This week, we’re back with another weird medieval dessert, because, with the ingredients and resources I have, it is genuinely the only thing I can make at the moment. I apologize.

Here’s this week’s recipe, from Curye on Inglisch again:

http://www.godecookery.com/mtrans/mtrans13.htm

And here are the ingredients:

• Figs
• Raisins
• Red wine – slightly sweet.
• Apples – peeled, cored, and diced.
• Pears – peeled, cored, and diced.
• Good powders – use spices appropriate for fruit: sugar, cinnamon, clove, mace, nutmeg, ginger, etc.
• Whole spices – this would probably have been such spices as anise, grains of paradise, etc.
• Oil

I don’t have whole spices and I don’t have pears, and I’m not using any wine. The process here: soak the dried figs and raisins in wine (I’m using water), grind these up with the apples, add spices, roll into balls, and fry them in oil. I don’t have anything to grind things with (I mean, I have a mortar and pestle, but I’m so tired) so I’m just going to try to finely chop everything. (If you’re wondering, I ground my almonds for last week’s post in a coffee grinder.) I also do not have amounts for any of these things. Time to guess!

I ended up using something like six dried figs, a few tablespoons of raisins, and one apple, along with some cinnamon and ginger. I chopped as finely as I could, and the mixture was far too wet to be made into anything resembling a ball without immediately falling apart.

So, I cheated.

Cheating.

Cornstarch. Just a teaspoon or two. It wouldn’t have been around back then, but I’m just trying to get through this without things falling apart. It feels like this needs flour- or ground almonds, or something. The cornstarch helped a little, but, ultimately, this is a recipe destined to fall apart. Simply not enough sticky or binding ingredients.

There were more, but I ate them while frying them. If you say you have never eaten half of what you’re making while making it, you might be lying.

The good first: the flavors are nice. Simple, powerful, fruit. It tastes like you’re frying fruit, because that is exactly what you are doing. Very sweet without added sweeteners. The frying is kind of pointless, but many foods are made more pleasurable by heating and adding oil, so I understand. Again, if there were a flour element these would make more sense. They feel a little pointless, but I guess that’s medieval desserts for you: a show of wealth and celebration, a rare spot of flavor in an otherwise dull life, a way to use up a large quantity of dried and pomaceous fruits.

This feels like a food I might invent at ten years old upon learning to use the stovetop for the first time. What is a rissole? Why were apples turned into weird meatless dessert meatballs? This probably shows my lack of fine culinary expertise, but I have no idea how to properly fry a sphere. Why was this even necessary? Why do so many medieval recipes involve needless cooking of fruit?

It turns out the answer to that question is good old food-borne illness. In medieval times, most believed that ingesting most fruit and vegetables raw could cause illness, through some combination of fluid leeching into the lungs and/or unbalance of the body’s four humors. While the science may have been… slightly incorrect, it’s definitely true that raw produce, when not carefully washed and processed, makes a lot of people ill, even today. When considering the food preparation and storage conditions of the time, it isn’t as surprising that cooking absolutely everything was commonplace.

Since this is probably my last historical cooking blog, I thought I would link a whole bunch of primary sources for old recipes for anyone that wants to look for themselves. I only got around to using a few of these, but go ahead and look through. If nothing else, they’re funny to read (if I had a working oven, I would be very tempted to make a certain lenten lasagna with nothing but crushed walnuts between the layers of pasta).

