"In mitulis" - ancient Roman mussels. Not those muscles, these mussels. Today we are
cooking from the oldest surviving cookbook in the West Apicius's
"De Re Conquinaria", or on the subject of cooking. Dating from the 4th century it gives us
a glimpse into what Romans were eating at the height, and during the decline of
the Roman Empire so today I'll show you how to make one of its simpler recipes,
and we will look at the history of this most important ancient cookbook. This
time on Tasting History.
Mix liquamen, chopped leek, cumin, passum, savoury, and wine. Dilute the mixture with
water, and cook the mussels in it. Seems pretty straightforward as long as you
have all the ingredients, and there are two that are probably missing from your
cupboard. First liquamen. Now by the fourth century liquamen had become
synonymous with garum (or ancient Roman fermented fish sauce). We made a quick
version of that last week, and I will put a link in the description if you want to
make it yourself. Now if you don't feel like making your own garum at home and
making your house smell like fish for an entire week, then you can of course use
Colatura Di Alici, and I'll put a link in the description to where you can buy
that online, or any of the Eastern Asian fish sauces that you can get at an Asian
market. Now those sauces are going to be slightly different than an ancient Roman
garum. They use different types of fish, they use different amounts of salt and
different herbs, but that's okay because frankly the kind that we made last week
is not the traditional fermented garum either which takes months to make and
you're probably not going to do that at home. The second ingredient you probably
don't have is passum, not to be confused with this little scamp. Passum was a
thick sweet wine originally from Carthage. It's made with dried grapes or
raisins, and grape must, and someday I would love to make it, but for today I'll
passum. Instead I'll use probably the closest thing that you can find today
which has vin santo, but you can use any kind of sweet fortified wine from Spain,
or Portugal, or Italy. They're all going to work just fine.
So with those ingredients (or their alternatives in mind) here's what you'll
need: two pounds of live mussels, 1 tbsp of either the liquid garum, or fish sauce,
and eighth of a cup of passum, or one of your sweet wines 1/4 of a cup of dry
white wine or more. I ended up using probably closer to a half a cup. We just
need to get some liquid in there. You can do water, or more wine. I chose more wine.
One cup of chopped leek 1/4 teaspoon of cumin 1/2 teaspoon of dried savory. I'll
link to that in the description as well, and then some water about 3/4 of a cup,
and like I said you could use more wine, or more water it's all going to depend
on the size of pot you have. You just want to have like you know that
much liquid on the bottom, so we'll get there. First make sure to wash and
clean your mussels. Now when you get those mussel home if any of them are
open give them a little squeeze. If they close on their own great, if they don't
chuck them out. It means they're dead. Also, some of your mussels might have
these little strings on them called a beard, pull that off. You don't need it,
it's where the mussel would have latched onto a rock or whatever. Then in a large
pot mix all of the ingredients, your wine and liquamen, and herbs, and spices, and
the water. And here's where you want to make sure that there's about half an
inch of liquid at least because you don't want it to completely boil away. So
go ahead and add more wine, or water whatever you want then place the pot
over medium-high heat and wait until it starts to simmer.
Once it's simmering add your mussels and put a lid over the pot for about five
minutes. Now while your mussels steam go ahead and pour yourself a glass of that
wine, and let's take a look at how this recipe came down to us after more than
1500 years. I often lament the fact that more recipes from antiquity haven't made
it to us, but if we're only afforded one cookbook for lack of a better term I'm
sure glad that it is the Apicius "De Re Coquinaria" and that's because of the
breadth of recipes that it includes. I mean you've got your recipes for the
average Josephus like plain leeks, or roasted parsley puree, mmm but then you
go all the way up to the most lavish dishes like fried spiced peacock
Rizzoli's, mmm. Now the book as it comes to us today is actually from two ninth
century manuscripts that were copied, and they
were probably copied from the original 4th century manuscript when the Roman
Empire was you know still chugging along. The first was created in Taurus France
and now resides in the Vatican and it's covered in highly illuminated decorative
manuscript so probably not meant to be used in the kitchen. The second version
is a little bit more practical and was copied by seven monks at a monastery in
Fulda Germany, and can now be seen at the New York Academy of Medicine. Now there's
actually kind of a third version as well it's it's actually
earliest one, and is a highly abbreviated version called the "Apici Excerpta A Vinidario"
or a "Pocket Apicius by an an illustrious man named Vinidarius" who
was probably in Ostrogoth living shortly after the fall of the Western Roman
Empire in the 5th century. Now one of my favorite things about the "De Re Coquinaria"
is that it has something that is missing from most recipe manuscripts, really for
like the next thousand years and that is a table of contents.
Ah! What a novel idea, or rather what a reference book idea. It's neatly divided
into ten liber (or books) starting with epimeles "the careful housekeeper" or at
least that's how it's translated by Barbara Fowler and Elizabeth Rosenbaum
in the Roman cookery book, link in the description. It's a great book. Also I kind
of love that translation because it reminds me of one of those now super
outdated commercials from the 1950s. "The Careful Housekeeper is something every
good wife should have in her kitchen to keep the home running smoothly for her
husband". So what kind of things do we find in the Careful Housekeeper? Recipes
of course. There's one for spiced wine, surprise, and for Roman vermouth. Perfect
for that V-o'clock martini, but then there are also non-recipes. Things like
instructions for how to keep grapes fresh, or turn salted meat sweet, or one
of my favorites to make an ounce of silphium last indefinitely. And someday I
want to do an entire episode on silphium, because it is now known as the lost
Roman aphrodisiac, grrr but I digress. There are also
instructions which I would really like to try someday on how to turn red wine
into white wine, it involves adding egg whites and bean meal to the wine and
leaving it overnight. One, not sure if it works so I'd like to try. Two, why would
you ever want to do that unless maybe your villa had just had new white marble
put down, I dunno. But I think my favorite instruction from the Careful Housekeeper
is "Ut Mel Malum Bonum Facias - How to make bad honey good. You will make bad
honey good for selling as follows: mix one part of bad honey with two
parts of good honey". That's it. It doesn't seem quite right, kind of shystery, but
interesting. The other nine books are marked by ingredients or style of dish.
