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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.