plums or refurbishing his kitchen – his outgoings began to outstrip his income. So much so that when he was down to his last few blocks of gold, his last few million sestertii, he came to a grand conclusion. If he could no longer live in the manner to which he had become accustomed, if the quality of food that would pass his lips was anything less than what he aspired to, then it was not a life worth living.
So one day he gathered together his most appreciative friends and prepared one final, perfect banquet. Each dish was more exquisite than the previous one. But to one of his own dishes he added an individual twist. We’ll never know if it was his ‘pumpkin fritters’, ‘lentils and chestnuts’ or ‘suckling pig stuffed two ways’. But whatever it was, Apicius had poisoned it and he died.
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Honeyed cheesecakes (#ulink_551e842c-8c6d-5cd8-9698-5dd418f919f6)
circa AD 200
AUTHOR: Athenaeus (quoting Hebe’s Wedding by Epicharmus)
FROM: Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banquet)
Wheaten flour is wetted, and then put into a frying-pan; after that honey is sprinkled over it, and sesame and cheese.
One cannot leave the shores of ancient Greece and Rome – for forays around the wider ancient world – without enjoying the taste of honey and various recipes associated with it, courtesy of the Greek scholar Athenaeus. Born in the Egyptian tr ading port of Naucratis, he was writing in around AD 200. Some of his publications are lost but we are indebted to him because of his fifteen-volume work entitled the Deipnosophistae.
Translatable as ‘The Learned Banquest’ or ‘Philosophers at Dinner’, the work purports to be recorded conversations that take place during an epic banquet between a variety of learned people, some of whom may or may not be fictitious. Now you might quite understandably feel that a collection of dinner party discussions in fifteen volumes sounds like proper torture, but what is discussed is so detailed, so many writers and thinkers are quoted, and such a number of customs and ideas are recorded, that it makes the work hugely important. For we are left with a great array of precise detail about life in ancient Rome – where the work was written – not just in AD 200 but going back in history.
The conversation veers from food to music, dance, women and much more. As would happen naturally, topics go off at extraordinary tangents. Poetry, philosophy, myths and legends are quoted at length by various individuals, and there is one of the longest discussions in history on cheesecake. Of the many cheesecakes discussed – and from absorbing myself in the literature, I can assure you that the ancient Greeks and Romans consumed a large number of them, going by different names and all cooked in different ways – the one attributed to Epicharmus, a dramatist and philosopher from around 500 bc, seems the tastiest. Included at the top of this chapter, the recipe is quite straightforward and it uses honey, which, as you’ll see, was a pretty much a key ingredient.
Reclining on couches, adorned in flowing togas, the guests ate and chatted away while servants fluttered about bringing food and drink as the conversation ebbed and flowed. It was perhaps during the serving of cheesecakes as a second or final sweet course that the epic cheesecake digression took place. ‘The cheesecakes of Samos are extraordinarily good,’ we hear one diner say, while another talks of how he has eaten them ‘set in a mould and made up of egg, honey and very fine wheatflour’.
Mention is made of cheesecakes served at a wedding to the bride and bridegroom, drenched in honey – the cheesecake that is, not the happy couple. Others are mixed with honey, then deep-fried and served with honey. Another, a recipe ‘by that clever writer on confectionery, Chrysippus’, is made by first roasting nuts and the seedhead of a poppy. This is pounded in a mortar and added to fruit juice mixed with boiled honey and some black pepper. Added to a cheesy dough, the soft mass that results is flattened and made into squares, then sprinkled with crushed sesame softened with more boiled honey. No doubt it’s then cooked, not that the clever Chrysippus is helpful enough to mention this. Still, it’s one of a cast of thousands, virtually all of which include honey.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had a pretty high regard for honey, which because of its preservative and antiseptic qualities they associated with longevity and hence immortality. It was both the food of the gods – ambrosia – and a gift from them. The mythical figure of Aristeaus was an apiculture – beekeeping – expert. The son of Apollo and a nymph, he had nectar and honey dropped on his lips as a baby and thus gained immortality. As he grew up, various nymphs taught him how to cultivate vines and olive trees and to keep bees. He then went about sharing his bee know-how with common mortals.
