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However it happened, man’s use of fire to cook was revolutionary. It wasn’t just the new flavour that it introduced to food, but the inedible then became edible. Items that could only be eaten when cooked – wheat, barley, rice, potatoes – were then worth cultivating. As man consumed more nutrients, his health must have benefited too. Furthermore, his use of fire for cooking is one of the decisive factors that separates him from other animals. When man cooks, he becomes fully human. Animals may store food – dogs bury bones, racoons douse their food in water – but only humans cook it.
Having learnt to roast food, man then got all sophisticated and started boiling it. So where roasting – or burning – food distinguished us from animals, boiling was proof of civilisation. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss muses on this point. In his essay ‘The Culinary Triangle’, he thrashes out his theory on cooked food. ‘The roasted is on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture,’ he writes. This is literally true because boiling requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object: ‘Boiling requires a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting.’
Thus, as we became cultured so roasting was seen as primitive and basic, while boiling was regarded as sophisticated and classy. Until more recently, that is, as we became increasingly sophisticated and decided that roasting was in fact rather more upwardly mobile. After all, the urbane gentleman doesn’t take pride in his ability to do a nice ‘Sunday boil’.
But he probably wouldn’t roast a goat either. Back in 30 bc, however, Publius Vergilius Maro – Virgil, to his friends – was more than happy to, and his reference to goat, spit-roast on hazel wood, comes in his epic work The Georgics. The Roman poet’s most famous work after The Aeneid, this chiefly detailed methods of running a farm – instruction manuals for those entering the agricultural sector making for perkier reading when in verse. In it he writes of raising crops and planting trees, of keeping livestock and horses and beekeeping.
His reference to roasting goat comes after a section on pruning trees and then a note celebrating vineyards, whose vines teem with ‘mellowing fruit’. With his mention of Bacchus, the goat roasting feels like a celebration of successful farming. The ensuing lines instruct on how to look after the soil with a few notes on hoeing.
As Virgil gracefully instructs one on correct farming practice, so he whets our appetites for a good roast, the flavours of which echo down the centuries as resonant as his poetry.
7
Another sauce for fowl
AD 10
AUTHOR: Marcus Gavius Apicius,
FROM: De re coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters)
Pepper, lovage, parsley, dry mint, fennel, blossoms moistened with wine; add roasted nuts from Pontus or almonds, a little honey, wine, vinegar, and broth to taste. Put oil in a pot, and heat and stir the sauce, adding green celery seed, cat mint; carve the fowl and cover with the sauce.
His predecessor Archestratus may have had a downer on sauce. Poncey and over-elaborate, it engulfed good and simple ingredients. But Apicius was having none of it. He lived during the good times of ancient Rome, long before even the seeds of decline were sewn.
If anyone ever asks you, ‘At which point did Rome reach its zenith and what precisely symbolised that moment?’, remember the answer has nothing to do with beating back barbarians at the furthest reaches of the empire or with the building of public latrines. Rome was at its peak when its sauces were at their best, when they were plenty and at their richest. And we can pinpoint when this happened because Marcus Gavius Apicius wrote it all down. He lived between 80 BC and AD 40 – during the reigns of both Augustus and Tiberius –and his cookbook is still in print, although unless you speak fluent Latin, I suggest you find an English translation. It’s called De re coquinaria – ‘Of Culinary Matters’ – and is a bumper read of some 500 recipes. And did I mention sauce? Well, 400 of those recipes are instructions for making a sauce.
Sauce was the trademark of the ancient Roman chef and if Apicius was not the best of them, then he is at least an astonishingly impeccable example. Some scholars argue that Apicius could have been one of several people, or a collection of recipes by several individuals garnered under the name of Apicius, but the good money is on him being the aforementioned M. G. Apicius. He was a chef, a collator of recipes and he endowed a school of cookery. If he were alive today he’d probably be running some Italian equivalent of Ballymaloe (the Irish cookery school near Cork).