Book of Apicius (Ancient Rome):

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm#bkvii_chxiii

De Agricultura (Ancient Rome):

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cato/De_Agricultura/E*.html

Gode Cookery (website archiving lots of mostly Renaissance recipes):

http://www.godecookery.com/allrec/allrec.htm

Libro de Cucina, translated into English (1300s-1400s Italy):

https://web.archive.org/web/20091027032901/http://www.geocities.com/helewyse/libro.html

Apple and Orange Tart (1500s England):

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/org/Medieval/www/src/docs/apple-orange-tarte.html

Delightes for Ladies (1600s England):

http://web.archive.org/web/20040603080850/http://infotrope.net/sca/texts/delights-for-ladies/

The Closet of Sir Digby Kenelm, Knight (1600s England):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16441/16441-h/16441-h.htm

A Long List of Links to Online Sources for Renaissance recipes (but most are transcribed in their original form, which is never modern English and often not English at all):

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/food.html

Victorian Soups:

http://lonehand.com/victorian_soup_recipes.htm

Victorian Gruel:

https://recipes.hypotheses.org/tag/gruel

Victorian Rice Pudding:

http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/victorianbakedricepudding.htm

Depression Blueberry Pudding:

A soggy dessert recipe from Eleanor Roosevelt

Depression Prune Pudding:

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018241-prune-pudding

A Long List of other Depression Foods with Source Links:

29 Weird Great Depression Foods That Will Make You Grateful You Weren’t Alive Then

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading this weird little blog. I hope you had fun, or learned something, or laughed. I did a lot of all three. I’m sad to sign off on this. Maybe I’ll come back to it. As soon as I can use a functional oven again and am around people who will eat whatever terrible thing I cook (college students), I really want to try making a Depression-era vinegar pie. We’ll see what happens. Thanks for sticking it out through these long-winded blogs.

Carpe diem.

I can’t be the only person who’s curious every time they hear that holiday song. Though this is not exactly the modern British baked pudding full of dried fruits- for one thing, it’s not baked (hey there, broken oven!)- it keeps the spirit of the thing, and it contains figs. This week’s recipe is from the Curye on Inglysch, a collection of fourteenth-century English recipes.

Translated into understandable contemporary English, here are the ingredients:

• 4 ounces ground almonds
• ½ cup water
• ½ cup wine
• 1 cup dried figs, cut into quarters
• 1 cup raisins
• 2 tablespoons honey
• ½ teaspoon ginger
• ¼ teaspoon salt

I halved the recipe, because that’s more pudding than I need. I also honestly forgot the ginger and the salt (sorry) and only used water instead of wine. I didn’t measure the water, but it feels like I used more than is ascribed here. However, it’s pudding. I was just trying to get a reasonable consistency and I’m sure the rest boiled off.

The process is fairly simple. Grind almonds, cook on stove, add chopped figs and raisins and honey, cook until whenever. Honestly, looking at the ingredients in the saucepan, I thought “there is no way these will incorporate evenly” and I was right. It came out looking hideous. I can see why the contemporary British pudding hides all of its hideous lumpy elements within a baked outside. The sight was also reminiscent of my attempt at a raisin wine sauce in the root vegetables blog post last month. Lumpy and strange, and full of dried fruits. It’s probably not the ugliest thing I’ve made on this blog.

Even though it’s kind of ugly, the flavor is actually… good! It’s too sweet, in my opinion, but it’s dessert, so I don’t know what I expected. I think I’m learning a lot about how ancient foods (at least, of the wealthy that bothered to record elaborate recipes) contained quite a bit of sugar just like many of today’s foods. The ground almond base was actually really great- I haven’t worked with almond-based desserts at all before, but it took up the flavors of the honey and dried fruit. Overall, very sweet, a little gross looking, but with good flavors (even my parents admitted it was decent!).

Here is the link to the recipe source for this week:

http://www.godecookery.com/friends/frec137.html

Reader, this recipe did not go well.

Somehow, I screwed up gruel. I set out to make watery oatmeal, and I failed.

But first, let’s talk about gruel. What is it? What is it made of? When was it popular?

Gruel is usually used as a word to describe any very thin and watery porridge, usually made to stretch any grain (often oats) into more meals by simply adding more water. As you can probably guess, this method of stretching food does not really add caloric value, but the added water can make one feel slightly more full.

