I love a good steak and typically my favorite steak sauce is just
more butter but in ancient Rome if you were invited to a banquet at the Emperor Nero's palace
you might expect something a bit more complex
and so today we are making an ancient Roman steak sauce that is indeed more complex.
So thank you to Brightland for sponsoring this video as we imagine what it might be like to feast with Nero,
this time on Tasting History.
So this recipe comes from Apicius's 'De Re Coquinaria' from the first century and could have been served
at one of Nero's feasts and really it works with any roasted meat.
"Aliter Assaturas (Another sauce for meat)
Grind dried pitted myrtleberries with cumin, pepper, honey, garum, defrutum, and oil.
Heat and thicken with starch.
Boil the meat then roast with salt, and pour the sauce over it sprinkle with pepper and serve."
Pretty simple and luckily it contains two of the three ingredients that were sent to me from Brightland.
Brightland sent me their luminous capsule which includes the Awake olive oil which is perfect for drizzling on bread,
and the Orange Blossom honey.
As well as the bright and zingy Parasol Champagne vinegar.
All their products are of premium quality and they come from family farms here in California,
so they're not filled with the fillers and preservatives they can often find their way into these types of ingredients
and then often lead to kind of a metallic taste.
I actually used all three ingredients last night to make a vinaigrette
so I will let Younger Max from last night tell you all about that.
Thanks Older Max. The champagne vinegar gives it this wonderful zing and it's so fresh and light.
As for the olive oil it's wonderful in the salad but I really prefer it just on bread
so I can get that nuttiness.
*Chomp
Next I want to try the Rapture balsamic vinegar which come to think of it would actually make
a good topic for an episode, history of balsamic vinegar.
Back to you Older Max.
Thank you Younger Max.
Ah! To be young again.
Anyway the Luminous Capsule which has both sweet and savory flavors in it
is really a perfect holiday gift for the food lover in your life.
So try Brightland now get 10% off when you click the link in the description and get your first Luminous Capsule.
Now on to the recipe.
For this recipe what you'll need is: two tablespoons of olive oil, two teaspoons of honey,
six myrtle or juniper berries, a half teaspoon of cumin, a half teaspoon of pepper.
So you can use regular black pepper for this but you can also use long pepper which is what I'm using.
It was very popular in ancient Rome and it has just a more aromatic almost flowery quality to it and it's wonderful.
One teaspoon of garum or other fish sauce.
I'm using Flor de Garum which is great
not only because of its flavor but because it comes in this cute little amphora style bottle.
I'll put a link in the description.
Two teaspoons of wheat starch,
or corn starch works as well. They wouldn't have had that but it does the same thing and it's a lot easier to find.
3/4 of a cup or 175 milliliters defrutum.
So defrutum is a one-third reduction of grape must into like a wonderful syrup,
and they have something today called saba which is basically the same exact thing.
It's a one-third reduction of grape must but it is kind of expensive especially for the amount that we're using
so you can make a reduction from grape juice.
It's not going to be as complex
but it will serve you just fine. Also all of the ingredient quantities are really up to you depending on your taste
so feel free to vary them.
Oh and you'll also need a steak,
and you can cook it pretty much however you want. The recipe says to boil it first but that's just a great way to ruin a steak so
I seared mine and then put it in the oven with some salt to roast which is
probably what they would have done but you can go ahead and grill it.
Whatever you want it's not the star of the show,
the sauce is,
and to make the sauce first grind up the myrtleberry with the pepper
and then add the cumin, oil, honey, garum and defrutum and mix it all together.
Then put it into a saucepan and set it over medium-low heat to simmer for about 10 minutes.
It really is one of the easiest recipes ever but it does take 10 minutes of waiting which is perfect
because that'll give you time to subscribe to Tasting History. Hit that notification bell
and contemplate what you might do if you received an invitation to dinner from the Emperor Nero.
So being invited to a banquet by the Emperor of Rome meant you were probably going to be in for
quite the interesting experience. Now some might be more subdued
like those given by the Emperor Augustus, a man who hardly even drank wine.
"He used to provide a meal of three courses,
six when he was in a very generous mood with no great extravagance..."
but a banquet from the Emperor Vitellius who only reigned for eight months was probably going to be pretty off the hook
because he spent over 900 million sestertii on feasts in that short time.
Less inviting might be a feast from the Emperor Domitian whose black banquet included tombstones inscribed
with the names of the guests.
Then there's the Emperor Elegabalus who held a feast where he supposedly
smothered people to death
with flowers.
Both of these feasts definitely deserve episodes in their own right
but if you really wanted to experience all that imperial Rome had to offer
then it was an invite from Emperor Nero that you might covet.
Nero was a bit of a culinary connoisseur.
Pliny said that he received the very last stalk of the precious silphium plant
and his daily dinner could last up to 12 hours where he drank
copious amounts of wine and finished everything off with his favorite oxyporum.
A laxative of quince, pomegranate, sumac, and saffron and those were just his daily dinners.
His feasts on the other hand could last for days and feature dishes like flamingo tongue,
dormouse, fig stuffed souse udder, and every other odd dish that the gourmand Apicius
espoused earlier that century.
And it's thought that the Feast of Trimalchio from Satyricon while a satire
was based on one of these great feasts.
And I'll put a link up here where I talk more about the fictional feast
but the real inspiration probably came in the year 64,
the same year as the Great Fire of Rome.
It was thrown in honor of Nero by his advisor Tigellinus
likely for the festival of Saturnalia,
which is coming up very soon, so if you haven't done your Saturnalia shopping already
you better get started.
Suetonius says that he would often levy his friends to pay up to four million sestertii
for feasts dedicated to him.