He lived and breathed his craft. He inspired those he met with his culinary ideals and he was an exhausting mentor to anyone who could withstand his rigorous teaching methods. He was an obsessive: exacting, precise, detailed and, naturally, opinionated. He also had the good fortune to be well born and wealthy. When we talk about good food during the period of ancient Rome, this was not a democratic idea. Most people would have lived very, very simple lives, with few possessions. The prospect of a decent meal, let alone decadent feasting, was denied to many. For the vast majority meals were a frugal affair at best; the richness of Apicius’s recipes therefore reflects only the dining habits of the elite. Of which he was a fully paid-up member.
Apicius had a vast fortune and he spent it on food. His kitchens would have been kitted out with all the latest mod cons. His cooking utensils were far more precious than ours as they would have been handmade, beautiful – works of art, even. By contrast, his apparatus for cooking food would have been basic (pots and a spit for roasting) and he seemed to make a virtue of his lack of chiller cabinets. At least that’s the only reason I can think for his creation of a recipe ‘for birds of all kinds that have a goatish smell’.
What he lacked in white goods, however, he made up for in kitchen staff. While good ingredients would have been hard to come by – this was a time when agriculture was haphazard, transportation limited and storage basic – once they were assembled there were plenty of people on hand to prepare and cook them. Perhaps this is one of the great differences between our age and his. Today ingredients are relatively cheap: we have access, within minutes, to ingredients from every corner of the earth. But while food is cheap, labour isn’t. Apicius didn’t just have cheap staff, he had free staff. What is unimaginable now was normal then – for the very rich, that is.
So we can picture Apicius beavering away with his dozens of kitchen underlings, chopping and prepping from dawn to dusk. Those lucky enough to work in his kitchen would have been dazzled by his ingredients. His larder would have been hung with hare, pork, lamb and endless fowl – from crane and duck to doves and peacocks, ostriches and flamingoes. He cooked with truffles, all kinds of mushrooms, sea-urchins, mussels, every type of fish. The herbs he used were of such variety that they take the breath away – from lovage and coriander to cumin and fennel seeds. He made wine reductions, pickled off-cuts of pork and served up great gravy, and he wrote this all down in his recipes.
Alamy: Mary Evans Picture Library
Marcus Gavius Apicius.
Apicius’s book is Europe’s oldest and ancient Rome’s only surviving recipe book. As Joseph Vehling, who translated it into English in 1926, wrote: ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; so here’s hoping that we may find a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life through the study of this cookery book.’ Yet it was never plain sailing. Apicius’s recipes may paint a picture of luxurious dinners, of exquisite flavours and textures, but he had to deal with a bureaucracy that must have infuriated him.
Today, chefs and restaurateurs have to be much more than providers of good food. Aside from creating a restaurant worth eating at, they have to deal with council officials, inspectors and regulators, not to mention listening to the advice of their PRs and tolerating the critics. Apicius had his problems too. History books may carry the legends of Roman decadence but at the time many looked down upon those who enjoyed extravagant lifestyles. Writers such as Pliny and Plutarch disapproved of high living in the form of fine dining, let alone feasting. And they weren’t alone – severe laws existed that fixed the amount a household could spend on specific types of food.
Senior politicians and officials felt a need to protect public morals. Not that it stretched to stopping people watching Christians being eaten by lions in the Coliseum. So imperial food inspectors were sent out to perform spot checks on kitchens, not dissimilar to how hygiene officials operate today. Fortunately there was another aspect of life that was rife back then: corruption. So one can imagine Apicius, on being told a posse of ingredient inspectors were on their way, dispatching one of his chefs to entertain the inspectors when they arrived. No doubt the food wardens would have been quickly seduced with promises of some tasty morsels for them to take home, a meal in the kitchen or very likely money, gold even. Because they clearly failed to stop the purchasing of expensive ingredients and the dinners for which they were intended.