Gruel was a popular offering in Victorian workhouses, where wage workers in terrible conditions were required by law to be fed a certain number of times a day. Gruel was the cheapest thing the workhouses could justify calling a meal for their labor, so they made it. Lots of it. The recipe I’m using from 1872 calls for a gallon of water, and that’s one of the smaller, more family-oriented serving sizes I’ve seen.

When poor law unions formed in 1834, workhouses were required to weigh out the portions they served to ensure they were serving as much as required. In 1837, described workhouse diets typically included the following: five ounces of meat three times a week, one and a half pints of soup three times a week and 12 ounces of rice or suet pudding weekly; breakfasts of 6 ounces of bread and one and a half pints of gruel; suppers of either one and a half pints of broth or two ounces of cheese with 7 ounces of bread. These houses were typically the only place the working poor got most of their food, and gruel was a staple of the diet.

Here’s the recipe:

Gruel recipe 1872:
16 ounces oatmeal
8 pints of water
4 ounces treacle,
Allspice to be used occasionally

Well, I don’t have Allspice, and I also don’t have treacle. I’m substituting molasses in for the treacle. I’m surprised at the quantity: maybe treacle is somehow less sweet than molasses, but that seems like a lot of treacle. I guess sugar is cheaper than some other ingredients, but I wonder if this was the norm. I am interpreting it as fluid ounces, but either way that seems like a lot of sweetener for the Victorian era.

It turns out what I did wrong while cooking gruel, exhausted and hungry, is I grabbed the wrong oats. I ended up cooking steel-cut oats instead of old-fashioned oats. This is a fatal error because the idea of gruel is to overcook a small quantity of oatmeal until it is mush, and then to dilute that mush in water.

Pre-dilution oats.

Oats diluted with water and molasses.

The trouble with steel-cut oats is that they do not become mush easily. Somehow, this completely slipped my mind until I already had a pot full of dark, molasses-flavored oatmeal. (Yes, I could taste the molasses.) It seemed far too thick, rich, and sweet to pass for gruel. I basically made sweetened oatmeal. I’m sure the results would be different if I had used old-fashioned cut oats. I’m picturing a thin, glue-like watery mixture. We will see if I find the time and energy to try to make gruel again. Personally, I do not feel any great need to feel more like Oliver Twist, but maybe at some point I’ll be bored enough to try again. It is also possible that this recipe is not like most gruel recipes and it is not entirely my fault for using the wrong oats. This seems like far too much sweetener and not enough water. This recipe makes for a good bowl of oatmeal, but not a satisfactorily watery gruel.

Here is the link from the page where I found my 1872 recipe today:

https://recipes.hypotheses.org/tag/gruel

Sometimes I scroll through the Apicius cookbook and yearn for the days when I could buy ingredients. Or use an oven. Or a microwave.

Well, I’ve found one more Apicius recipe I can do. I think it’s basically French toast. As always, here is the link to the source material:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm#bkvii_chxiii

And here’s a snip of the specific recipe we’ll be covering today, from the “sweetmeats” section of the text:

Soak bread in milk and eggs, fry in oil, serve with honey. That’s basically French toast, right?

Yes. It turns out that yes, it is.

The recipe calls for “fine white bread”. Regrettably, I was only able to do this recipe when I found a hitherto undiscovered lump of week-old whole wheat sourdough raisin bread in the back of my refrigerator. (By raisin bread, I do not mean sweet bread. The bread has no sugar in it. It is just regular bread with the occasional raisin, and it is a week old.) There’s only enough of it for a few small slices, which is perfect.

The recipe also calls for the crusts of the bread to be removed, which I shall not do. Sorry, Apicius, but I am not one of those people. Eat your crusts like an adult, my dear anonymous Roman chef. You are two thousand years old.

Anyway! The bread was sliced and dipped in a mixture of one egg and a quarter of a cup of milk, and then it was fried. I didn’t actually add the honey on top of all the toast, but I did leave a spoon of it off to the side of the dish in order that anyone that wished might consume it. I tried it with honey. It tasted fine. Here are some pictures.

