Who doesn't know the roman frickin empire, am I right?
When it comes to branding they're at the top. They're up there with Coke, and
Disney, and McDonald's so I think it's pretty big of them to have
given credit when making today's recipe to
a little bit lesser of an empire. Someone that was not so much a household name
and a nemesis at that. Pullum parthicum or Parthian chicken
is a classic Roman dish from the De Re Coquinaria.
So today that's what we're making and it'll give us an opportunity to look
at the Parthian empire and see just why that empire got the credit for this dish,
this time on Tasting History.
Parthian chicken open the chicken at the rear end
and in the square shape. Pound pepper, lovage, a little caraway, moisten with
liquamen, blend with wine. Put the chicken in an
earthenware pot, and pour the sauce over it. Dissolve
strong asafoetida in lukewarm water, pour it over the chicken and let it cook.
Sprinkle with pepper and serve. So is this chicken Roman
or Parthian? Well it has a distinctly Roman ingredient,
caraway seeds which were grown in central Europe at the time,
but then it also has a distinctly Parthian ingredient
asafoetida which came to Rome along the Silk road
from Parthia. Asafoetida or asafetida as it's sometimes called
is the extract of a plant of the same name that's grown
in the mountainous regions of Iran and Afghanistan.
It was a very popular ingredient in ancient Rome especially
after its North African cousin silphium went extinct, and I would actually
love to do an entire episode just on silphium so if that's something you
might like to see let me know in the comments. So i've
never actually tried asafoetida. I bought it just yesterday to
make this recipe, and I undid the top and I have to say
it lives up to its name and so i'm a little trepidatious to actually eat it.
It's name asafoetida comes from asa meaning gum and fetada meaning fetid
or stinking, and it stinks. It smells like
an apartment that I had back in college where over the summer a cat died in the
wall, and nobody knew and the apartment was in
Arizona so yeah. Of course it's going to be a
popular ingredient in ancient Rome and I can't wait to try it...
Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is one chicken
(three to four pounds), one and a half teaspoons of pepper,
plus a little extra for garnish, one tablespoon
of chopped lovage. So lovage might be a little hard to find,
I actually got some because I had a viewer send it to me
freeze-dried from England, very, very excited.
Kind of smells like um, smells a bit like celery but
but a little more potent so thank you to James Eddie and Bodhi for picking this
wonderful lovage, and sending it my way here to the states.
I do have to warn you after some research about lovage i found
out you're not supposed to eat it if you're pregnant,
or have kidney problems so you know maybe stick with celery if you
want, or if you can't find lovage. One and a
half teaspoons of caraway seeds, three tablespoons of liquamen, now that
is garum which I'm sure many people found
my channel from when i discussed garum. It's that ancient roman fermented
fish sauce. So I'm actually using Colatura Di Alici,
which is a fermented fish sauce, rather than my quick garum
that I made in that episode. This is going to have a little bit more
of the umami flavor that you're going to get. You can also
use just a regular Eastern Asian fish sauce as well. One cup or 250
milliliters of wine. You can use red, you can use white, it
doesn't matter it's up to you. Three quarters of a teaspoon of
asafoetida powder. Now if you can find the actual root,
good for you but most people are going to find this in a powder.
If it's yellow there's more turmeric in it so
you might want to use a little bit more maybe like a full teaspoon.
If it's brown then there's less turmeric in it so just stick with that
Three-quarter teaspoon, and 1 4 cup lukewarm water.
So first we have to prepare the chicken and the translation, I
found many translations and none of them really agree on
on what it's saying there in that first sentence. I kind of read it as
you know cut open and then and then set like a square which makes me think of
like a butterfly or a spatched cock chicken and I
kind of love that word spatchcocked, so that's what i'm going to be doing but
you can go ahead and truss it, or cut it up you can do whatever you want but
just know that the cooking times that i'm giving today
are for a spatchcocked chicken so if you are going to spatchcock your chicken
make sure to clean it out and then with kitchen shears cut
out the spine then flip it back over and crack the breastbone so it lays flat.
If it keeps popping up you can actually snip that breastbone as well
so that it lays flat. Then set it into a baking dish,
and tuck in the wing tips so they don't burn.
