As we have already seen with the sweet cheesecake recipe, the tradition Roman recipe shows us that it is easy to use one recipe to create two completely different recipes, which is what I decided to do.
This time I decided to swap the ricotta cheese for feta in order to create a more savoury cheesier flavour in order to contrast the mild ricotta cheesecakes. I also chose to increase the amount of bay leaves to intensify the flavour, making it seem like a completely different dish to the sweet cheesecake balls.
The final alteration to the traditional recipe was to change the way it was baked. Whilst in the previous recipe I create 4 individual balls of dough, this time I chose to create a more traditionally Roman loaf shape, a round shape with 6 slits across the top, similar to that of the image below. This change meant that I need to increase the cooking time to 35 minutes.
Ingredients:
120g/ 4oz plain flour
340g/ 12oz feta cheese (rinse slightly before use)
1 medium egg
6 bay leaves
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 225 fan/ gas mark 7
- Break up feta and place in a food processor. Blitz for 30 seconds or until it begins to look smooth instead of crumbly
- Add the flour and the egg and process until the mixture resembles a soft dough, ensuring all the ingredients are well combined.
- Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper, place the bay leaves in a circular pattern on top of the greaseproof paper
- Shape the dough into a circular loaf and make 3 slits along the top of the dough in order to create 6 mini segments. Transfer to the prepared baking tray.
- Place a cover over the baking tray and bake for 35 minutes or until golden brown
- Leave to cool slightly. Serve either warm or cold.
My Thoughts:
I made this recipe several times because I didn’t think the first attempt was quite right, so I decided to alter a couple of things. The first time I made the cheesecake I found it was far too salty, so on the next attempt I decided to reduce the amount of feta used, and rinse the feta before I used it in order to get rid of some of the brine that the cheese came in. This was a great improvement and the cheesecake was much nicer because you could taste more of the flavours from the ingredients because the dish wasn’t over powered by salt.
This led me to think about how the Romans would have eaten it. In the ancient world salt was a hugely important ingredient. This is mainly because they had to use salt as a way of preserving meats and fish, therefore a lot of the basic foods they would have used within a meal were already covered in salt. On top of this is the role that garum or fish sauce played within cooking. Fish sauce was a stable to the majority of Roman food. To make garum you had to combine fish guts and basically let them stew. As a result it created a pretty pungent smell, the smell got so bad that it is thought at certain times the production of garum within the city was banned. As you can imagine the garum added a lot of flavour to a dish, however the main flavour it created was salt.
Therefore we see that many Roman recipes were extremely high in salt. It is even thought that Romans would have added more salt to some meals just to take away the taste of the dish itself, especially if it contained rotting meat.
In Roman times this kind of cheesecake would have been served as a gustatio or a starter. It was most likely served by itself but accompanied with olives, or other forms of snacks. So when I recreated the dish I paired it with olives and hummus, although I also found that it worked very well within salads as a form of croton.
Conclusion:
The most beneficial thing I learnt from both the sweet and savoury adaptions of the original recipe by Cato is that we can interpret one recipe in a number of different ways. The lack of instruction or measurements in the ancient recipe has made it possible to use the same method and basic ingredients but to produce two completely different end results. I would go as far as saying just making 1 change to the cheese made a huge difference. This illustrates how difficult it can be to interpret these recipes and recreate them today.
Real Roman Recipes 