I ended up having a few tablespoons of the milk and egg mixture left over when I ran out of bread, so I added a little flour and made one perfect little pancake.

Overall, this was a pleasant little breakfast treat for the whole family, and a good way to say farewell to that random lump of bread. Would I do it again? I don’t know. It seems too extravagant and unnecessary for day-to-day life, when one might find it more filling to cook and eat eggs and bread separately. But maybe this is a good one to keep in the back of my head as a treat. It’s good on its own, and I found the honey to be unnecessary, but not unpleasant. I also really find old hard bread with eggs more justifiable than the modern atrocity people call french toast- all white and soft and sugar. Why? What, exactly, is the purpose?

Without much else to say, I’m going to take some time to consider how the French somehow got all the credit for the universal human experience of cooking bread and eggs together.

It turns out Americans call it French toast because it was brought by early French settlers, which called it “lost bread” because they made it from bread that was otherwise too old and brittle to do much else with.

How did we fall so far? I do not know. It is worth nothing that Apicius frames this as a dessert, to me made of rare white bread for the wealthy of Rome. It’s possible, then, that the concept of fried bread as a bread-saving strategy evolved across cultures at the same time as the concept of fried bread as a decadent dessert. Both certainly have historic precedent, and I grudgingly accept both as valid culinary experiences.

Tune in next time for whatever else I can find that is historically relevant and cookable on the stove. On the off-chance that anyone ever reads this: please comment some recipe ideas. I don’t really want to be reduced to Victorian single-vegetable soups, but we will see.

It happened. A member of my household became one of those quarantine sourdough people.

This means we have lots of sourdough starter and nothing to do with it (no oven, no microwave, just a 20-year-old dysfunctional stove). So we’ve been doing sourdough pancakes. When I say pancakes, don’t think of the fluffy white-flour, sugar-filled, butter-and-syrup stacks. Instead, imagine we are trying to make something functionally as close to bread as possible, without an oven. No sugar, no fillers, just eggs, sourdough starter, and not much else.

Surprise! That’s actually pretty close to the way many miners made their meals during both the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) and the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska (1896-1899). With no town, no oven, and no yeast, sourdough was practically ubiquitous with miners, and cooking it with eggs over a fire was easier than finding somewhere to bake real bread.

I don’t exactly have a recipe for this one either. You can look for any recipe related to Klondike-style or sourdough flapjacks. Mine are made with just sourdough starter mixed with whole wheat flour and water, and a couple of eggs. I’ve found that whole wheat flour is sometimes still on shelves where all-purpose has sold out (plus bran is good for you!). For these reasons, it is the only flour I currently own. I’m sure you can use whatever flour you have, though I’m not sure how starters react with gluten-free options.

I mixed the ingredients and allowed them to rise for about two hours before cooking. You can speed this up by adding baking soda, if you like. Cook each pancake on a lower heat, allowing it to puff up fully before flipping it over. The goal is to create an almost-baking-like environment in the pan.

The results: these are delightful. They have a hint of sour, and a lot of hearty texture. They are filling and sturdy. I made mine large like crepes, as making them this size and shape made most sense for flipping and using up all of the space on the pan. You may, of course, cook these any size or shape you like. These are great with any toppings (including the Depression prune pudding/jam from a few weeks ago!), and are also irresistible with none at all. Give these a try. I absolutely cannot get enough of them, which I suppose is a good thing because I don’t have a lot of other options for flour consumption at the moment.

If you want a recipe because you need to measure things in order to feel that all is right in the world, here is one I found that looks like a simple enough base to work from:

https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/klondike-style-sourdough-pancake-recipe-zmaz85ndzgoe

Final verdict: if you, too, have taken up sourdough during these scary and unprecedented times, this is a good way to use it. These can be time-consuming, but they are worth it.