You can also cook this in like a cast iron skillet or a stainless steel pan,
just anything that can go into the oven and
once your bird is set you can either move on to the rest of the recipe or you
can actually put it into the refrigerator
overnight. Let the skin dry, makes for a crispier skin.
When you are ready to move on go ahead and set your oven to 450 degrees
fahrenheit, or 230 degrees celsius then grind up
your pepper, and your caraway seeds as best you can
and mix them and the lovage in a bowl then add your garum and finally the wine,
and mix together. Then in a separate bowl dissolve the
asafoetida in the lukewarm water. Now for some reason the recipe has you
pouring these two sauces separately over the chicken. I don't
really understand how that's going to to change things but
you know what i'm going to do as the De Re Coquinaria suggests, and first
i'm going to pour the wine concoction over the chicken and then the dissolved
asafoetida mixture. Then pop it in the oven for about 40 to
45 minutes, or until an instant read thermometer stuck into the
breast of the bird reads 165 degrees fahrenheit, or 74 degrees
celsius. Make sure to pour yourself a glass of
wine so it doesn't go to waste. Now if you're worried about the bird drying out
while it's baking you can go ahead and baste it a few times throughout the
cooking process. I didn't, it wasn't in the original
recipe so I didn't do it but it's probably a good practice.
Now while the chicken bakes let us look at the empire that gets all the credit
for this dish.
Now i'm not going to go into the long and rather complex history of the
Parthian empire and how they came to be, but it is pretty impressive.
Essentially Alexander the Great had this huge empire
that stretched from Europe to India and then when he died it broke up
into smaller warring factions. You had the the
Greco-Bactrians. You had the Seleucids, and then over here
you had ancient Rome which was starting to grow and kind of come in as
well, and here this this little people called
the Parni kind of squeezed into the table and they're like
"okay, all right, okay", and finally all right
we've quickly taken over all of Iran, Iraq and parts of the caucasus and
Syria. It was really, really pretty impressive,
and what they were famous for at this point
was something called the Parthian shot, and that's when the archers
during a feigned retreat or maybe a real retreat on horseback
would turn around, and shoot at their enemies who were coming at them
and it's actually where we get the phrase parting shot.
So that's kind of cool right but as cool as etymology is
what we're going to be discussing today is what they were famous for
later on when they kind of settled down stopped trying to impress everyone,
and realized that what they were good at was
business and being the middleman of the Silk road.
Starting around 90 AD the Silk road ran from
Northern China uninterrupted all the way to
Rome and it was controlled by just four states.
Now most of the goods being traded were coming from either China on one side
or Rome on the other side. They were the two big players but
in the middle you had these two smaller
empires. You had the Kushan kingdom, they had lots of spices to trade
and they actually had a lot of the links to the even further
southeast like Indonesia and whatnot, and then you had the Parthian empire and if
the ancient Chinese sources are to be believed
then the only things that the Parthians were trading were lions,
gazelle, and large birds. So yeah, but the Romans obviously were
getting their asafoetida from them hence the name of our dish so they were
trading a few other things, but they didn't need to because their
trade was business. See while the Kushans
allowed Chinese traders to come across their lands for a small fee,
once they got to the Parthian city of Merv, "Marv!"
no, Merv they were stopped and basically the Parthians were like give it here,
give me, I got, I got it. I'll take it the rest of the way, don't worry.
I got it, I gotta you know what, it's long. You're gonna thank me, you're welcome I'm
doing this for you, and then they would take the goods the
rest of the way to Rome, and sell them at a tidy profit.
It was a wonderful business model and they kept tight control
over their little section, their rather large section,
of the Silk road. In fact all through the Han dynasty of 400 years
there is only record of one Chinese person
getting across their lands. According to the Hou Hanshu,
a 5th century chronicle of the latter part of the Han dynasty,
in the year 97 the great general Ban Chao sent Gan Ying
as an ambassador to visit Daqin, which is what they called Rome.
Anyway Gan Ying made it all the way across Parthia to the Western sea which
was probably the Persian gulf where he planned to
take a ship the rest of the way, but when he got there and tried to hire
a ship the sailors told him "the ocean is huge... if you encounter winds
that delay you, it can take two years... the vast ocean urges men to
think of their country and get homesick and some of them die."
