I love to play with food.
I love to play with food.
This page documents my attempts at ancient Roman cooking. I’m basing my experiments on the helpful cookbooks I’ve collected. These scholars have done all the hard work of translating the various original texts that provide us a glimpse into Roman diet and cooking.
All I need to do is choose recipes and try them.
Before we begin, I should mention: A) I don’t follow recipes exactly. I use them as a foundation and then adapt them based on my tastes and what I happen to have in the kitchen. And B) I’ve cut gluten from my diet, which means some of the recipes are further altered.
If you want 100% authentic Roman cuisine, you’ll have to look elsewhere. If you want verisimilitude, read on…
Pork Stew with Raisin Sauce
Romans often combined sweet with savory, such as this stew. The raisins add a subtle sweetness and give the sauce body.
The raisins are soaked in wine vinegar and sapa (reduced sweet wine or grape juice) then pureed and added to the pork stew, which is seasoned with common Roman flavors including vinegar, coriander seeds, and oregano.
The end result was delicious.
I served it with very un-Roman boiled potatoes.
Must Cakes
Must was a common sweetener in ancient Rome. It was the pulp and juice of crushed grapes. I attempted to simulate must by using both grape juice and chopped grapes.
These savory cakes ended up more like savory cheese biscuits than a dessert cake. They had only a subtle sweetness, and they were strongly flavored with both cumin and the fresh bay leaves that the dough was placed on before baking. They were tasty, but they turned out quite dense. I will try these again someday.
Additional Resources
Food Timeline.org: An informative site on the history of food.