I don’t actually have a recipe for this one, but I’d read on a number of websites that Roman soldiers cooked and ate a lot of buckwheat polenta, and I thought this would be as good a time as any to expound upon my love for this miraculous grain-like grass.

Polenta is a famous Italian dish, usually based on cornmeal. However, corn came from the Americas. So what did Italians use before corn? Many different grains, among them buckwheat, which was introduced from the Middle East (and, before that, from the rest of Asia) during ancient wars.

Buckwheat is easy to cook, versatile, high in protein, easy to grow, and gluten-free. You can grind it into flour. You can cook the groats in a thermos of boiling water in fifteen minutes (I regularly do this for dorm meals). Soba noodles are made out of it. Buckwheat originated in East Asia, where it formed a base for many dishes where rice was unavailable or could not easily be cultivated. Today, it is a staple grain throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. It was also a staple of my childhood. Buckwheat with milk was a familiar cereal, while buckwheat with savory ingredients for dinner was also a frequent delight. I am so excited to share this wonderful grain with all of you today.

Polenta, on its principle, involves cooking grain or grain meal until it becomes mushy, and then stirring it, and sometimes adding dairy, until it becomes creamy. Simple enough, right?

In retrospect, I should have tried to grind up my buckwheat, even roughly. It would have sped up the process and left me with something slightly more polenta-like. Still, this pot of buckwheat mush cooked within an hour. Here is how I did it:

Boil about two cups of water with one cup of (rinsed) buckwheat groats. Add chopped onions. Simmer, mix, and mash with a fork as often as you feel like checking on it. Towards the end, add a few tablespoons of parmesan cheese, and stir until fully integrated. Serve hot, or cold, or whatever your heart desires.

Though I do wish I’d ground the buckwheat beforehand, I did end up with something that tasted recognizably like polenta, and had reached a creamy consistency not unlike overcooked oatmeal. Despite that maybe unappealing comparison, it actually tasted okay- like creamy buckwheat with notes of cheese and onions.

It looks like oatmeal, it tastes like oatmeal, it was a waste of time.

Was it worth it? I think not. I could have just boiled the buckwheat in fifteen minutes and eaten it. I don’t understand how people pack polenta into logs they can then cut slices off of. I could have attempted something with this, but just imagine storing a log of mushy oatmeal and chopping bits off of it- gross and unnecessary. As it were, I could have just cooked the buckwheat the normal way. Perhaps polenta was the go-to if Romans were carrying buckwheat flour, and not whole groats. I would understand this more. It wasn’t that bad, but I don’t know if it was worth the time and effort.

Incidentally, cleaning the pot after this was absolutely awful. There was a thick layer of stuff attached to the bottom of it, just like when you wayyyyyy overcook oatmeal. So that was unpleasant. Maybe I could have avoided it somehow by being better at polenta. I don’t know.

Final thoughts: this was fine. It tasted fine. I would hate to be the Roman soldier tasked with washing cookware.

Today’s recipe is one for a historic pudding. It can be found here:

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018241-prune-pudding

Ah, the Great Depression. A time in which average Americans were struggling to make ends meet, and foreign dignitaries were complaining about the food served in the White House.

In fact, FDR’s White House gained a reputation among world leaders for serving food that was, by their standards, absolutely horrible. This is because Eleanor Roosevelt took it upon herself to simplify the fare served to the First Family and dignitaries. This was more about image than about cutting domestic costs: Americans wouldn’t want to hear about the elaborate meals served in the White House when they themselves were struggling to find enough to eat every day.