Wealthy food-loving Romans thus easily brushed aside the food police and circumvented the law. Which meant they were able to indulge in Apicius’s delectable food and, of course, his sauces. And there are sauces to accompany every meat you can think of, from hare and duck to lobster and sardines. But not the oft-mentioned ‘dormouse’ – not so much a mouse as a large rodent that lived in trees (not unlike a squirrel). Apicius stuffed it with pork, nuts and herbs and then roasted or boiled it, but he can’t have been that keen on it as he doesn’t do a sauce to match. This aberration aside, there are so many sauces it’s almost a frenzy. When he can’t think what to call it, he just says, ‘Here’s another one’ – as you can see from the recipe heading this chapter.
His writing style is chatty when there’s detail, of which there is often little. The language is of a busy, harassed man. He can be obscure and unhelpful, assuming a level of knowledge that would frustrate the novice. These days his publisher would have forced a ghost-writer on him. But instead we get the writings of a man focused on his work – after all he was a cook.
But reading between the lines he was also a humane chef. In those days many felt that the worse an animal suffered the better it tasted. Torturing some poor beast, it was thought, would bring out the flavour of the meat. Yet there are very few examples of this in Apicius’s writings. The two exceptions being a starter that calls for a dis-jointed chicken (this being done before the bird was killed) and a fig-fed pig, in which the poor animal would be starved before being force-fed with dried figs and then given mead to drink. The figs then simply expanded or start to ferment, the liver enlarged and the pig died. (For the modern equivalent – foie gras (or ‘fat liver’))
Apicius seemed less enamoured of this sort of animal cruelty and keener on promoting the cooking of vegetables. If you’re ever stuck for a recipe for cabbage, he’s your man. He was also a master of the art of disguising food. This was less for economic and practical reasons – think mock turtle soup in later times – than for show. Although the jury is out as to whether his ‘anchovy paste without anchovy’ might have been devised as an exquisite piece of trickery to fool and delight guests or simply concocted on the day he found he was all out of anchovies. With his extraordinary wealth, it was probably the former.
Apicius was a stickler for perfection, determined that his recipes should enlighten his readers and enhance their lives – although he wasn’t big on puddings. Despite the Romans love of confectionery, you won’t find any sweet dishes in this book. Perhaps this was one thing he sent out for.
But so great was his love of food that it did for him in the end. As he worked his way through his fortune – purchasing the likes of sea scorpions and Damascus plums or refurbishing his kitchen – his outgoings began to outstrip his income. So much so that when he was down to his last few blocks of gold, his last few million sestertii, he came to a grand conclusion. If he could no longer live in the manner to which he had become accustomed, if the quality of food that would pass his lips was anything less than what he aspired to, then it was not a life worth living.
So one day he gathered together his most appreciative friends and prepared one final, perfect banquet. Each dish was more exquisite than the previous one. But to one of his own dishes he added an individual twist. We’ll never know if it was his ‘pumpkin fritters’, ‘lentils and chestnuts’ or ‘suckling pig stuffed two ways’. But whatever it was, Apicius had poisoned it and he died.
8
Honeyed cheesecakes
circa AD 200
AUTHOR: Athenaeus (quoting Hebe’s Wedding by Epicharmus)
FROM: Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banquet)
Wheaten flour is wetted, and then put into a frying-pan; after that honey is sprinkled over it, and sesame and cheese.
One cannot leave the shores of ancient Greece and Rome – for forays around the wider ancient world – without enjoying the taste of honey and various recipes associated with it, courtesy of the Greek scholar Athenaeus. Born in the Egyptian tr ading port of Naucratis, he was writing in around AD 200. Some of his publications are lost but we are indebted to him because of his fifteen-volume work entitled the Deipnosophistae.
Translatable as ‘The Learned Banquest’ or ‘Philosophers at Dinner’, the work purports to be recorded conversations that take place during an epic banquet between a variety of learned people, some of whom may or may not be fictitious. Now you might quite understandably feel that a collection of dinner party discussions in fifteen volumes sounds like proper torture, but what is discussed is so detailed, so many writers and thinkers are quoted, and such a number of customs and ideas are recorded, that it makes the work hugely important. For we are left with a great array of precise detail about life in ancient Rome – where the work was written – not just in AD 200 but going back in history.
