Flamingo in the Home Kitchen

As likely as one is to find the Ancients' taste for chowing down on flamingo's tongues and otters noses lampooned in all cultural representations of Rome, rarely do we see a portrayal of an authentic dish from the period. However, a massive collection of recipes from antiquity has survived under the name De Re Coquinaria, attributed to a certain Marcus Gavius Apicius who lived in the 1st Century A.D. For the adventurous home-cook, this book can allow you to entertain like an Emperor and give your guests a gustatory experience they will always remember.

On the Subject of Cooking is indeed one of the hidden gems of Latin literature, a strange compendium of recipes and cooking tips compiled in the kitchens of Rome's well-to-do nearly two thousand years ago. Although it is traditionally said to be the work of the said Marcus Gavius Apicius, the famous gourmand and aesthete at the court of Tiberius, it appears rather that it was a collectively composed book designed for transmission cook to cook. Therefore, the language is nearer to vulgar Latin (colloquial forms) and is replete with technical terms borrowed from Greek (many of the cooking professionals were Greek slaves).

The flavor profiles of ancient Italian cuisine are surprising and unforgettable. Although there are no tomatoes, pasta, nor anything familiar is in sight, still the Ancient Roman flavor palette is bursting with bold and saturated flavors which combine sweet, sour, and savory notes, thickly herbaceous--oh yes, and very funky and fishy. Contrasting and harmonizing the taste of honey, fish sauce, vinegar, olive oil, and a formidable arsenal of herbs and spices (some familiar and some not), was thought not only to be delicious, but to balance the humors and serve as a sort of preventative medicine.

The key to this form of cuisine is in its most often used tool: the mortar and pestle. Dry and wet ingredients are ground painstakingly into a paste that is incorporated into the next stage of the dish. Pepper abounds in the Apicius, and is the starting note on which the rest of the seasoning is harmonized. Pepper was imported over vast distances and was not native to the territories of the Roman Empire, and yet it is used copiously in almost all extant dishes. The pepper is ground in the mortar with other seeds, often some combination of cumin, coriander, or caraway; followed by a series of fresh and dried herbs including oregano, mint, cilantro, lovage, rue, and many more. This is moistened with fish-sauce, which also provides the only salting for most dishes, and then the paste is extended farther with honey, wine, vinegar, olive oil, and and array of other possible sweet or sour fluids. These ingredients are available to the general buyer, if not at the average supermarket, then at specialty Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern markets, or else online.

One of the most challenging aspects of reconstructing the recipes in De Re Coquinaria is not so much the difference in cooking methods or apparatus between ancient and modern, but the way that the recipes themselves are worded and structured. We are rarely if ever given amounts of ingredients or cooking time; many items consist simply of a list of ingredients and a brief description of a process, or even just a list of ingredients without more ado.

Nevertheless, the majority of the time the entries contained in this book function as working instructions, akin to the way a restaurant's house formulae are transmitted to new cooks orally, with emphasis being lain on ratios and proportions. These instructions are designed as much to feed two as two hundred people, and to account for any variation in taste that might call for more of one and less of another ingredient. The cooks themselves, then, will have much shaping power over the resultant dish, even while following the recipe "exactly." The reader/cook will be using the "season to taste" principle not just in seasoning, but in choosing the ratio of their own ingredients, as well as cooking times and presentation. This creative leeway, while it seems daunting, also makes the process of bringing these dishes to life all the more fulfilling and tempered to one's own taste.

De Re Coquinaria may at times showcase some strange meats we would not want to venture to try, but it does give the reader a chuckle to try and imagine themselves asking at the supermarket if they have any dormice on sale.

So, try to track down a copy of what is often just called the Apicius, and impress your friends today with your imperial tastes.