Personally, I think the meals described by records sound absolutely fine, I salute Eleanor Roosevelt for the effort, and I find the response of the dignitaries absolutely abhorrent. What’s disgusting isn’t the hard-boiled eggs, but the high horse of anyone choosing to criticize food on merit of taste when an entire nation is starving. However, my opinion might not match the opinions of most people out there, because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself from writing about food for a semester, it’s that I tend to treat food strictly as fuel, and evaluate it by its utilitarian merits. I maintain a philosophy that taste does not matter, and neither does enjoyment, in my personal food consumption. I would happily switch to some sort of Silicon Valley astronaut mush for all of my meals if it was cheaper, healthier, and saved me time. I would never force it anyone else or impose it upon society as a whole, but I’d do it in a heartbeat. Maybe this means I shouldn’t be writing a food blog. Actually, this definitely means I shouldn’t be writing  food blog. But here we are.

Anyway, pudding.

Let prunes stand in water. Boil them. Chop them. Put them back in water and let them simmer. Add sugar and cinnamon and a cornstarch slurry for thickening purposes. Allow to cool fully. Serve in small containers.

I followed the instructions faithfully, with the slight exception of the cornstarch- most of my cornstarch experience isn’t with boiling materials, since I never thicken jams and preserves, so I wasn’t expecting it to curdle the way it did and had to take some of the cornstarch out. It seemed thick enough anyway.

There is actually way more of it than this, I just separated a portion of it into this bowl for aesthetic reasons.

Like revenge, this pudding is a dish best served cold, so I had to wait a while to taste the fruit of my labor. However, by the time it finally cooled, it didn’t make me think of pudding at all. I tried a spoonful and realized- I’ve just made jam from dried fruit.

I know I really do not have a lot of pudding experience, but I cannot imagine consuming more than a tablespoon or two of this at a time. Indeed, even as I added the required sugar faithfully, I cringed, since the habit within my household is always to decrease the amount of sugars in anything by almost half, and ideally to get rid of them entirely. Especially considering it was the Depression, I was surprised at the amount of sugar I had to pour into this. And, indeed, it is jam. I promptly moved it all into a jar.

This is good, because it means I may consume it slowly over a matter of months instead of trying to inhale all of this pudding in my judgemental sugar-free family before it goes bad. This is less good, because I make liters and liters and liters of jam from the berries and fruits we grow every summer, and now no one in this house eats any of it, and we still have so much, please help me.

Anyway, this recipe is really exciting. The texture of the jam- I’m going to call it jam- is not unlike strawberry, and the flavor is mild and comforting. I’m curious how this would work with other fruits. I’m really curious to try this recipe again with dried apricots once society comes out of self-isolation and I can go buy dried apricots.

Final thoughts: it wasn’t pudding, but it was good anyway. People who are scared of prunes as an ingredient on principle need to grow up. I recommend.

Hello, dear reader. You may notice I am behind on my cooking blogs. Here is why.

I went home for break, and now I’m at home for the rest of the semester due to the pandemic. At first, I thought being stuck at home with a fully-stocked kitchen might be a good cooking development. The opposite has proven true, however. For one thing, my parents’ house does not have a microwave, and our oven broke just last month. This limits me to boiling and frying things, at least for now. Also, because we are social distancing (and grocery stores are perpetually out of stock, especially when it comes to staples like eggs and flour) I can’t easily get ingredients I do not have on hand from when we last went grocery shopping over two weeks ago.

Also, the question of “who is going to eat it” is still an issue as ever. I definitely ate sweet potato mush with almost every meal for a couple of weeks in my dorm, but if I cook something gross and force my family to partake in it I’ll feel bad for wasting resources and making the already frustrated people around me unhappy. Also, if cooking things my family will eat is a concern now, practically all desserts are out, since they have quit sugar. As a vegetarian, I have no idea how to cook the many animal-based recipes in my arsenal, many of which involve rare or illegal animals or parts of animals I couldn’t obtain anyway.

So that narrows me down to vegetarian, non-dessert, no-bake, no-microwave (ideally tastes okay cold), small-yield-producing, non-alcoholic historical recipes that contain a relatively simple ingredient list and do not overly rely on staples like flour and eggs.