The conversation veers from food to music, dance, women and much more. As would happen naturally, topics go off at extraordinary tangents. Poetry, philosophy, myths and legends are quoted at length by various individuals, and there is one of the longest discussions in history on cheesecake. Of the many cheesecakes discussed – and from absorbing myself in the literature, I can assure you that the ancient Greeks and Romans consumed a large number of them, going by different names and all cooked in different ways – the one attributed to Epicharmus, a dramatist and philosopher from around 500 bc, seems the tastiest. Included at the top of this chapter, the recipe is quite straightforward and it uses honey, which, as you’ll see, was a pretty much a key ingredient.
Reclining on couches, adorned in flowing togas, the guests ate and chatted away while servants fluttered about bringing food and drink as the conversation ebbed and flowed. It was perhaps during the serving of cheesecakes as a second or final sweet course that the epic cheesecake digression took place. ‘The cheesecakes of Samos are extraordinarily good,’ we hear one diner say, while another talks of how he has eaten them ‘set in a mould and made up of egg, honey and very fine wheatflour’.
Mention is made of cheesecakes served at a wedding to the bride and bridegroom, drenched in honey – the cheesecake that is, not the happy couple. Others are mixed with honey, then deep-fried and served with honey. Another, a recipe ‘by that clever writer on confectionery, Chrysippus’, is made by first roasting nuts and the seedhead of a poppy. This is pounded in a mortar and added to fruit juice mixed with boiled honey and some black pepper. Added to a cheesy dough, the soft mass that results is flattened and made into squares, then sprinkled with crushed sesame softened with more boiled honey. No doubt it’s then cooked, not that the clever Chrysippus is helpful enough to mention this. Still, it’s one of a cast of thousands, virtually all of which include honey.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had a pretty high regard for honey, which because of its preservative and antiseptic qualities they associated with longevity and hence immortality. It was both the food of the gods – ambrosia – and a gift from them. The mythical figure of Aristeaus was an apiculture – beekeeping – expert. The son of Apollo and a nymph, he had nectar and honey dropped on his lips as a baby and thus gained immortality. As he grew up, various nymphs taught him how to cultivate vines and olive trees and to keep bees. He then went about sharing his bee know-how with common mortals.
Early excavations on Crete show bee-related motifs on pottery and jewellery; Hippocrates recommended it to everyone, sick or otherwise; Aristotle made an intense study of bees; and Democritus, who spent a lot of time thinking about atoms, had a favourite recipe for a long and healthy life: ‘One must nourish the external part of his body with oil and the internal with honey.’
Honey was mass-produced by the Greeks and used as a traded commodity. A record of 1300 BC shows 110 pots having the equivalent value of an ass or ox. Above all, it was nutritious and tasted good and, as we now know, it was very popular in cheesecake.
Wade through the dinner party monologues of Athenaeus, perhaps imagining him declaim it as a piece of theatre, and you learn a thing or two about other foodie subjects. His dinner party guests appear to abhor drunkenness – even during the penultimate volume, when the party was drawing to a close (it must have been a dry night). ‘We’re not of the class who drink to excess, nor of the numbers of those who are in the habit of being intoxicated by midday,’ declares one. ‘Those who drink too much unmixed wine are become violent,’ says another, while a fellow guest opines sagely (quoting Herodotus): ‘When wine has penetrated down into the body, bad and furious language is apt to rise to the surface.’
They recommend songs to calm people at the start of feasts and stop them eating too fast: ‘Music softens the moroseness of character, for it dissipates sadness and produces affability and a sort of gentlemanlike joy.’ Not that they were without experience of overdoing it. There is considerable discussion on the subject of hangovers. A comic poet, Clearchus, is quoted as saying: ‘As we get all the pleasure first … we lose the whole delight in the sharp pain that follows.’
But if you want another measure of the spirit of these discussions it comes when referencing one Aristoxenus: ‘The theatres have become completely barbarised and … music has become entirely ruined and vulgar.’ No doubt he also felt that young people had no respect.
