A lot of people have been asking me "What is the hardest ingredient for you to find?
Is it flamingo tongue, or white horehound maybe?"
And yes those are hard to track down but
at least they exist.
Now I've got to go with that lost and possibly extinct herb
silphium from ancient Rome.
So today we're making a sauce for fried fish
from ancient Rome which calls for this mysterious ingredient.
So thank you to Noom for sponsoring this video
as we pick through the murky past of silphium.
This time on Tasting History.
So i was picking through the Epicius De Re Coquinaria looking for a recipe that uses silphium for
today's episode and there are lots that use silphium, he even has one that's just a silphium sauce but
I decided on either a fried fish sauce or
the womb of a sterile sow.
Then it turned out that all
the sows that I know are rather fertile, so it's the fish sauce.
"Sauce with herbs for fried fish"
Whatever fish you like, clean, salt, fry.
Pound pepper, cumin, coriander seed, silphium root, oregano, rue, pound.
Moistened with vinegar, add dates, honey, defrutum, oil, liquamen.
Pour into a pot, let it boil.
When heated pour over the fried fish.
Sprinkle pepper and serve.
Now the author doesn't give us
any quantities for the ingredients so what i'm making today, my interpretation far from
the gospel truth. If you want to change it up go right ahead. Now the amount that i'm making today
though is good for about two fried fish. So what you'll need:
is a whole fish or filet.
Salt for seasoning.
Now usually the Romans use liquamen, or garum, for seasoning and they do mention that
in this sauce but they also say to salt the fish, so i'm just going to use regular salt
though actually I got a really cool fancy salt that was given to me so if you have any of those
cool fancy salts that you can never actually find a use for go ahead and use it for this.
One-half teaspoon black peppercorns,
one half teaspoon cumin seeds,
one half teaspoon coriander seed,
one half teaspoon silphium,
but wait you just said that it
was extinct or at least we don't know what it was,
and that is true.
So you can either leave it out completely that's okay some historians would
say to do that, but some historians would also say swap it out for something called asafoetida, or hing.
And that's because it sometimes may have been used in Rome as a substitute but we
will get into that later.
For my part I'm using the asafoetida because the flavor is very interesting.
One teaspoon fresh oregano.
If you can only find dried oregano use half a teaspoon.
One half teaspoon dried rue.
Now this is a really interesting ingredient one because it's almost
impossible to find at least here in America that's not dried. Now if you can find it, if
you're growing it in your garden go ahead and use the fresh because that's probably what they would
have used, but double it so use a full teaspoon. But if you're using the dried then a half a teaspoon.
Now we don't know did they use just the leaves, or did they use the berries, not sure both are edible,
very different flavors. We think though that they were probably using the leaves in something like
this, so they're kind of bitter, so you can swap out with any kind of bitter herb, but
another thing to watch out for is if you're pregnant you shouldn't be eating it which is weird.
3 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar.
3 dates minced.
Two tablespoons of honey.
One tablespoon of defrutum.
Now here's another ingredient that you might not have heard of. Defrutum was a a reduction
of must. So must is the fresh squeezed juice of grapes which includes the seeds and the skins
and everything and then it's reduced by about half to become like this nice sweet syrup.
The modern version is called Mosto Cotto, or vincotto, and it's very, very similar probably.
We don't know for sure
and i'll put a link in the description to where you can get that but you can also just take
some grape juice, and reduce it yourself. It won't have the the other parts of the grape
it's just the juice but you can reduce it yourself, it'll be similar. What you don't want
to add is any lead which probably would have been included in the original recipe,
but don't add that.
Two tablespoons of olive oil, plus more for frying,
and one tablespoon of liquamen, or garum.
Again, you're probably not going to be able to find garum so go ahead and use Colatura di Alici which
is what I use, i'll link in the description, or any other kind of wonderful fish sauce
eastern Asia has a lot that you can get at pretty much any store. So before I get started cooking
I wanted to mention the sponsor of this video - noom.
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doing research, so actually maybe it's the history that's made me fat.
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Now let's get to cooking.
So first make your sauce.
Go ahead and chop up your herbs nice and fine,
then add your pepper cumin and coriander into a mortar and grind everything up. Once it's ground add the
asafoetida if you're going to use it, along with the oregano and the rue, then mix everything together
pounding the ingredients into submission.
Then transfer all of that into a small saucepan and
add the vinegar, the honey, the defrutum, the oil, and the garum, and the dates. Mix everything together
and then set it aside while you prepare your fish.
Now when it comes to frying fish there are a lot
of ways to do it this is the way that i'm doing it but it's not the only way to do it.
So make sure your fish is nice and clean and pat it dry. You can take off the fins or leave them on, you're
not going to eat them probably but you actually can.
Then make several slices about halfway through
the meat of the fish, and then season it with the salt making sure to get some into those openings.