I’m working on putting together a list of doable recipes for the future weeks of my blogs. Maybe not every blog will follow the formula of the blogs I made in the past. Going out, buying ingredients, and staying up until atrocious hours with friends cooking terrible ancient foods and writing about it was really fun, but it was also a lot of work. (I pulled an all-nighter in a kitchen across campus from my dorm cooking the root vegetables and doing work before my last day of classes before break. I’m tired.) My blogs this semester have historically gone way, way over wordcount, with lots of pictures and fun features. I’ve enjoyed it a lot, but it’s also been exhausting. In the coming weeks I might have to vary the old formula a little. I might start using contemporary adaptations of recipes that were prominent in more recent history, instead of trying to approximate on recipes from the ancient world. I might profile a particular ingredient or method of cooking. I’ll write something or other, and hopefully cook something, too.

Because I still feel like I need to cook something and I still have a few small crusts of bread left from before the oven broke, I’ll cover one simple recipe from the Great Depression this week: a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich.

It sounds repulsive. But, historically, it’s a favorite sandwich of many older people in the South, who relied on these two inexpensive ingredients to get through the great depression.

So this week I’m just going to put some peanut butter and mayonnaise on a bit of bread and rate the results. (Do I really have to demonstrate the process for this one?)

All I could find are some tiny dry scraps of black bread from a week or so ago. It’s probably better than using a larger slice of bread. Oh, and the peanut butter is expired.

Live, Laugh, Love? More like Die, Cry, Goodbye.
Ever stop in the middle of something and wonder how you got there? That’s what this feels like.

Thoughts: hmm. This is bad! Very bad. No stars. I do not recommend the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. Tune in next week for more poor culinary choices!

This week, we’re back with more Apicius! I covered the background of this particular book of ancient Roman recipes in my previous passion blog post, so feel free to look back to find out more about the probably-not-a-real-person-but-still-a-prolific-chef wonder that is Apicius. Here’s the link the the Gutenberg Project’s free upload of the entirety of the translated document, footnotes, introductions, index, and all:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm#bkvii_chxiii

I decided to do a week of nothing but root vegetables. My vision: acquiring as many root vegetable recipes as possible, and running through each in rapid-fire succession. Searching through the old-world roots of Apicius, the recipes I found were mostly to do with carrots, parsnips, and beets. (I originally had some recipes listed for cow-parsnips and water-parsnips, but these turned out to be herbs where only the greens are used in cooking. Fun fact about cow-parsnips: allowing their sap to absorb into your skin makes you extremely sensitive to a burning reaction triggered by the sun!)

Why roots? Well, the thought was planted in my mind by my love for Shakespeare’s little-performed play Timon of Athens, whose titular character abandons society and runs away to live in a cave in the woods and eat nothing but roots when he feels his friends have abandoned him. (Mood? Mood.) In the beginning of the play, a cynical character who already lives the root-eating lifestyle says a wonderfully biting prayer of grace:

“Immortal gods, I crave no pelf;
I pray for no man but myself:
Grant I may never prove so fond,
To trust man on his oath or bond;
Or a harlot, for her weeping;
Or a dog, that seems a-sleeping:
Or a keeper with my freedom;
Or my friends, if I should need ’em.
Amen. So fall to’t:
Rich men sin, and I eat root.”

It’s interesting to consider how the root vegetable diet was synonymous with poverty in this Elizabethan portray of ancient Greek culture. (Money may be the root of all evil, but is money the evil of all roots?) The idea of honoring this fascinating play with a roots week on my blog really took root, if you will, as I was presenting a paper about Timon at a conference a few weekends ago. I found seven recipes that centered on the use of carrots, parsnips, and beets. Turns out, I can’t find parsnips anywhere in the local area, so I substituted more carrots into the parsnip recipes.

Let’s get right into the recipes! I’m giving each of these a distinct descriptive name, since the names Apicius gave them usually all go something like “beets another way” and “parsnips that will appeal to your tastes”. I’ll quickly summarize and review my experience with each dish below. In the end, I’ll rank all the dishes.