You've got the meat mincer which is all about making Rizzoli's, and sausages.
The gardener which of course is about fruits, and vegetables. There's a book on
fish, a book on birds, and one book called Tetrapus which means the quadruped.
I like that name. The book also includes some kind of home remedy medicinal type
instructions, one for Urticae, or stinging nettles says take the wild nettle when
the sun is in the sign of Aries against illness, if you wish. I don't think I
trust that because first it doesn't specify what kind of illness this is for,
and second, that little addendum. The if you wish at the end, it's like he's trying to
you know not get sued for malpractice. "Here's a prescription take eight of
these each night, if you wish, and if it kills you that's on you."
Now as I said before "De Re Coquinaria" has recipes that run the gamut
from your your simple pottage that any family you know poor middle-class family
could make all the way up to the most opulent dishes that only the very very
wealthy, and frankly adventurous diner would want to try. There's a recipe for a
sauce specifically to be used on boiled ostrich, there are instructions on how to
truss and serve flamingo, sow's udder stuffed with sea urchin, and there's even a
recipe for how best to serve dormouse, mmm. Now it may seem an odd juxtaposition
going from boiled ham on one page to dormouse on the next, but that's because
the recipes didn't come from one source. There were many sources that made up
this book. See, the "De Re Coquinaria" is attributed to Apicius, but if Apicius
had any recipes in this book it was probably only those most lavish and
and kind of weird. Most of them came from later cookbooks, and books on agriculture.
So why did Apicius get all the credit? And frankly who was this guy? In the
first century during the reign of Tiberius there are several accounts of a
man named Marcus Gavius Apicius. He was known for being quite the food lover
to the point of ostentatious gluttony, but it seems that anyone who was anyone
in ancient Rome at the time: console, senators, advisors to the Emperor
getting an invitation to dinner at Apicius's villa was a must.
Food was his thing. He wrote several cookbooks that stayed in circulation for
centuries and Pliny credits him for devising a method to make something like
foie gras, but from pigs by feeding the pigs dried figs and then slaughtering
them via an overdose of honeyed wine. Apicius also advised that the best way
to serve red mullet was to drown it in a bath of fish sauce made from other red
mullet which seems a little like psychopathic to me but I don't want to
impose my modern values on historical figures, still seems creepy. He swore that
flamingos tongu, muah, most superb and he advised Drusus who was the son of the
emperor Tiberius that he should not eat cabbage tops because they were for the
commoners. Frankly this guy kind of seems like an ass but I think that my favorite
story of Apicius is that when he heard someone boast that the shrimp from the
Libyan coast were larger and sweeter than those in his own hometown of Minitornei,
Apicius hired a boat, sailed across the Mediterranean Sea, and when he
got there some fishermen showed him their catch, and he was just like "meh,
I've seen bigger", and turned his boat right around. Didn't even get out. Sadly
all of this opulence led to quite the tragic end for poor Apicius, as Seneca
wrote "having spent a fortune of 100 million sestertii on his kitchen spent
all the gifts he had received from the imperial court, and thus swallowed up his
income in lavish hospitality, Apicius found that he had only 10 million sestertii
left. Afraid of dying in relative poverty he poisoned himself". Now while
it's always hard to do like an exact exchange rate from ancient money to
modern money ten million sestertii would still be
like between three and five million dollars so killing yourself over it, kind
of a drama queen. Anyway after his death the name Apicius
became synonymous with opulence, and a love of food, and that's why three
hundred years later when the "De Re Coquinaria" was written the author gives
full credit to that first century gourmand. Now as Arnold Schwarzenegger
would say "let's get back to the muscles". After about five minutes take a look and
if most of the mussels have opened you're good to go. Now if they haven't
give them another minute, but you want to make sure that any mussels that haven't
opened you don't eat. Once they are ready, go ahead and take the pot
off the heat and dish up your mussels. Nice to include a little broth with them.
All right here we go "in mitulis", ancient Roman mussels. Let's give them a
shot. So if you don't have one of those fancy little forks that they have at
restaurants, which I don't. And what I do is I actually use one of the shells
click-click to pull out the mussel from the other shell like so. Then you can eat it.
Hmm :)
They're nice really you're getting a lot of the mussel flavor.
I mean the liquamen, or garum, I mean it adds salt to it. It definitely, you know,
kind of tastes a little oceany, but it's not fishy at all. I do wish I had
some, some butter. I miss butter, haha. But they're really
really quite good, and I will be eating this entire bowl. I look forward
to making more of Apicius's recipes, and if you have one that you want to see
me do just let me know in the comments, maybe steer away from the dormouse and
flamingo but you never know so make sure to hit that like button and I will see
you next time on Tasting History.