This feast in 64 included all of the usual trappings
that a great Roman feast would have except it went well above and beyond.
Tacitus says that it was the most extravagant and notorious feast of Nero's reign.
"The banquet took place on a raft built on Agrippa's Lake.
It was towed by other vessels with gold and ivory fittings and their oarsmen were degenerates,
assorted according to age and their libidinous attainments.
On the quays were brothels stalked with ladies of high rank and opposite them were harlots,
naked and gesturing obscenely...
At nightfall the woods and houses nearby echoed with singing and blazed with lights.
Nero himself, defiled by every natural and unnatural lust
had left no abomination in reserve with which to crown his vicious existence."
Basically Nero had done it all, he had nothing left to shock people with...
until a few days into the festivities.
Now you might recall in my episode on Saturnalia that
the festival was a bit of a topsy-turvy time with slaves and servants being served by their masters
and everybody kind of being encouraged to make a bit of a fool of themselves
but Nero went one step further.
When "He stooped to marry himself to one of that filthy herd, a former slave, by name Pythagoras...
The bridal veil was worn by the Emperor and everyone witnessed the ceremony,
the wedding tower and the nuptial bed and torches..."
"Going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations
of a maiden being deflowered."
I don't want to see that!
This was definitely beyond the Emperor's usual dining shenanigans which might feature a recital of him singing...
for several hours...
with the doors barred so no one could leave.
He really loved a captive audience.
*Ba dum tss
But better to watch the entertainment than be part of it
because alongside the usual poets and jesters and occasional gladiatorial fight,
being the entertainment at a Nero banquet might find you tied to a stake in his garden.
At one banquet "He devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal,
he was let loose from a cage and attacked young men and women,
naked who were bound to stakes."
Though that was better than when he used stakes to tie up Christians
who he falsely accused of starting the Great Fire of Rome.
He had them bound to stakes covered in pitch and then set a light as human torches to illuminate a garden party.
So you may be starting to see that an invite to dinner with Nero while filled with good food
might not be worth the calories
and frankly you might want to steer clear of the food as well.
See his mother had famously used mushrooms to poison his adopted father Claudius,
and during one dinner where his adopted brother Britannicus was present
Nero tested some poison on a pig which died instantly.
Then "He ordered that the poison be taken to the dining-room and
given to Britannicus. The boy dropped dead at the very first taste..."
And even if it's not poison or immolation, dinner at Nero's could still be deadly.
During the festival of Minerva Nero hosted a banquet where his beloved mother Agrippina,
the same dear lady who allegedly poisoned Claudius,
"Was graciously received, and seated at the table above the Emperor.
Nero prolonged the banquet with various conversation then escorted her on her departure,
clinging with kisses to her eyes and bosom..."
Then always the dutiful son he put her on a boat and bid her adieu.
What she didn't know was that the roof to the boat had been filled with lead,
and was meant to collapse and kill her.
And it did collapse but the sofa that she was on was so sturdy
that it actually protected her and she did not die.
A feat which our Ikea couch could likely not replicate.
Unfortunately for her Nero heard that she survived and then just sent assassins to kill her which they did.
But for argument's sake let's say you don't mind Nero's singing, depravity or murderous ways
and you accept the invitation anyway.
Well if it's in one of the last years of his reign
it might be worth it for the venue alone.
See after the Fire of Rome destroyed much of the city he used the opportunity to rebuild.
Not only the city itself with wider streets and other fire safe design concepts
but also to expand the imperial palace so that it took up nearly a quarter of the city.
It was called the Domus Aurea, or golden house, and was one of the grandest buildings in antiquity.
"It's vestibule large enough to contain a colossal statue of the Emperor a hundred and twenty feet high,
and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade a mile long.
There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities...
In the rest of the house everything was overlaid with gold,
and adorned with gems and mother of pearl."
And when he finally moved in Nero said
"Now at last, I can be housed like a human being."
Hear, hear.
And this is where he held some of his most fantastic feasts.
Suetonius describes the main banquet hall,
a round building known as the Coenatio Rotunda.
It had panels of ivory which could open up to shower down flowers and sprinkle perfume over the guests,
and the most amazing thing something so outlandish that most historians thought that it was pure fiction
but they found out in 2009 during an excavation that it actually did this,
was that the entire room
rotated in time with the heavens.
Pretty amazing.
And something I'll only be able to imagine as I sit in my non-rotating, flowerless dining room
and enjoy my ancient Roman steak sauce.
So once your sauce has reduced a bit add in the starch and stir to dissolve.
Then keep it simmering for another five minutes or so until it thickens a bit more,
and then remove it from the heat and serve at once.
And here we are ancient roman steak sauce.
Let's give it a shot.
It's so sweet. It's wonderful. It's almost like a barbecue sauce,
which I love. I love barbecue sauce and I think you could kind of
finesse the ingredients to really have any level of sweetness that you want, but
the defrutum, and the honey really come through, and add that sweetness
but you're still getting a lot of cumin and some pepper in there as well. I think
if you don't like cumin actually, maybe even back it off a little bit but I like cumin, so
works for me. What's always fun with any- pretty much any ancient Roman dish most of them have
garum and it adds this- it has the saltiness to it but
it also adds this like
just unfamiliar foreign flavor.
This savoriness that really rounds out the dish
and they used to use it even in their desserts and I think that I should try making an ancient roman dessert
with garum I think. That'll be- I think that will be fun.
So definitely make this. You can use it on any meat at all. It's really like a barbecue. If you like barbecue make this, I think you'll enjoy it.
Again, don't feel like you're married to the to the quantities taste as it's cooking
and add in what you want.
So thank you again to Brightland for sponsoring this video.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.