So here's the question: do we flour this fish, or do we not flour this fish?
I am not flouring this fish.
It doesn't mention it in the recipe so we don't actually know they might have put some sort
of flour on there. I don't know, but you don't need flour to fry a fish you just have to have a little
bit more oil, and when you put it in DON'T MOVE IT. Just leave it alone until it's cooked on that side.
If you are going to flour it then you can use a little bit less oil but you do need to kind of
move it around for the first few seconds until it gets a nice crust so it doesn't stick to the pan.
Either way you do it pour your olive oil into a pan and heat it on medium-high heat until
it's nice and hot, about 400 degrees fahrenheit or 205 degrees celsius.
Once it hits that temperature turn it down to medium and put the fish in very gently away from you
Again do not move this fish,
it will break up if you're not flouring the fish.
Just go ahead and leave it untouched in the oil to
fry for about four or five minutes
while we talk silphium.
"We find it stated by the most trustworthy among the Greek writers,
that this plant first made its appearance in the vicinity of the gardens of the
Hesperides and the greater Syrtis.
Immediately after the earth had been soaked by a rain
black as pitch.
This took place seven years before the foundation of the city of Cyrenae,
and in the year of Rome 143."
That was Pliny the Elder so you know it's got to be true.
I mean what's hard to believe right?
143 years after the foundation of Rome some sort of black rain came down
around the area of like Benghazi, Libya
and all of a sudden silphium just magically sprouted out of the ground.
What's hard to believe?
I also love that he makes sure to mention that this story came from the most
trusted of Greek writers who was probably Theophrastus, because he's like you know don't don't
take it from me it's not my word it's that guy so if you got a problem with the story take it up
with him.
Anyway it wasn't long after the silphium came magically sprouting up that the people of
Cyrenae settled the area supposedly on the good advice of the god Apollo.
Thanks Apollo!
Anytime!
The plant ended up becoming one of their main exports to Greece, Rome and Egypt and even became
their national symbol appearing on their coins as far back as the 6th century BC. So now while
the plant itself silphium was very precious Pliny says that it was the sap or the juice that came
from the stalk and the roots which he called "laser or laserpicium" which was really, really precious.
He said that it was actually sold for its weight in silver which is why
"The dictator Caesar at the beginning of the civil war
took from out of the public treasury besides gold and silver no less
than fifteen hundred pounds of laserpicium"
but Pliny claims that the farmers of Cyrenae allowed
their sheep to graze on the silphium so that
"Within the memory of the present generation, a single stalk is all that has ever been found there,
and that it was sent as a curiosity to the emperor Nero...
Had been no other laser imported into this country, but that produced in either Persis,
Media, or Armenia, which is grown in considerable abundance though much inferior to that of Cyrenaica.
And even that is adulterated with gum sacopenium, or pounded beans."
Okay so you don't to blame the poor sheep when you just said that Julius Caesar had 1500 pounds of the stuff.
That's not really fair is it?
Also just for a little context those three places that he mentioned:
Persis, Media, and Armenia
were under the control of the Parthian empire,
which we discussed at length in our episode on Parthian chicken,
and that's why a lot of historians think that it's possible that
this knockoff silphium, sometimes cut with pounded beans I guess
was asafoetida or hing because that was growing in those regions at the time,
probably.
I guess it'd be kind of like if the recipe for
Coca-Cola just completely disappeared and all that we were left with was Pepsi cut with RC Cola,
very, very sad.
So Theaophrastus, father of botany and that most trustworthy Greek that Pliny mentioned,
discusses how silphium was only grown in one strip along the north African coast about 125 miles long,
he also says that silphium couldn't be cultivated. It had to grow wild and there were attempts to
cultivate it but the the product was inferior and it just never really worked, so after the
Romans took over the area they blew through the entire supply in just over a century.
BUT WHY?
What was so special about this plant?
We don't really know but definitely one reason and probably
the main reason was it was tasty, or at least they thought so. I mean even hundreds of years
after the plant supposedly went extinct it's still showing up in recipes like the one that
we're making today.
There's a great scene in the Greek comedy "The Birds" by Aristophanes
where the main character immortal from Athens is cooking when Poseidon, Hercules and another god
come walking through the door.
"The grater for the cheese - can someone get it? And bring the silphium .
Hand me the cheese. Now fire up the coals.
Greetings, Mortal.
We three are gods and urge you to greet us!
But I'm grating silphium right now."
I love that. I mean who has time for the gods
when you're eating silphium.
That's how good this stuff was. It'd be like me with anything that had the words
molten and chocolate in it.
So yeah they thought it was tasty and it was probably mostly used for food and
that's why we're talking about it here on Tasting History, but it also had a number of other uses.
"When the gut protrudes and will not remain in its place, scrape the finest and most compact silphium
into small pieces and apply as a poultice..."