Now the sailors neglected to tell him that there was a much faster, and safer
route over land but you know what, maybe he didn't ask so you know benefit
of the doubt. Anyway Gan Ying being practical said well
why don't you just tell me about the Roman empire,
and so they did. He wrote it down and he hoofed it back to China.
Now we know that Rome was getting silks from China and lots and lots of spices,
and other exotic things from the Kushan empire,
and beyond. But what I find interesting were the things that Rome
was sending back "Gold, silver, and rare precious stones,
especially the jewel that shines at night, the moonshine pearl
and the chicken frightening rhinoceros," I assume that the Hou Hanshu is referring to
like the rhinoceros horn there but I just love that they made sure to let
you know that rhinoceros frightens chicken. The
document also talks about glass and perfumes coming over
as well as cloth made of asbestos, and when I read that I was like
well they have to mean something else, but no it's that asbestos
like the kind that was in the walls of the house where I grew up.
There's actually a story of a sixth century Sasanian king
Khosrow II impressing guests by cleaning his asbestos napkins
with fire. Magic! *_* Another textile that they mention is
silk cloth made from Roman silkworms, but
you're probably asking well if Rome had silkworms why are they
importing silk from China and the answer is
they don't, and they're not. What actually was happening was
when the the Chinese would send silk it was in this kind of thick brocade,
and then once it got to Rome they would unravel it and
re-sow it in a way that made like a very thin
gauze kind of material probably similar to what we think of
as silk cloth today, but as it went back over to China
the Parthians made sure to tell the Chinese well yeah they're making it with
their own silk worms so that China didn't think that they had a
monopoly, and hence would have to keep the price of silk
down. Bit unethical, but again good business sense on the Parthian side
and silk wasn't the only time that maybe the Parthians were leaving out some
details when talking to the trading partners
because they they often sold Parthian furs
which were actually Russian furs and there are stories in China of precious
jewelry made with gemstones coming to Xhina and then once a
discerning eye looked at them they would realize they were just colored
glass. Though whether it was a Parthian
deception or a Roman deception we shall never know. What we do know is
that Parthia was exporting asafoetida so you know
they they did something right. Anyway I think it's time to
say a toast to the middlemen, and get back to our chicken.
So at about 40 minutes into baking go ahead and check the breast with an
instant read thermometer to see if it's hit that 165 degrees
fahrenheit. If it hasn't, leave it in for a few
minutes more. Then make sure to let the chicken rest for about 10 minutes
before carving it up, and here we are Parthian chicken. You want to make sure
to pour some sauce on there, and sprinkle with pepper. Now i'm going to
slice right into the whole chicken because my chicken carving skills are
lackluster at best, and i don't want to embarrass myself all over the internet
so i'm going to just cut into the whole
thing. Smells wonderful, doesn't smell at all
like the asafoetida did at all.
Okay so it's amazing,
but I don't know what I'm tasting. I don't know what I'm tasting.
It's so foreign to me, I don't know if it's
the asafoetida or if it's the garum, but
it's wonderful. I can see why this ingredient or whatever is making this
flavor came from so far and was so wonderfully
prized. It is an interesting flavor, it's not,
it's not a really strong flavor. You actually, when I first bit into the chicken
I didn't get it. I was like oh, it's chicken and then
and then it just kind of washed over me. It's an umami flavor but one that
i've never really had before. It kind of reminds me a little bit of
of like a really nice chantral mushroom, which I actually don't
like, but it's because the texture so you get
the wonderful flavor without the texture of mushrooms.
But then you get the celery, or the lovage
as well. It's this cool celery flavor coming through and kind of
cutting through the umami, and oh what a wonderfully complex dish this
is. I heartily endorse this dish, it has two ingredients the asafoetida and the
the garum, or liqueman, that that do not smell good.
That really, it's like why are you putting this in
food but they work. I don't know how they
work but they work. It's like magic alchemy because this is really
fantastic and complex, and something I don't think you will
have ever tried before so go ahead and make it. i'm going to
link to a lot of the ingredients down in the description, some of the harder
ones to find but if you have trouble finding lovage go
ahead and use celery. Yeah, endorsed, A+,
thumbs up, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.