Early excavations on Crete show bee-related motifs on pottery and jewellery; Hippocrates recommended it to everyone, sick or otherwise; Aristotle made an intense study of bees; and Democritus, who spent a lot of time thinking about atoms, had a favourite recipe for a long and healthy life: ‘One must nourish the external part of his body with oil and the internal with honey.’
Honey was mass-produced by the Greeks and used as a traded commodity. A record of 1300 BC shows 110 pots having the equivalent value of an ass or ox. Above all, it was nutritious and tasted good and, as we now know, it was very popular in cheesecake.
Wade through the dinner party monologues of Athenaeus, perhaps imagining him declaim it as a piece of theatre, and you learn a thing or two about other foodie subjects. His dinner party guests appear to abhor drunkenness – even during the penultimate volume, when the party was drawing to a close (it must have been a dry night). ‘We’re not of the class who drink to excess, nor of the numbers of those who are in the habit of being intoxicated by midday,’ declares one. ‘Those who drink too much unmixed wine are become violent,’ says another, while a fellow guest opines sagely (quoting Herodotus): ‘When wine has penetrated down into the body, bad and furious language is apt to rise to the surface.’
They recommend songs to calm people at the start of feasts and stop them eating too fast: ‘Music softens the moroseness of character, for it dissipates sadness and produces affability and a sort of gentlemanlike joy.’ Not that they were without experience of overdoing it. There is considerable discussion on the subject of hangovers. A comic poet, Clearchus, is quoted as saying: ‘As we get all the pleasure first … we lose the whole delight in the sharp pain that follows.’
But if you want another measure of the spirit of these discussions it comes when referencing one Aristoxenus: ‘The theatres have become completely barbarised and … music has become entirely ruined and vulgar.’ No doubt he also felt that young people had no respect.
Still, on food, especially cheesecake, these are precious volumes. And while Atheneaus discourses endlessly on pomegranates, pheasants, sucking pigs and salted crab – to mention just a few of the foodstuffs covered in this work – he’s at his best when he waxes lyrical on ‘tartlets and cheesecakes steeped most thoroughly in the rich honey of the golden bee’.
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Congee (#ulink_84f36ee0-be4e-530c-956c-bc7145cfcfb8)
AD 636
AUTHOR: Linghu Defen, FROM: The Book of Zhou
While wearing the mourning of nine months, one might eat vegetables and fruits, and drink water and congee, using no salt or cream.
Of the official twenty-four histories of Imperial China, The Book of Zhou stands out – fifty chapters long, some inevitably lost over time – as the one that mentions a dish now enjoyed daily by millions across Asia. As well as recommending it as appropriate to eat during times of mourning, it records how ‘Emperor Huang Di was the first to cook congee with millet as the ingredient’. Today congee is mostly made with rice, but as the emperor showed, where rice wasn’t available it might be substituted with another cereal.
The dish has spread to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and South Korea. Each culture has its own way of preparing it, although the basic method is pretty much the same, the rice being cooked in large quantities of water so that it disintegrates in the liquid as it’s heated and becomes a sort of thick porridge or soup. It would have been made in this way back in the days of the Tang Dynasty, when The Book of Zhou was commissioned by Emperor Taizong to give the official history of the earlier Northern Zhou Dynasty. Although congee was regarded as a little more special in those times – presented as a gift to the emperor’s nobles. No doubt given as a measure of respect with no end of bowing, it was then gently brought to the lips with gold-tipped chopsticks made of ivory.
Despite all the ceremony, it was, as now, a plain dish – the humblest gift signifying the greater respect. In fact, served on its own without the addition of other ingredients, it would have been almost tasteless. Think of gruel, stodgy from cooking in the pot overnight and served with little more than a smile. Yet its blandness belies its strength. Congee fortifies the body at the start of the day. It is easily digested, providing instant energy and making it a good dish to wolf down if you’re about to be attacked by some aggressive warrior. An expert congee consumer will tell you that by turning a hot bowl of congee in your hands and slurping the cooler parts around the rim, you can get through three bowls in as many minutes. And as it doesn’t sit uncomfortably in your stomach, but is absorbed quickly, you won’t get a stitch while wielding your sword at your attacker.
