Today’s experiment is the first that I would say is truly not very good.
This recipe is from De Re Coquinaria, a Roman text from the first century AD that documents a colossal variety of recipes, in language so old it is closer to Vulgar Latin than Classical Latin. (This means that the language reflects the non-standardized dialects of Latin spoken by commoners, rather than the refined and standardized Latin of the educated). Though the book is “credited” to someone named Apicius, the cultural context of that particular name reveals that it had long been associated with a love for refined food. Thus, this may not be as close to a genuine personal manuscript as it is to an ancient version of Buzzfeed’s Tasty Cookbook. Because of the age of the manuscript, as well as its age, and the fact that many of the essential ingredients of the past (such as the herb silphium, also called laser) are now completely extinct, academic arguements about the meanings of specific words are still ongoing. As is traditional for many ancient recipe books, Apicius is a cook writing for cooks, not listing detailed instructions for any particular recipe, and rarely giving quantities for anything. The entire translated manuscript may be found through Project Gutenberg at the link below:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm#bkvii_chxiii
Here is today’s specific translated recipe, footnotes and all:
To someone who has never made a souffle before, this is intriguing. Souffle, however, is a rather contemporary word, and perhaps an anachronistic concept. I’ll go out and say it right now: this is scrambled eggs with honey drizzled on top of it, and I do not particularly recommend it to friend nor foe.
But first, how I did it: I had to convert those quantities from the ancient Roman pint, which was probably the hermina, to standard contemporary units. I tried converting the ounce quantity to contemporary standard fluid ounces from what I can only assume was the Egyptian ounce, but I could not find an accurate conversion rate, so I just used a normal fluid ounce and prayed people had left the definition of an ounce largely unchanged throughout history.
The other thing to consider here is the “pepper”, an alarming ingredient in an otherwise supposedly sweet egg-based dish. If there’s one thing I’ve learned reading Apicius, however, it’s that “pepper” is rarely actually pepper. While many of the savory spices and herbs are listed, the few sweet recipes in Apicius do not describe the spice mix, referring to the spices altogether generally as “pepper”. As such, I used cinnamon in this dish. Though extraordinarily expensive, it did exist in Rome, and it seems to fit the desired flavor profile of the recipe.
The people I fed this to hated it. One of them had just scrambled an egg and eaten it with honey just to see what it might be like, and she hadn’t hated the combination, so it’s not just the concept as a whole that doesn’t work.
It reminds me of a staple recipe from my childhood I can only translate as egg-on-milk. To make it, you mix one egg with some milk and a pinch of salt and then cook it in the microwave, until it becomes a far-too-milky wet sort of omelette.
Egg-on-milk: It’s like Stratford-upon-Avon, but worse.
To me, this recipe feels like making egg-on-milk the hard way. I fried the eggs, doing my best not to scramble them, but between the frying pan and the oven they inevitably got scrambled. Then I put the already-friend omelette in the oven to warm and supposedly rise, and took it out afterward and covered it in honey and cinnamon. The people I fed it to found it repulsive. I guess it’s not a souffle. I’ve never had a souffle. Maybe I’ve missed the ancient Roman mark, but this feels like the sort of recipe nobody asked for.
In this blog, I’ve touched on my apparent inability to recognize when things are fundamentally unpleasant. I’m just not the sort of person who asks herself “do I like this?” as often as most people seem to. I do things without considering any arbitrary measure of supposed enjoyment. So yes, of course I finished the plate of this for breakfast the following day. The flavors reminded me of the French toast my family tried making a few times in my youth, but without the dry bread: flavors of eggs with too much milk, topped with cinnamon and a clashing sweet note.
However, according to my taste testers, this dish was awful. This was so bad I promptly baked some apples for my friends to apologize for making them experience this nightmare. The baked apples were very good. I do not know who invented baked apples. I imagine they were first made a long, long time ago. And they were better than this abomination calling itself a souffle.
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