0: Raisin Wine Sauce

Okay, so this isn’t actually one of the recipes, but I did have to make some sort of raisin wine sauce, as many of these recipes asked for either reduced wine, wine sauce, raisin wine, reduced raisin wine, or some other variant of these. I boiled down some grape juice with raisins, but unfortunately burned it when I combined it with my roux of butter and flour. The second try, I had no grape juice, and it was past midnight and the convenience stores were closed, so I just boiled raisins in water, then poured this into the roux. This worked better, producing a strange sort of not-quite-sauce. I couldn’t find a good way to get the raisins out, but they started separating themselves out as the oily sauce boiled down and the raisins filled with juices and peeled away. I don’t know how to describe this creation. It wasn’t quite sauce. It tasted fine. Let’s move on.

1: Beets with Raisin Wine

This one is pretty similar to the beets with leeks recipe (below), but with a less interesting range of flavors. The nuts are a nice textural touch (I used walnuts). I don’t have polypody (the root of a fern) so something’s missing on the seasoning front. As it were, they’re boiled and seasoned beets with the weird raisin sauce and a few walnuts. They’re okay, but nothing to write home about and the leeks version of this is better. 7/10: it’s alright, but it’s missing something.

2. Beets with Mead

With all the recipes that simply said “cook” instead of specifying a method, I decided to bake, in order to provide some variety when compared to the boiled and fried roots in other recipes. I didn’t have mead, so I just poured some straight honey on these beets, seasoned them and let them bake. (Listen, it was two in the morning.) The results? I baked them too long and they started caramelizing. That was interesting. I think the sweet notes in beets need contrast and the honey was overpowering, but it was an interesting experiment and a welcome and unusual note when I had to finish all of these recipes mixed together for every meal the following day. 4/10: interesting does not mean good.

3. Beets with Leeks

I couldn’t find leeks in stores, unfortunately. I couldn’t even find green onions! So I used onion powder and hoped for the best. I love leeks and know this would have been better with them. Still, this recipe is excellent. It’s got sweet notes from the raisin wine and tangy notes from the vinegar. It’s well-seasoned. It has a rich broth. 8/10: the favorite so far.

4. Beets with Mustard

This recipe is simple and underwhelming. baked with mustard powder and some other seasonings. As with the mead beets, a welcome and unique twist, but not incredibly good on their own. A little dry, but I think I baked them for far too long. Eating a shriveled beet covered in mustard powder dust reminds me of the cinnamon challenge and also of mulch. 2/10: did not incorporate well.

5. Fried Carrots

Simple enough. I sliced the carrots and fried them. They tasted like oily carrots. Nothing to write home about, though it was greasier than most of the ancient fare I’ve made thus far. 6/10: I don’t know if I am personally a fan, but it worked well enough.

6. Carrots, Baked and Salted

For some reason, the carrot just didn’t want to bake properly. It wouldn’t soften the way I expected to. For this reason, I over-baked all my baked dishes and let them all dry out a little. This one is underwhelming. It is simply a baked carrot with some salt. The vinegar is a nice touch, but it isn’t enough to save this dry and unappealing root. 3/10: not particularly appealing.

7. Boiled Cumin Carrots

They are boiled carrots. They taste like boiled carrots. I don’t know what I expected. Unimaginative seasoning palate. 5/10: boiled carrots.

Final ancient root recipe ranking, from best to worst:

Beets with Leeks (8/10)

Beets with Raisin Wine (7/10)

Fried Carrots (6/10)

Boiled Cumin Carrots (5/10)

Beets with Mead (4/10)

Carrots, Baked and Salted (3/10)

Beets with Mustard (2/10)

That’s all for this week! If you are, for some reason, still reading this mess of a blog, tune in next week for whatever I think up when I have access to a fully stocked kitchen over break.

Carpe diem.

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.