Still, on food, especially cheesecake, these are precious volumes. And while Atheneaus discourses endlessly on pomegranates, pheasants, sucking pigs and salted crab – to mention just a few of the foodstuffs covered in this work – he’s at his best when he waxes lyrical on ‘tartlets and cheesecakes steeped most thoroughly in the rich honey of the golden bee’.
9
Congee
AD 636
AUTHOR: Linghu Defen, FROM: The Book of Zhou
While wearing the mourning of nine months, one might eat vegetables and fruits, and drink water and congee, using no salt or cream.
Of the official twenty-four histories of Imperial China, The Book of Zhou stands out – fifty chapters long, some inevitably lost over time – as the one that mentions a dish now enjoyed daily by millions across Asia. As well as recommending it as appropriate to eat during times of mourning, it records how ‘Emperor Huang Di was the first to cook congee with millet as the ingredient’. Today congee is mostly made with rice, but as the emperor showed, where rice wasn’t available it might be substituted with another cereal.
The dish has spread to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and South Korea. Each culture has its own way of preparing it, although the basic method is pretty much the same, the rice being cooked in large quantities of water so that it disintegrates in the liquid as it’s heated and becomes a sort of thick porridge or soup. It would have been made in this way back in the days of the Tang Dynasty, when The Book of Zhou was commissioned by Emperor Taizong to give the official history of the earlier Northern Zhou Dynasty. Although congee was regarded as a little more special in those times – presented as a gift to the emperor’s nobles. No doubt given as a measure of respect with no end of bowing, it was then gently brought to the lips with gold-tipped chopsticks made of ivory.
Despite all the ceremony, it was, as now, a plain dish – the humblest gift signifying the greater respect. In fact, served on its own without the addition of other ingredients, it would have been almost tasteless. Think of gruel, stodgy from cooking in the pot overnight and served with little more than a smile. Yet its blandness belies its strength. Congee fortifies the body at the start of the day. It is easily digested, providing instant energy and making it a good dish to wolf down if you’re about to be attacked by some aggressive warrior. An expert congee consumer will tell you that by turning a hot bowl of congee in your hands and slurping the cooler parts around the rim, you can get through three bowls in as many minutes. And as it doesn’t sit uncomfortably in your stomach, but is absorbed quickly, you won’t get a stitch while wielding your sword at your attacker.
Congee is sustaining too, ideal for those who need a quick energy boost after exercise or are recovering from illness. Indeed, its fortifying properties are held in such regard that it is often served at funerals. More than that, it has provided life-saving nutrition in a nation ravaged by famine over the centuries. From 108 BC to 1911, China experienced 1,828 famines – that’s almost one a year. The one thing that enabled people to survive, that kept millions of families from starvation, was congee. Congee because of its warming and sustaining qualities and because it is made with rice.
Rice is one of the most important global foods, of which there are some 10,000 varieties. Eight thousand of these are grown for food and they have many advantages over cereal crops such as wheat and barley. Yields are higher and the moisture content is low which means rice can be stored for longer and used during periods of famine. In fact the Tang Dynasty – which lasted from AD 618 to 907 – made much of the value of storing rice by building storage depots near their newly built canals so the rice could be transported to areas of greatest need.
Understanding its usefulness, the Tang Dynasty oversaw a period in which the production of rice became a key part of the agricultural industry. Special tools were developed, as were irrigation systems for transferring water to different paddy fields. Rice was just one part of a flourishing empire, the most glistening period in China’s history. The economy grew, as did the military. Tax collecting became more efficient as every adult male was given an equal-sized plot of land together with an equal tax bill.
The elite loved their congee and so did everybody else – a poor family might get by on little else, after all. Different types of congee were made at different times of the day. On a cold winter’s morning the addition of meat – if you could afford it – warmed the body. At dusk in midsummer as the heat of the day faded, it was made with lotus seeds or hawthorn to cool and refresh. And with the addition of medlar, it would boost the immune systems of the old, feeble and weak.