So that was Hippocrates, Father of Medicine describing how
silphium could be used to treat what iI'm assuming is a hernia,
but it comes from a work called "On Fistulae"
and in the work Hippocrates describes in the most vivid of terms
every horrible malady that the human body will go through. I'm not going to read them
right now, but I am going to put a link in the description to where you can read it.
It's really gross but it's really interesting.
Now going back to Pliny the Elder he goes to town and
names off 39 remedial uses for silphium.
"Laser, a juice which distills from silphium... reckoned among
the most precious gifts presented to us by nature is made use of in numerous medicinal preparations.
Employed by itself, it warms and revives persons benumbed with cold.
It is given to females in wine to promote the menstrual discharge
mixed with wax it extracts corns on the feet after they have
been first loosened with a knife."
He also says that it's a diuretic, and a digestive, and can neutralize
the venom of serpents and poisoned weapons.
It's also good for gout, pleurisy, quincy, sciatica and epilepsy,
but my favorite thing that he says is actually what it should NOT be used for
"For my own part, I should not recommend, what some authors advise.
To insert a pill of laser,
covered with wax, in a hollow tooth, for toothache;
being warned to the contrary by a remarkable case of a man,
who after doing so, threw himself headlong from the top of a house.
Besides it is a well-known fact if it is rubbed on the muzzle of a bull
it irritates him to an extraordinary degree and
if it is mixed with wine, it will cause serpents to burst - those reptiles being extremely fond of wine."
I just love this guy.
What world is he living in.
Drunk snakes going around.
I love you, I love you Pliny.
Never change. <3
Anyway, it also had several ties to
carnal relations.
It was thought that silphium was actually an aphrodisiac.
The seed pod was shaped like a heart and also appeared on Cyrenae's coins,
and some scholars have actually linked that to the heart being a symbol of love today. <3
There's a little story about the plant's tie to amour from Pausanias's "Description of Greece".
He tells a story of the Discordi, who were the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology.
You might know them better as
Gemini the constellation.
These rascally brothers did everything together, from fighting to falling in love.
And one day they show up at the house of a Spartan named Formion and ask
if they can stay, and Formion's like "yeah, of course you can stay just don't stay in this one room",
because that was where his maiden daughter lived.
WELL,
"By the next day this maiden and
all her girlish apparel had disappeared,
and in the room were found images of the Discori,
a table, and silphium upon it."
Now silphium was an aphrodisiac, but it was also a contraceptive,
so make what you will of that story.
So yeah that's silphium possibly extinct,
possibly still hiding in plain sight
and just lost to history and forgotten.
Some people actually think that it's the ferula tinjitana
or tangier fennel, or maybe
it's ferula communis known as giant fennel.
We don't know and
that's why the asafoetida that I'm using today is just a guess,
and you would not be wrong to leave it out completely.
It's up to you.
Either way I used it, and I am ready
to finish up this fish.
So by now your fish should be done on one side, and all that you got to do is gently,very gently
flip it over. If it feels like it's stuck then that means it's not cooked all the way and you
just got to give it another minute and then flip it over.
Once you flip the fish turn the heat to
medium low and strike up another burner so you can start heating up your sauce. It should only
take a few minutes to get this amount of sauce to a boil which is why we're just starting it now as
our fish finishes frying.
Fish finishes frying,
fish finissis frying.
It's so hard to say. I took so many takes to get that.
Once the fish is fried on the other side go ahead and set it onto a wire
rack with paper towels underneath.
Don't put it directly onto paper towel because then it ends up
losing the crispness and it kind of gets soggy on one side of the fish
and nobody wants a soggy fish.
Then as the recipe says go ahead and pour the sauce over the fish and
sprinkle with pepper. I actually swapped the two, did the pepper and then the sauce I don't think
it really matters but I just - I can't read.
So here we are: our fried fish with sauce from ancient Rome.
I'm going to take my bite right out of the middle. Try not to get any any bones that's
always the, it's always the scary part with whole fish, not that it really matters.
*munch munch
O_O
Hmm!
Okay, it's so
so like anything from ancient Rome the flavors are so
so foreign.
It's really sweet... at the beginning,
and then it's not sweet.
It turns into something very savory and then salty.
It's like it's going down the line of all of these
different flavors and there's there's this onion, which is actually probably the asafoetida
that kind of spiced onion flavor, oh but it's really good and it's so crispy.
I did a good job frying this fish.
Yeah I would suggest you make this sauce.
I need some more sauce on there.
The sauce is really good, honestly this sauce could go on anything
*monch monch
I just love how the flavor keeps changing along the way. It's so interesting. It's wonderful.
Yeah, it's also really light and and uh and that's that's just, that's lovely.
I don't make a lot of light things here.
I use a lot of butter and whatnot.
Anyway, make sure to subscribe to Tasting History,
and I will see you next time
<_<
on Tasting History.